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2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
2 episodes with she came
On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: silencing notifications and crying over books Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: a book that surprised us and how we can replicate that experience The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) . . . . 1:27 - Our Bookish Moments Of The Week 6:01 - Amari and the Despicable Wonders by B. B. Alston 8:21 - Our Current Reads 8:49 - Death on Ocean Boulevard by Caitlin Rother (Meredith) 13:12 - Death at the Mansion: Rebecca Zahau on Apple TV 14:38 - Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson (Kaytee) 14:43 - Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson 18:04 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett 18:05 - A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett 18:32 - From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks (Meredith) 24:14 - She Came to Slay by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Kaytee) 24:32 - Libro.fm 27:39 - Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes (Meredith) 34:38 - A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales (Kaytee) 34:53 - CR Season 6: Episode 7 35:00 - Schuler Books 35:07 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 38:09 - A Terribly Nasty Business by Julia Seales (pre-order, releases June 24, 2025) 39:08 - A Book That Surprised Us 39:39 - In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden (Meredith's book) 41:55 - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 43:49 - Crow Talk by Eileen Garvin (Kaytee's book) 45:55 - A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales 51:12 - Meet Us At The Fountain 52:33 - I wish for you to let us know what you want us to deep dive about. Send us an email to currentlyreadingpodcast@gmail.com (Meredith) 54:00 - I wish to circle back to my wish about reading repair manuals and let you know about some books that fulfill that wish. (Kaytee) 54:21 - The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud 55:49 - Bibliotherapy by Molly Masters Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. April's IPL is brought to you by Warwick's in La Jolla, California! Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business. All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!
Episode Overview:This week's episode is absolutely buzzing — and not just because we're talking bees. Meet Emma: ethical beekeeper, skincare alchemist, and proof that you don't need GCSEs or a conventional path to build something extraordinary. From being a teen mum navigating the stigma, to cold-calling for dodgy kitchen companies (yep, we went there), Emma's journey is anything but beige.She's built a legacy from raw honey and raw grit, and if you've ever thought your life was too messy to build something meaningful — think again. Emma proves that the wildest journeys often make for the sweetest success.Think success looks like a neat CV, a degree, and a 5-year plan?Wrong. Sometimes it looks like telesales in a smoke-filled office, accidental skincare breakthroughs in your kitchen, and bee stings to the face.
Weekly shoutout: Subscribe to Flash Perspectives from author Tommy Dean! -- Hi there, We're back! Today I am delighted to be arts calling writer/performer Jen Ponton! (jenponton.com) About our guest: JEN PONTON (writer/performer SUGARCOATED) returns triumphantly to the New York stage with Sugarcoated, her autobiographical solo show, in its New York premiere. Last seen off-Broadway in Halley Feiffer's How To Make Friends and then Kill Them (Rattlestick, 2013), Jen has spent the past decade building a vibrant career in film and television. Highlights include Dietland, 30 Rock, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Orange is the New Black, Law & Order: SVU, and Blue Bloods, among many others. Jen also starred in Ash Christian's Love on the Run alongside Frances Fisher, Annaleigh Ashford, and Steve Howey. She has since appeared in Rebecca Miller's She Came to Me and Todd Solondz's Wiener-Dog opposite Greta Gerwig and Kieran Culkin. Off-screen, Jen is a passionate creator. Her works include the storytelling podcast All the Fucks with co-host Lillian Bustle_, a nostalgia-packed puppet sitcom, and her TEDx Talk, “Hollywood's Fatphobia Problem.” Her collaboration with _Sugarcoated director Tessa Slovis began with Tessa's film Pizza Party, wherein the two found an immediate connection through their commitment to bold activism through storytelling. Explore more about Sugarcoated at jenponton.com. Maiden Mother Crone: an evening of poignant storytelling as two extraordinary solo shows, THE LONGER MY MOTHER IS DEAD THE MORE I LIKE HER by Deborah Unger and SUGARCOATED by Jen Ponton, take center stage at The Pete at The Flea from February 12–23, 2025. ABOUT SUGARCOATED: Jen Ponton takes audiences on a visceral journey through the polished facade women are often forced to wear. With biting humor and profound vulnerability, Sugarcoated strips away societal expectations, revealing raw truths about trauma, survival, and self-empowerment. Best known for her role on AMC's Dietland, Ponton has made waves in TV, film, and theater. Sugarcoated, which premiered at the Denver Fringe Festival, is a testament to her fearless approach to storytelling and her commitment to exploring the untold narratives of women. MAIDEN MOTHER CRONE plays the following schedule through Sunday, February 23: Preview Performances: February 12 & 13 at 7 PM Opening Night: February 14 at 7 PM February 15 (2 PM & 7 PM, with matinee talkback) February 16 (2 PM) February 19–21 (7 PM) February 22 (2 PM & 7 PM, with matinee talkback) February 23 (2 PM) Tickets are $40 and can be purchased at maidenmothercroneshow.com or in person at the theater ½ hours before the performance. Venue: The Pete at The Flea, 20 Thomas Street, New York, NY 10007 Running Time: 2h15 mins (with intermission) Website: maidenmothercroneshow.com Thanks for this amazing conversation, Jen! All the best! -- Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro. HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.
حادثة جيمي. أيام الجمعة. الجرايد. فيلم الجوكر التاني. برفان لشارك تانك. عبدالله سلام. التفاح وإشارات المرور. فوز ترامب. من سيربح المليون. جورج قرداحي. شوكولاتة جيرسي. Jimmy's accident. Fridays. Newspapers. Gran Turismo. Joker Folie à Deux. Thelma. The Tender Bar. Windfall. She Came to Me. Shark Tank perfumes. Abdallah Sallam. Cleobuttera. Apples and traffic lights. Gemini AI. Trump. Adam Mckay's Dr Phil. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. George Kordahi. Gersy chocolate.
Hey pals! It's our third anniversary and we're throwing our birthday party in the swamp, specifically the sexy sapphic swamp from Darva Green's WE CAME FROM THE SWAMP. We're three years old now, and thankfully podcasts age like cats, because otherwise we'd be way too young to be reading smutty romance. We're celebrating all the support you've given us over three years as well as the love and joy we get from reading romance, and especially queer romance, in a world where a lot of people would rather we got neither. Here's to another great year! Brazen banter: Stags striking out! Glass bottomed boats! What's the true definition of a murder cult? The complexities of being pulling by tiny dogs! Cat Scale, Us: 15,005 Cat Scale, She Came from the Swamp: 5 Revolutionary Resources Hays Code Kikimora Buried rug girl Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream Subscribe! Follow! Rate! Review! Tell your friends and family all about us! Support the podcast and buy us coffee WRION merch! Our feminist, sapphic, bookish Etsy shop! Instagram/Threads: @wereaditonenight Facebook: We Read It One Night TikTok: @wereaditonenight Email: wereaditonenight [at] gmail.com
PopaHALLics #131 "Won't You Take Me to, Spooky Town!"We return from fall break with some super supernatural offerings featuring that demonic scamp Beetlejuice, a new twist on the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, macabre goings-on in the fashion world—and more! In Theaters:"Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice." Michael Keaton reprises his iconic role in this sequel to the cult classic horror comedy "Beetlejuice" (1988). Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder are also back, while new cast members include Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Justin Theroux, and Monica Bellucci. Streaming:"Will and Harper," Netflix. Will Ferrell and his longtime buddy, former "SNL" head writer Harper Steele, embark on a cross-country road trip after Harper comes out as a trans woman in this documentary.Books:"Tiny Threads," by Lilliam Rivera. In this "slow-burn novel of supernatural suspense," a young woman's dream of working for a famous designer turns into a nightmare: Seeing strange things, hearing voices at night ... "Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow," by Christina Henry. Henry has written several books that take classic tales in new directions. Here, non-gender-conforming Ben begins to experience terrifying encounters in the spooky woods featured in Washington Irving's tale of hapless Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman."The Which Way Tree," by Elizabeth Crook. In this acclaimed novel that may remind you of Charles Portis' classic "True Grit," a teen boy in the remote Texas hill country reluctantly helps his obsessed younger stepsister pursue the panther that seriously mauled her and killed her mother."It Had to be You," by Eliza Jane Brazier. In this sexy thriller, two contract killers hook up on a nighttime train from Florence to Paris. They grapple with their attraction to each other in a high-stakes adventure across Western Europe.Music: For his latest solo tour, singer/songwriter Martin Sexton is performing the Beatles' 1969 album "Abbey Road" in its entirety, from "Come Together" all the way through the 16-minute medley on side 2. In this clip, he plays "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window." Our latest playlist features Martin's own songs and his "soul-marinated voice" (Rolling Stone).Click through the links above to watch, read, and listen to what we're talking about.
Recorded - 5/27/2024 On Episode 272 of the Almost Sideways Movie Podcast, we review the new George Miller trip into the Mad Max world with Furiosa. Then we look ahead to the summer movie season and what we are most looking forward to. Our power rankings, inspired by Marisa Tomei's tugboat captain character in the film She Came to Me, focuses on oddest combinations of actor and character job. Here are the highlights: What We've Been Watching (6:15) Terry Oscar Anniversary Review: Beyond the Lights (10:35) Zach Review: Evil Does Not Exist (14:20) Todd TallaBoogie Review: Out on a Limb (17:40) Featured Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (40:15) Spotlight: Most Anticipated Movies of the Summer (1:04:50) Power Rankings: Oddest Actor/Character Job Combos (1:36:00) Guessing Adam's List Trivia! (1:48:20) Trivia Review: Ricky Stanicky (2:00:40) Trivia: Oscar Nominated Live Action/Animated Directors & Top Female Title Characters (2:09:30) Quote of the Day Find AlmostSideways everywhere! Website almostsideways.com Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AlmostSidewayscom-130953353614569/ AlmostSideways Twitter: @almostsideways Terry's Twitter: @almostsideterry Zach's Twitter: @pro_zach36 Todd: Too Cool for Twitter Adam's Twitter: @adamsideways Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/almostsideways-podcast/id1270959022 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/7oVcx7Y9U2Bj2dhTECzZ4m Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/almost-sideways-movie-podcast YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfEoLqGyjn9M5Mr8umWiktA/featured?view_as=subscriber
Hear from creator, actor and the producer, Brad Forenza, and two of the stars of Around the Sun, Robert Funaro and Emmy Award-winner Cady McClain in The Locher Room.Brad, Robert and Cady are joining me to discuss Season 3 of the award-winning episodic audio drama. Created by actor/writer/producer Brad Forenza, Around the Sun is a scripted audio series of self-contained stories with a theme. In Season 3 Forenza has started something new, each episode builds more of the story. This season's story - about the Pinecones family and friends, is voiced by an EGOT winning cast.The ensemble includes Francois Clemmons (Grammy Award-winner, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood), Brad Forenza (A Case of Blue), Robert Funaro (The Sopranos, The Irishman), Judy Gold, (Emmy Award-winner, She Came to Me), Wilson Jermaine Heredia (Tony winner, Rent), Terry (Never Have I Ever), Cady McClain (Emmy Award- Winner – As the World Turns, Days of Our Live and All My Children), Estelle Parsons (Oscar winner, Bonnie and Clyde) and Jai Rodriguez (Emmy winner, Queer Eye). The series is presented via the Broadway Podcast Network and available “wherever you listen to podcasts.”Catch up with Brad, Robert and Cady here in The Locher Room.
The calendar has flipped to 2024 and the a busy awards season begins with the Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 7, at 8 p.m. Eastern. Co-hosts Bruce Miller and Terry Lipshetz break down the big categories and offer predictions on which films, shows and actors will be rewarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Contact us! We want to hear from you! Email questions to podcasts@lee.net and we'll answer your question on a future episode! About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. List of 2024 Golden Globe nominees BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — The nominees for next year's Golden Globe Awards have been announced. BEST DRAMA MOVIE “Anatomy of a Fall”; “Killers of the Flower Moon”; “Maestro”; “Oppenheimer”; “Past Lives”; “The Zone of Interest” BEST MOVIE MUSICAL OR COMEDY “Air'; American Fiction''; ”Barbie"; “The Holdovers”; “May December”; “Poor Things” FEMALE ACTOR IN A MOVIE DRAMA Annette Bening, “Nyad”; Lily Gladstone, “Killers of the Flower Moon”; Sandra Huller, “Anatomy of a Fall”; Greta Lee, “Past Lives"; Carey Mulligan, ”Maestro''; Cailee Spaeny, “Priscilla” ACTOR IN A MOVIE DRAMA Bradley Cooper, “Maestro”; Leonardo DiCaprio, “Killers of the Flower Moon”; Colman Domingo, “Rustin”; Barry Keoghan, “Saltburn”; Cillian Murphy, “Oppenheimer”; Andrew Scott, “All of Us Strangers” FEMALE ACTOR IN A MUSICAL OR COMEDY Fantasia Barrino, “The Color Purple”; Jennifer Lawrence, “No Hard Feelings”; Natalie Portman," May December"; Alma Poysti, “Fallen Leaves” Margot Robbie, “Barbie”; Emma Stone, “Poor Things” ACTOR IN A MUSICAL OR COMEDY Nicolas Cage, “Dream Scenario”; Timothee Chalamet, “Wonka”; Matt Damon, “Air”; Paul Giamatti, “The Holdovers”; Joaquin Phoenix, “Beau Is Afraid”; Jeffrey Wright, “American Fiction” FEMALE ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE Emily Blunt, “Oppenheimer”; Danielle Brooks, “The Color Purple”; Jodie Foster, “Nyad”; Julianne Moore, “May December”; Rosamund Pike, “Saltburn”; Da'Vine Joy Randolph, “The Holdovers” MALE ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE William Dafoe, “Poor Things,”; Robert DeNiro, “Killers of the Flower Moon”; Robert Downey Jr., “Oppenheimer”; Rya Gosling, “Barbie”; Charles Melton, “May December”; Mark Ruffalo, “Poor Things” ANIMATED FILM "The Boy and the Heron"; “Elemental”; “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”; “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”; “Suzume”; “Wish” DIRECTOR Bradley Cooper, “Maestro”; Greta Gerwig, “Barbie”; Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things”; Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”; Martin Scorsese, “Killers of the Flower Moon”; Celine Song, “Past Lives.” SCORE “Poor Things”; “Oppenheimer”; “The Boy and the Heron”; “Zone of Interest”; “Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse”; “Killers of the Flower Moon.” ORIGINAL SONG “Addicted to Romance“ from ”She Came to Me", music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen; “Dance the Night'' from ”Barbie", music and lyrics by: Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Dua Lipa, Caroline Ailin; “I'm Just Ken'' from ”Barbie'', music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt; “Peaches'' from ”The Super Mario Bros. Movie" music and lyrics Jack Black, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond, John Spiker; “Road to Freedom'' from ”Rustin", music and lyrics by Lenny Kravitz; “What Was I Made For?” from "Barbie'', music and lyrics by Billie Eilish O'Connell, Finneas O'Connell. BEST SCREENPLAY Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, “Barbie”; Tony McNamara, "Poor Things"; Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”; Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, “Killers of the Flower Moon”; Celine Song, “Past Lives”; Justine Triet, Arthur Harari, “Anatomy of a Fall” BEST MOTION PICTURE NON-ENGLISH “Anatomy of a Fall" (France); ”Fallen Leaves" (Finland); “Io Capitano” (Italy); “Past Lives” (USA); “Society of the Snow” (Spain); “The Zone of Interest” (United Kingdom/USA) CINEMATIC AND BOX OFFICE ACHIEVEMENT “Barbie”; “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3”; 'John Wick: Chapter 4"; “Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1”; “Oppenheimer”; “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”; “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”; “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” TELEVISION DRAMA SERIES “Succession”; “1923”; “The Last of Us”; “The Morning Show”; “The Diplomat”; “The Crown” TELEVISION COMEDY SERIES “Ted Lasso”; “Abbott Elementary”; “The Bear”; “Barry”; “Only Murders in the Building”; “Jury Duty” LIMITED SERIES, ANTHOLOGY SERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION All the Light We Cannot See”; “Beef”; “Daisy Jones & the Six”; “ ”Fargo”; “Fellow Travelers″; ”Lessons in Chemistry” FEMALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION DRAMA Helen Mirren, “1923”; Bella Ramsey, “The Last of Us”; Keri Russell, “The Diplomat”; Sarah Snook, “Succession”; Imelda Staunton, “The Crown”; Emma Stone, “The Curse” MALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION DRAMA Brian Cox, “Succession”; Kieran Culkin, “Succession”; Gary Oldman, “Slow Horses”; Pedro Pascal, “The Last of Us”; Jeremy Strong, “Succession”; Dominic West, “The Crown". FEMALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION COMEDY Rachel Brosnahan, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”; Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”; Elle Fanning, “The Great”; Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building”; Natasha Lyonne, “Poker Face. MALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION COMEDY Bill Hader, “Barry”; Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”; Jason Segel, “Shrinking”; Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”; Jason Sudeikis, “Ted Lasso”; Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear" FEMALE ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES, ANTHOLOGY SERIES, OR A MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Riley Keough, “Daisy Jones & The Six”; Brie Larson, “Lessons in Chemistry”; Elizabeth Olsen, “Love & Death”; Juno Temple, “Fargo”; Rachel Weisz, “Dead Ringers”; Ali Wong, “Beef" ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES, ANTHOLOGY SERIES, OR A MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Matt Bomer, “Fellow Travelers”; Sam Claflin, “Daisy Jones & The Six”; Jon Hamm, “Fargo''; Woody Harrelson, ”White House Plumbers"; David Oyelowo, “Lawmen: Bass Reeves”; Steven Yeun, “The Beef" SUPPORTING FEMALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES Elizabeth Debicki, “The Crown”; Abby Elliott, “The Bear”; Christina Ricci, “Yellowjackets”; J. Smith-Cameron, “Succession”; Meryl Streep, “Only Murders in the Building”; Hannah Waddingham, “Ted Lasso” SUPPORTING MALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show”; Matthew Macfadyen, “Succession”; James Marsden, “Jury Duty”; Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Bear”; Alan Ruck, “Succession”; Alexander Skarsgård, “Succession" STAND-UP COMEDY TELEVISION SPECIAL Ricky Gervais, “Armageddon”; Trevor Noah, “Where Was I”; Chris Rock, “Selective Outrage”; Amy Schumer, “Emergency Contact”; Sarah Silverman, “Someone You Love”; Wanda Sykes, “I'm an Entertainer”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A Tacular comes but once a year, and what a year it has been. We've Taculared non festival films (Mank once or twice) and Cannes premieres (France and The French Dispatch), but never before has a trailer so solidified the need for a Tacular. And this Tacular comes to us all the way from the opening night of Berlin. Rebecca Miller's She Came to Me is the subject. Our many thought and some thoughts from our listeners is the meat of the thing. Enjoy the She Came to Me-Tacular! Thank you for another great year, and we'll see you in 2024! Our twitter is @CannesIKickIt Our instagram is @CIKIPod Our letterboxd is CIKIPod Enjoying the show? Feel free to send a few bucks our way on Ko-fi. Thanks to Tree Related for our theme song Our hosts are @andytgerm @clatchley @imlaughalone @jcpglickwebber
It's the third annual installment of our FNDF show, in which Patrick and Adam Riske watch and talk about two double features from their monthly column. Download this episode here. (64.8 MB) Listen to F This Movie! on Apple Podcasts. Also discussed this episode: Doc Hollywood (1991), Heaven is a Playground (1991), Eileen (2023), She Came to Me (2023), The Exorcist (1973), Crossing Delancey (1988), Stepfather 2 (1989), Renaissance: A Film by Beyonce (2023), Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret (2023), Poor Things (2023), Satanic Hispanics (2023), I'll Be Home for Christmas (1998)
Let a thousand flowers bloom! In episode 92 of Overthink, Ellie and David have a a panoramic conversation on love beyond monogamy with philosophy professor, podcaster, and author of Why It's OK To Not be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy. They envision relations of love and special attachment that aren't bound to the notion of sacrifice. They also turn to personal stories and question the role of marriage in consumer capitalism and its nonstop pressure to find the One and Only. Together, they find in non-monogamous pathways to reimagine agency, identity, and community — and a nudge toward a richer philosophy of our relations with the world around us.Works DiscussedMarina Adshade, "The Origins of the Institutions of Marriage"Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to StayElizabeth Brake, Minimizing MarriageJustin Clardy, Why It's OK to Not Be MonogamousCarrie Jenkins, What Love IsRobert Nozick, "Love's Bond"Pages The Reading GroupRelated Overthink episodes15. Marriage16. Monogamy17. Open Relationships18. PolyamoryCheck out the episode's extended cut here!Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast Website | overthinkpodcast.comInstagram & Twitter | @overthink_podEmail | Dearoverthink@gmail.comYouTube | Overthink podcastSupport the show
Director Rebecca Miller discusses her new film, She Came to Me, with fellow Director Noah Baumbach in a Q&A at the DGA theater in New York. In the conversation, she discusses how her background as a painter gave her an eye for composing scenes, how she overcame challenges that arose on-set and how she learned the dynamics of each Actor's methods in order to work with them. The film tells the story of Steven, who is unable to finish the score for his big comeback opera. At the behest of his wife and former therapist, Patricia, he sets out in search of inspiration, but finds much more than he bargained for in the form of Katrina- a tugboat captain with her own obsessions. See photos and a summary of this event below: https://dga.org/Events/2023/December2023/SheCameToMe_QnA_1023.aspx
Join Russ, Peter and Tigs as they talk about Saw X, The Creator, The Royal Hotel, Dicks: The Musical, Exorcist: Believer, She Came to Me, Strange Way of Life, Killers of the Flower Moon, Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Shorts, Cassandro, Totally Killer, Monsters of California and more on this episode of the Movie Movie Podcast. Recorded October 23rd 2023. The post Movie Movie Podcast #156: Killers not Killer appeared first on Movie Movie Podcast.
This week on the show!John Cena plays an ex-special force agent hired to protect a journalist set to interview a dictator in the early review of FreelanceTommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx tray to take down a multi billion dollar company in the amazon original The BurialExperience Your inner demons in the Hulu horror original AppendageAnd Finally A composer who suffers a writer's block and then has a one-night stand in She Came to MeI also have a special announcement! **Help support the show by leaving a review on Apple podcast or Spotify**Make sure you don't miss an episode of one of my favorite go to cinema podcasts and that's with Antonio over at The Cultworthy Cinema PodcastMake sure to listen and subscribe to that show!Make sure you check The Movie Wire out as a featured podcast on the Newsly App and make sure you use promo code: THEM0V1EW1RE to receive a 1-month free premium subscription.
This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, whose latest book is the mother-daughter drama Monica. Next, writer-director Rebecca Miller joins to discuss her latest film She Came to Me. And on The Treat, Bottoms director Emma Seligman talks about a teen comedy that took its characters' struggles seriously.
SHE CAME TO ME MOVIE REVIEW You know what they say: you can't spell opera without Oh, perhaps a saucy affair is in order. Writer/director Rebecca Miller presents She Came to Me. Brilliant composer of transcendent operas Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage) is a suffering artist who has come down with a horrible case of writer's… Read More »Screener Squad: She Came To Me
SHE CAME TO ME MOVIE REVIEW You know what they say: you can't spell opera without Oh, perhaps a saucy affair is in order. Writer/director Rebecca Miller presents She Came to Me. Brilliant composer of transcendent operas Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage) is a suffering artist who has come down with a horrible case of writer's… Read More »Screener Squad: She Came To Me
A new romantic comedy starring Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway, and Marisa Tomei tells the story of a composer struck by writer's block who becomes inspired to write an opera when he meets a woman. Writer and director Rebecca Miller joins us to discuss, "She Came to Me," in theaters now.
Seth takes a closer look at Republicans going at each other's throats after a small group of hardliners ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump considering a trip to pitch himself as a candidate.Then, Anne Hathaway talks about celebrating her wedding anniversary, working with Rebecca Miller in the film She Came to Me and giving Miller a poem after auditioning for her as a teenager.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Today we are celebrating Joy Behar's birthday! In Hot Topics, the co-host react to the Biden administration's move to continue southern border wall construction and how it got to this point. Anne Hathaway stops by and discusses her new film, ‘She Came to Me,' and the importance of investing in female filmmakers. Joy celebrates her birthday with a tag sale benefitting charity, featuring a unique item from each co-host. Make a bid here: https://charitybuzz.com/theme/theview/lots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Reviews of The Exorcist: Believer, She Came to Me, The Royal Hotel, Foe and more. Plus an interview with Desperation Road director Nadine Crocker. And a look at the Ahsoka 1980s TV show intro and checking Jigsaw's email. Hilarity ensues!
Andy Farnsworth joins KSL-TV to help audiences decipher #WhatToWatch for the weekend of October 6, 2023. There is a lot to watch this week, headlined by "The Exorcist: Believer," which is a direct sequel to the original movie, including a return by Ellen Burstyn to her role for the first time in 50 years. Season 2 of "Loki" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe deals with more time-travel shenanigans. "She Came to Me" is an odd yet humorous movie with Peter Dinklage as an opera writer with writer's block until a spontaneous one-night stand."Totally Killer" on Prime video is a surprisingly entertaining movie that is like a cross between "Back to The Future," and "Frequency," and a teen slasher film. I couldn't believe I enjoyed it. A military courtroom drama movie that's coming to streaming is "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial," based on a classic novel but set in modern times. "Monster High 2" brings back the live-action musical version of the Mattel toys, and "Fright Krewe" is a cartoon for older kids about using magic to defend New Orleans from monsters. The most uplifting thing I've watched in a while is "Break the Mold: The Zach Bates Story," a documentary about a young adult with autism from Arizona who decides to run a 100-mile ultramarathon. You will shed emotionally healing tears watching this. Beyond Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Gaming, and Tech, the brains behind Fan Effect are connoisseurs of categories surpassing the nerdy. Brilliant opinions and commentary on all things geek, but surprising knowledge and witty arguments over pop culture, Star Trek, MARVEL vs. DC, and a wide range of movies, TV shows, and more. Formerly known as SLC Fanboys, the show is hosted by KSL Movie Show’s Andy Farnsworth and KellieAnn Halvorsen, who are joined by guest experts. Based in the beautiful beehive state, Fan Effect celebrates Utah’s unique fan culture as it has been declared The Nerdiest State in America by TIME. Listen regularly on your favorite platform, at kslnewsradio.com, or on the KSL App. Join the conversation on Facebook @FanEffectShow, Instagram @FanEffectShow, and Twitter @FanEffectShow. Fan Effect is sponsored by Megaplex Theatres, Utah's premiere movie entertainment company.
Craig reviews "The Exorcist: Believer" and "She Came to Me"See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Crew is back for more updates and trailers! Come join us!HOUSEKEEPINGWATCH US ON YOUTUBE: WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/PLUS63HPFOLLOW US ON X, FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM: @PLUS63HPLISTEN TO THE PODCAST: APPLE PODCAST, SPOTIFY OR AMAZONTHE BROCHACHOS UPDATESCHUBAX UPDATESARNI UPDATESJONG UPDATESREACTIONSREACTS RATING RUBRIC (+/-)+ (PLUS): DAY-OFF OR ON-DEMAND- (MINUS): MAYBE NOT TRAILER REACTIONSThe Continental: From the World of John Wick (J+, C+, A+)Call of Duty Modern Warfare III (J+, C+, A+)A Million Miles Away (J+, C+, A+)Moving (J-, C+, A-)She Came to Me (J+, C+, A+)Kim Vs Kanye: The Divorce (J+, C-, A-)Inside the World's Toughest Prisons (J-, C-, A-)Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction (J-, C-, A-)Scott Pilgrim (J+, C+, A+)Maestro (J-, C-, A+)Spy Ops (J+, C+, A+)Percy Jackson and the Olympians (J+, C+, A-)Hosts: Jong Clemente and Chubax Chuidian with Raymond Villanueva and Arnold Valentino.
Marisa, Sam, and Jermaine preview the tv shows and movies coming in September 2023, including The Golden Bachelor, Snake Oil, Sex Education, The Morning Show, Gen V, The Other Black Girl, Dicks the Musical, Saw X, She Came to Me, Love at First Sight, and more. Marisa learns her contact info for Jermaine has been incorrect for months. Plus, Jermaine's new workout playlist.
What Is This Episode - Top of Show . NYFF ANNOUNCEMENTS: Maestro Gets a Gala Spot - 2:14 . PROP BET #1: BRADLEY COOPER'S MAESTRO SCREENTIME - 6:08 , The Rest of the NYFF Spotlight Slate - 9:48 AlsoMIke's NYFF Movie Tier Plan of Attack - 15:08 . GOTHAM'S REMOVED THEIR BUDGET CAPS. BECOME FREE FOR ALL - 21:16 . CONTENDER TRAILERS: Reptile Trailer #1 - 28:55 PROP BET #2 - GUESS THE REPTILE METASCORE - 32:44 . Anatomy of a Fall US Trailer #1 - 35:00 PROP BET #3 - ALSOMIKE'S BROTHER OF A FALL - 37:14 . She Came to Me Trailer #1 - 40:38 Cassandro Trailer #1 - 45:52 Talking About Rebel Moon's Trailer - 48:44 PROP BET #4 - HOW MANY OSCAR NOMS FOR NETFLIX THIS YEAR? - 50:22 . STRIKE UPDATES AND MORE WGA/AMPTP MEETINGS- 55:40 . A LEGAL LESSON IN AI COPYRIGHT PROTECTIONS - 59:45 . BOX OFFICE UPDATE: PROP BET #5 - WHAT'S BLUE BEETLE'S BOX OFFICE CEILING? - 1:09:00 Barbenheimer Keeps Making Money - 1:11:14 AM Reviews Strays - 1:14:55 Elemental Will Make Money - 1:17:07 AM Watched The Covenant/TV - 1:20:20 M1 Watched JFK/The Pope's Exorcist - 1:22:16 . . Your Homework/LEAVE US 5 STARS! - 1:25:21 Words of Wisdom/What's Coming Next - 1:26:12
Welcome back to another episode of the Online Warriors Podcast! This week we discuss what's going on in the world of videogames and Movies! - She Came to Me Trailer (2:50) - Thor 5 In The Works (15:57) - Charles Martinet Stepping down From Voicing Mario (25:21) Then the gang gets into what they have been up to: - Illeagle reads The Magpie Murders and watches Megan, Sound of Metal, Murder Mystery, and This is Where I Leave You (33:07) - Techtic starts playing Metroid Samus Returns (41:06) - Nerdbomber plays Detective Pikachu, rewatches Awkward, and watches Puppy Love (43:38) Then wrap things up with some Selena Gomez Trivia (48:36) Special shoutout to our Patreon Producer: Steven Keller We'd like to thank each and every one of you for listening in every week. If you'd like to support the show, you can drop us a review on your favorite podcast platform or, if you're feeling extra generous, drop us a subscribe over at Patreon.com/OnlineWarriorsPodcast. We have three tiers of subscriptions, each of which gives you some awesome bonus content! As always, we appreciate you tuning in, and look forward to seeing you next week! Stay safe and healthy everyone! Find us all over the web: Online Warriors Website: https://www.onlinewarriorspodcast.com Online Warriors Twitter: https://twitter.com/onlinewarriors1 Illeagle's Twitter: https://twitter.com/OWIlleagle86 Nerdbomber's Twitter: https://twitter.com/OWNerdbomber Techtic's Twitter: https://twitter.com/OWTechtic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onlinewarriorspodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onlinewarriorspodcast/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwOwzY6aBcTFucWEeFEtwIg Merch Store: https://teespring.com/stores/onlinewarriorspodcast
Night of the Living Podcast: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Film Discussion
Beware the monkey's paw! We're doing a series of ironic wish fullfillment stories. This week's Main Attraction is Amicus Studio's 1972 classic Tales from the Crypt. Kelley reviews She Came from the Woods for Straight-to-Video Russian Roulette. Brought to you ad-free by the Legion of Demons at patreon.com/notlp. Join the Legion to get more stuff at patreon.com/notlp! Our Beelzebub tier producers are: Alise Kombrinck Ernest Perez Jeremy, Cassie & Gamora Burmeister Jeff L Iona Goodwin Branan & Emily Intravia-Whitehead Bill Chandler Blayne Turner Monica Martinson Paul Gauthier Brian Krause Alyssa Boehm Dave Siebert Joe Juvland Dustin Chisam “Monster Movies (with My Friends)” was written and performed by Kelley Kombrinck. It was recorded and mixed by Freddy Morris. Night of the Living Podcast's chief contributors are: Andy Hung Kelley Kombrinck Amy Morris Freddy Morris The podcast is produced and engineered by Amy & Freddy Morris. Night of the Living Podcast Social Media: facebook.com/notlp twitter.com/notlp instagram.com/nightofthelivingpodcast youtube.com/notlpcrew Connect with other listeners in the Facebook Group or on Reddit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/notlp https://www.reddit.com/r/NOTLPodcast
Sound artist Natalia Beylis released a brilliant collaboration with Cork cellist Eimear Reidy earlier this year, entitled She Came in Through the Window to Stand by the Door. Ahead of her appearance at MusicTown in Dublin on July 27, Natalia talks about sound recording in rural Leitrim, how her live show comes together, finding sounds around the house, and what's next. Natalia Beylis plays alongside Anna Mieke, Adrian Crowley and Aoife Wolf on Thursday, July 27, in the depot @ the complex for MusicTown. Tickets and listings: http://www.musictown.ie/listings/ Natalia Beylis on Bandcamp: https://nataliabeylis.bandcamp.com/
The McEachern girls dominated the first half, then fought off a strong comeback by Campbell in the second to take a 50-47 victory over their longtime county rivals in the second round of the Class AAAAAAA state basketball tournament at Lovinggood Arena on Saturday. It was all McEachern in the first half as it led 30-15 at halftime, but Campbell outscored the Indians 32-20 in the second half to narrow the margin. With the win, McEachern advanced to the state quarterfinals for the 10th time in 13 years. The Indians will host Central Gwinnett in the state quarterfinals Wednesday at 6 p.m. The McEachern boys earned its seventh state quarterfinal appearance in eight years with a resounding 88-51 victory over Westlake in the second round of the Class AAAAAAA state tournament at Lovinggood Arena on Saturday. With the win, McEachern will now host county rival Wheeler in a quarterfinal showdown between the top two ranked teams in the state in the ScoreAtlanta pre-tournament Class 7 A boys' state rankings – with the Wildcats ranked Number 1 and the Indians Number 2. That game is scheduled for a 7:30 p.m. tip-off on Wednesday. The Black History Month dinner hosted by the city of Smyrna, called off multiple times in recent years because of the pandemic, convened Friday evening at the Smyrna recreation center. More than 150 people were eager to listen to the night's keynote speaker, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of “She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman.” Councilman Lewis Wheaton welcomed and thanked the guests for coming, reminding them that the proceeds from the evening would benefit the foundations for Griffin and Campbell middle schools, before introducing Dunbar to loud applause. Dunbar's goal was to reintroduce people to Harriet Tubman. Tubman is best known as the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad — a network of secret routes slaves used during the 1800s to escape to freedom. Tubman would make the journey to lead people out of enslavement at least 13 times. Dunbar discussed how the Black Lives Matter movement reminds Americans of the people and names who have been and continue to be lost to violence, adding that social reform is an ongoing process. With her book, Dunbar said she was trying to tell the story of a complex woman who dedicated her life to social justice, and how her influence still inspires new generations. After the presentation, a long line formed to get books autographed by the author, particularly some young readers, who remarked that they really loved hearing about Harriet Tubman. Several hundred people ran full tilt into Lake Acworth on Saturday — some of them in costume. The brisk excursion was part of the “Polar Plunge,” an annual national fundraiser for the Special Olympics. The money will help run and sponsor athletes for the state's Special Olympics, which will be at Emory University in May. The event was jointly organized by the Special Olympics of Georgia and Law Enforcement Torch Run, a long-running campaign among law enforcement professionals who support the Special Olympics. Several local law enforcement agencies raised money and submerged officers and staff, including the Kennesaw and Acworth police departments, and the Cobb County Sheriff's Department, the latter of which won the costume contest by riding into the lake on toy horses. The water temperature inside the lake was estimated to be in the upper 50s. Matthew Wynne, a Special Olympics athlete who grew up in Alpharetta, said the cold water is part of what makes the event fun, and he wouldn't have minded if the water had been more frigid. Georgia Milton-Sheats, CEO of Special Olympics Georgia since 1999, ran into the lake alongside other Special Olympics organizers. She said almost 500 people raised money and registered for the plunge, and the event raised more than $230,000. State Senator Ed Setzler, filed legislation this week to reimpose Republicans' county commission district map on the Cobb Board of Commissioners. Senate Bill 236 mirrors the map passed last year by the General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, which drew Democratic Commissioner Jerica Richardson out of her seat. The proposal comes after Setzler filed a bill — SB 124 — explicitly prohibiting Georgia counties from drawing their own district lines, which the commission's Democrats have been working to do since October. If passed, the tandem bills could overrule the Democrats' “home rule” effort designed to amend the district lines and keep Richardson in office. Though Republican officials, including Attorney General Chris Carr, have said the home rule bid is unconstitutional, Richardson and her two Democratic colleagues on the Cobb Board of Commissioners maintain the effort is legal. Richardson said were the legislation to be passed, it would end her tenure on the board. East Cobb resident Larry Savage, meanwhile, challenged the constitutionality of the home rule effort in a lawsuit filed just before the new year. That lawsuit was later withdrawn, with Savage saying a follow-up suit was forthcoming. That suit, however, has yet to materialize. Savage last said he was working with a new attorney but did not respond to a request for comment this week. Andrew Young Jr., former ambassador to the United Nations, former congressman, past mayor of Atlanta and civil rights icon, will be the keynote speaker at the Georgia Symphony Orchestra's annual Celebrity Luncheon fundraiser. The event will take place March 18 from noon to 3 p.m. at the Marietta Country Club. Ambassador Young will be joined by a group of local artists, authors, musicians and business leaders. Proceeds from the event will benefit the GSO's musical performance, youth education and outreach programs. Not only are guests certain to be inspired by Ambassador Young, but they also will select to be seated at a table with one of a carefully curated collection of influential and creative area personalities to learn more about them. A specially created three-course menu will be prepared by Gary Sanderson, Marietta Country Club executive chef, and his team. The event also will provide a fantastic opportunity for guests to indulge themselves from among an array of silent and live auction goods, such as rare trinkets and tidbits, fine art and everyday splurges. On March 11, Cobb County will be well represented in the 139th Atlanta St. Patrick's Parade as it marches down Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta. Ten local groups will participate in one the largest St. Patrick's parades in the Southeast, which draws hundreds of parade watchers from around the region. The parade will begin at noon at the intersection of Peachtree Street and 15th Street and will continue down Peachtree to 5th Street, concluding at 1:30 p.m. The Cobb County Groups are: - the 116th Army Band, Artz for the Harp, Atlanta Freedom Band, Atlanta Gaelic Athletic Association, Cosplay Volunteers of Atlanta, DREAM Dachshund Rescue, Firefighters Emerald Society of Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia Smoke Diver Association, MIB DragonCon Parade Crew and Twilight Twirlers of Marietta #CobbCounty #Marietta #LocalNews - - - - The Marietta Daily Journal Podcast is local news for Marietta, Kennesaw, Smyrna, and all of Cobb County. Subscribe today, so you don't miss an episode! MDJOnline Register Here for your essential digital news. https://www.chattahoocheetech.edu/ https://cuofga.org/ https://www.esogrepair.com/ https://www.drakerealty.com/ Find additional episodes of the MDJ Podcast here. This Podcast was produced and published for the Marietta Daily Journal and MDJ Online by BG Ad Group For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Die Berlinale ist fast zu Ende und Janick Nolting schaut zusammen mit Giancarlo M. Sandoval zurück auf ein beeindruckendes Festival. Sie sprechen über: - "She Came to Me" von Rebecca Miller - "Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen" von Emily Atef - "Notre Core" von Claire Simon - "The Shadowless Tower" von Zhang Lu - "Viver Mal" & "Mal Viver" von João Canijo - "Musik" von Angela Schanelec - "Roter Himmel" von Christian Petzold - "Infinity Pool" von Brendon Cronenberg - "Talk to Me" von Danny und Michael Philippou - "Last Things" von Debora Stratman - "Horse Opera" von Moyra Davey - "Orlando, ma biographie politique" von Paul B. Preciado - "Samsara" von Lois Patiño - "Past Lives" von Celine Song - "Geranien" von Tanja Egen - "Knochen und Namen" von Fabian Stumm - "Vergiss Meyn Nicht" - "Here" von Bas Devos - "Concrete Valley" von Antoine Bourges
The Super Bowl is over and done with, so you know what that means. Trailers!!! This year's batch had some good ones, but we were disappointed on a number of levels. From our fear of QR codes to trailers basically being a clip show, we have a lot of concerns. We also talk about the prospect of a three hour John Wick movie, and our guesses for who Ghostface will be.You do not have to watch Lady Snowblood for too long before seeing the influence on Quentin Tarantino. There are many shots from Kill Bill that are shot for shot homages to the 1973 film. Aside from casting a long shadow, it is also incredibly stylish and filled with a surprising amount of nuance and characterization.It is not just for the cinematography and awesome lead character it is remembered, however. The film is incredibly violent and will surprise audiences with just how graphic the brutality can get. TRIGGER WARNING: Lady Snowblood has scenes that contain sexual violence.Because of our ages, the 1980s are the Golden Age of Horror to us. For better and worse, this means we will be drawn to 80s inspired horror movies. Set in 1987, She Came from the Woods is about a group of camp counselors who decide to have a ritual as a joke one night. You can guess what happens next.We talk about the thin line between being an homage, a spoof, and just being derivative. She Came from the Woods does a great job of using 80s horror cliches mixed with modern storytelling, but there was one thing it completely whiffed on. B-horror can get away with a lot, but did this film go too far?Adventures in Movies! is a part of the Morbidly Beautiful Podcast Network. Morbidly Beautiful is your one stop shop for all your horror needs. From the latest news and reviews to interviews and old favorites, it can be found at Morbidly Beautiful.Adventures in Movies! is hosted by Nathaniel and Blake. You can find Nathaniel on Instagram at nathaninpoortaste. Blake can be found on Twitter @foureyedhorror and on Instagram at foureyedhorror. You can reach us personally or on Twitter @AdventuresinMo1.Music in the background from https://www.FesliyanStudios.com
“Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?"–Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig "I really love that line in the script. It's an incredible script that Greta Gerwig wrote. It's not obvious, that sentiment that she says. I think that's why she has to point it out to the Lady Bird character, but I think if we're lucky in our lives, we can choose the path that we want to go down, whether it's something creative or in the arts or something else. And I think if you're lucky, you can spend your life or your career following something you really love or spending time following the path, whether it's a hobby or your career. And spending that time paying the attention that the craft or the hobby or the creative pursuit wants."Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.“Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?"–Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig "I really love that line in the script. It's an incredible script that Greta Gerwig wrote. It's not obvious, that sentiment that she says. I think that's why she has to point it out to the Lady Bird character, but I think if we're lucky in our lives, we can choose the path that we want to go down, whether it's something creative or in the arts or something else. And I think if you're lucky, you can spend your life or your career following something you really love or spending time following the path, whether it's a hobby or your career. And spending that time paying the attention that the craft or the hobby or the creative pursuit wants."https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
“Every movie is different. Every story is different. We've been talking about Lady Bird, and you mentioned Francis Ha. So we made Francis Ha first, and there's an interesting relationship between her and her best friend that is almost like a romance, but it's not actually romantic, but the way the story is told, it's like two lovers, but they get into arguments and there's a lot of conflict. And then Ladybird, there's a lot of conflict between the mother and the daughter. And in some sense, I remember thinking, Well, I've made things before and with Greta where there's conflict and maybe there's some overlap here, but there wasn't. It's just every time you start from scratch, and you might think, Well, if we use a certain camera or if we use certain tools, maybe that will help. But that's really the last step. And then I think, you have to have a more, a sort of less practical approach in the initial discussions.I find it helpful to speak with the director and all the collaborators on the project and just to have what I'd call a more dreamy conversation when you get together in a cafe or in the office and just talk through more emotional aspects of the story. There's these very earthly concerns that making a film requires, and you have to really leave all that stuff for later. All the stuff is important, just like in any creative process or business where there's a finite amount of resources. But how do you show certain relationships? The fact is you just have to talk about them first and figure out what they are. It's really important to understand specifically what the emotional notes are of the story. And then, little by little, we just figure out the technique of like the brush strokes, if it were painting, or the notes, if it were music. In cinematography, it's a visual medium, so eventually, we're moving towards: What is in the frame or what isn't in the frame? And how will these frames transition to each other?”Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.“Every movie is different. Every story is different. We've been talking about Lady Bird, and you mentioned Francis Ha. So we made Francis Ha first, and there's an interesting relationship between her and her best friend that is almost like a romance, but it's not actually romantic, but the way the story is told, it's like two lovers, but they get into arguments and there's a lot of conflict. And then Ladybird, there's a lot of conflict between the mother and the daughter. And in some sense, I remember thinking, Well, I've made things before and with Greta where there's conflict and maybe there's some overlap here, but there wasn't. It's just every time you start from scratch, and you might think, Well, if we use a certain camera or if we use certain tools, maybe that will help. But that's really the last step. And then I think, you have to have a more, a sort of less practical approach in the initial discussions.I find it helpful to speak with the director and all the collaborators on the project and just to have what I'd call a more dreamy conversation when you get together in a cafe or in the office and just talk through more emotional aspects of the story. There's these very earthly concerns that making a film requires, and you have to really leave all that stuff for later. All the stuff is important, just like in any creative process or business where there's a finite amount of resources. But how do you show certain relationships? The fact is you just have to talk about them first and figure out what they are. It's really important to understand specifically what the emotional notes are of the story. And then, little by little, we just figure out the technique of like the brush strokes, if it were painting, or the notes, if it were music. In cinematography, it's a visual medium, so eventually, we're moving towards: What is in the frame or what isn't in the frame? And how will these frames transition to each other?”https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.“Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?"–Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig "I really love that line in the script. It's an incredible script that Greta Gerwig wrote. It's not obvious, that sentiment that she says. I think that's why she has to point it out to the Lady Bird character, but I think if we're lucky in our lives, we can choose the path that we want to go down, whether it's something creative or in the arts or something else. And I think if you're lucky, you can spend your life or your career following something you really love or spending time following the path, whether it's a hobby or your career. And spending that time paying the attention that the craft or the hobby or the creative pursuit wants."https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
“Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?"–Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig "I really love that line in the script. It's an incredible script that Greta Gerwig wrote. It's not obvious, that sentiment that she says. I think that's why she has to point it out to the Lady Bird character, but I think if we're lucky in our lives, we can choose the path that we want to go down, whether it's something creative or in the arts or something else. And I think if you're lucky, you can spend your life or your career following something you really love or spending time following the path, whether it's a hobby or your career. And spending that time paying the attention that the craft or the hobby or the creative pursuit wants."Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me."I think one of the things in Lady Bird that's interesting is she is incredibly vulnerable, especially in relationship to her mom, and then she starts to come out of her shell and becomes more and more empowered and less and less vulnerable, in a sense. And so how do you convey that on screen? And a lot of it is just wanting that sense to be there. Every movie is different. Every story is different. We've been talking about Ladybird, and you mentioned Francis Ha. So we made Francis Ha first, and there's an interesting relationship between her and her best friend that is almost like a romance, but it's not actually romantic, but the way the story is told, it's like two lovers, but they get into arguments and there's a lot of conflict. And then Ladybird, there's a lot of conflict between the mother and the daughter. I was very lucky to have a wonderful mom who's an attorney. And growing up, my mom worked very long hours, and my father was a musician who did most of the cooking. And I think just having a strong mother with a career and a very distinctive point of view has something to do with all of this. Like I'm looking for my mom in some of these projects. Someone who really shaped my worldview. That her relationship with her friends or possibly with her mom, and I think it just feels very familiar and fun. I was lucky to have a great relationship with my mom, who is all of those things, and who also would feel very guilty working long hours. And I always loved that. I loved that it was my dad who would cook, and my mom had this interesting career, and still does."https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"I think one of the things in Lady Bird that's interesting is she is incredibly vulnerable, especially in relationship to her mom, and then she starts to come out of her shell and becomes more and more empowered and less and less vulnerable, in a sense. And so how do you convey that on screen? And a lot of it is just wanting that sense to be there. Every movie is different. Every story is different. We've been talking about Ladybird, and Francis Ha. So we made Francis Ha first, and there's an interesting relationship between her and her best friend that is almost like a romance, but it's not actually romantic, but the way the story is told, it's like two lovers, but they get into arguments and there's a lot of conflict. And then Ladybird, there's a lot of conflict between the mother and the daughter. I was very lucky to have a wonderful mom who's an attorney. And growing up, my mom worked very long hours, and my father was a musician who did most of the cooking. And I think just having a strong mother with a career and a very distinctive point of view has something to do with all of this. Like I'm looking for my mom in some of these projects. Someone who really shaped my worldview. That her relationship with her friends or possibly with her mom, and I think it just feels very familiar and fun. I was lucky to have a great relationship with my mom, who is all of those things, and who also would feel very guilty working long hours. And I always loved that. I loved that it was my dad who would cook, and my mom had this interesting career, and still does."Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
"I've always thought that filmmaking rhymes with classical music, the process of making classical music that I observed as a child. When I discovered filmmaking, I thought these things, they're very similar. They rhyme with each other. I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but what operating a camera does resemble the physicality of conducting an orchestra. I was in a certain proximity to my father's orchestra playing on Stephen Spielberg's and Clint Eastwood's soundtracks, and I grew up playing the cello.My favorite conductor that I ever got to see was Seiji Ozawa, who was the musical director of the Boston Symphony and the Tokyo Symphony. But he was my father's orchestra was the Boston Symphony, and he was musical director for 35 years or something like that. And this was like, he was like a dancer, really beautiful, elegant movements. And I watched him rehearse and perform for so many hours when I was a child. And I think subconsciously as a camera operator, that it informed my sensibility, and maybe if I'm able to pull off like an elegant, smooth camera move, like on Noah Baumbach's Mistress America movie we did a lot of big flourishy movements all in one shot. And I think Seiji was a huge influence on me in terms of movement. And even if, Confess, Fletch, I didn't operate the camera, but I had an amazing operator named Julian Delacruz. And just being able to communicate like what the movement should be and just speak that language, I think getting to watch Seiji as a kid really helped that for me.”Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me."I've always thought that filmmaking rhymes with classical music, the process of making classical music that I observed as a child. When I discovered filmmaking, I thought these things, they're very similar. They rhyme with each other. I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but what operating a camera does resemble the physicality of conducting an orchestra. I was in a certain proximity to my father's orchestra playing on Stephen Spielberg's and Clint Eastwood's soundtracks, and I grew up playing the cello.My favorite conductor that I ever got to see was Seiji Ozawa, who was the musical director of the Boston Symphony and the Tokyo Symphony. But he was my father's orchestra was the Boston Symphony, and he was musical director for 35 years or something like that. And this was like, he was like a dancer, really beautiful, elegant movements. And I watched him rehearse and perform for so many hours when I was a child. And I think subconsciously as a camera operator, that it informed my sensibility, and maybe if I'm able to pull off like an elegant, smooth camera move, like on Noah Baumbach's Mistress America movie we did a lot of big flourishy movements all in one shot. And I think Seiji was a huge influence on me in terms of movement. And even if, Confess, Fletch, I didn't operate the camera, but I had an amazing operator named Julian Delacruz. And just being able to communicate like what the movement should be and just speak that language, I think getting to watch Seiji as a kid really helped that for me.”https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society
“Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?"–Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig "I really love that line in the script. It's an incredible script that Greta Gerwig wrote. It's not obvious, that sentiment that she says. I think that's why she has to point it out to the Lady Bird character, but I think if we're lucky in our lives, we can choose the path that we want to go down, whether it's something creative or in the arts or something else. And I think if you're lucky, you can spend your life or your career following something you really love or spending time following the path, whether it's a hobby or your career. And spending that time paying the attention that the craft or the hobby or the creative pursuit wants."Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
“I studied for a year under Eric Rohmer at The University of Paris-Michelet, and his class was called Cinematography with Eric Rohmer, but we didn't shoot anything. We just watched films, mostly his films, and he would turn the sound off and just talk. It was fantastic. And then we would write papers and discuss. And he talked a lot about his cinematographer Néstor Almendros who shot My Night at Maud's, Pauline at the Beach, Claire's Knee, most of his better-known films.I think the big thing that I got from studying with Rohmer was just his movies are extremely dialogue-heavy, but they're very cinematic. And the way that he would talk about shooting scenes and n a film like My Night at Maud's, that's like largely in one apartment, dialogue spoken between two people, and how to shoot a story that's told through dialogue, but not have it feel like television.And that came in handy later when I did meet Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. Noah's a huge, huge Rohmer fan, so we talked about him a lot. And I think that helped me a lot to have confidence that if a film has a lot of dialogue, for it to feel cinematic and interesting, you don't just need many different angles for the scene to play well. You can kind of show some restraint and even have a scene unfold in one shot and be dynamic, even if people are talking a lot."Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Sam Levy studied film in Paris with French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and began his career as an apprentice to legendary cinematographer Harris Savides. Sam first gained recognition as a cinematographer when he photographed Wendy and Lucy for director Kelly Reichardt - voted “One of the Best 25 Films of the 21st Century” by The New York Times. He went on to shoot Frances Ha, Mistress America and While We're Young for director Noah Baumbach, Changers and Frank Ocean's Blonded for Spike Jonze, Sermon on The Mount for Jerrod Carmichael, Maggie's Plan for Rebecca Miller and Green Porno for Isabella Rossellini. Sam also photographed Lady Bird for writer/director Greta Gerwig - nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and winner of The Golden Globe for Best Picture. Other new films include Mayday, which he also produced, Confess, Fletch, and She Came to Me.“I studied for a year under Eric Rohmer at The University of Paris-Michelet, and his class was called Cinematography with Eric Rohmer, but we didn't shoot anything. We just watched films, mostly his films, and he would turn the sound off and just talk. It was fantastic. And then we would write papers and discuss. And he talked a lot about his cinematographer Néstor Almendros who shot My Night at Maud's, Pauline at the Beach, Claire's Knee, most of his better-known films.I think the big thing that I got from studying with Rohmer was just his movies are extremely dialogue-heavy, but they're very cinematic. And the way that he would talk about shooting scenes and n a film like My Night at Maud's, that's like largely in one apartment, dialogue spoken between two people, and how to shoot a story that's told through dialogue, but not have it feel like television.And that came in handy later when I did meet Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. Noah's a huge, huge Rohmer fan, so we talked about him a lot. And I think that helped me a lot to have confidence that if a film has a lot of dialogue, for it to feel cinematic and interesting, you don't just need many different angles for the scene to play well. You can kind of show some restraint and even have a scene unfold in one shot and be dynamic, even if people are talking a lot."https://samlevydp.comwww.imdb.com/name/nm1240085/ www.instagram.com/samlevydp/ www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
Keith Moon's last days, The Jam and She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
The City of Smyrna will have a Juneteenth celebratory dinner with Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of "She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman." #CobbCounty #Georgia #LocalNews - - - - - The Marietta Daily Journal Podcast is local news for Marietta, Kennesaw, Smyrna, and all of Cobb County. Subscribe today, so you don't miss an episode! MDJOnline Register Here for your essential digital news. Find additional episodes of the MDJ Podcast here. This Podcast was produced and published for the Marietta Daily Journal and MDJ Online by BG Ad Group For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire" by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode and the shorter spoken-word tracks. Information on Dick Bock, World Pacific, and Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger have all released autobiographies. Densmore's is out of print, but I referred to Manzarek's and Krieger's here. Of the two Krieger's is vastly more reliable. I also used Mick Wall's book on the Doors and Stephen Davis' biography of Jim Morrison. Information about Elektra Records came from Follow the Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, which is available as a free PDF download on Elektra's website. Biographical information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes from this book, written by one of his followers. The Doors' complete studio albums can be bought as MP3s for £14. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are two big problems that arise for anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history, and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast -- things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on a subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragons of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal -- we know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other, related, problem, is deliberate disinformation. This comes up especially for people dealing with military history -- during conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are, and after a war has concluded the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine -- depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars, and on all sides. Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting, since assuming the Presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F Kennedy, to get further into the war, but had needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident provided him with that excuse. On August the second, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters -- they used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time -- President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second "attack", however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and use that as justification to get Congress to authorise him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam, and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then-Captain, later Rear Admiral, Steve Morrison: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the forties, fifties, and early sixties -- there was a lot of back and forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of these genres, and so we've looked at swing, bebop, and modal jazz before now. But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the fifties, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at Cool Jazz. Cool Jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed, that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of "jazz" as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular fifties jazz musician, are very much in the "cool jazz" mode: [Excerpt: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"] And we have mentioned on several occasions the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were cited as influences by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the Modern Folk Quartet: [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Regret?"] We have also occasionally mentioned people like Mose Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode. But we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of bop and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his bop and modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette, who performed together for a couple of weeks in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different lineup, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gil Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Konitz, had all been working for the big band Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, a band which along with the conventional swing instruments also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music: [Excerpt: Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, "To Each His Own"] The Davis Nonette also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody, rather than call-and response riffing: [Excerpt: The Miles Davis Nonette, "Venus De Milo"] Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled "Birth of the Cool", by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a bandleader himself, and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"] While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called the Haig, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big-band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio, with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlowe, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Red Norvo, "This Can't Be Love"] By 1952 Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue, which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide -- the idea of a group with a rhythm section that *didn't* have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual, style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group were the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock. Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes -- a taste for hashish, and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock *loved* the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Harte, a notable jazz drummer, he raised three hundred and fifty dollars to record the first album by Mulligan's new group: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Aren't You Glad You're You?"] Pacific Jazz, the label Bock and Harte founded, soon became *the* dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound. The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name, as by Chet Baker, or as "Lee Konitz and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet" when Mulligan's old bandmate Konitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz. But both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953 Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star. Not only was Baker a great jazz trumpet player, he was also very good looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song "My Funny Valentine" one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "My Funny Valentine"] But when Baker recorded a vocal version, for his album Chet Baker Sings, it made Baker famous: [Excerpt: Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine"] When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker, but Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazines, and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early fifties. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had *two* of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bock loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956 he was invited by his friend George Avakian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician he was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music -- they were putting it out as a speciality release rather than something that would appeal to the general public -- and so they were happy for Bock to sign Shankar to his own label. Bock renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases, and he produced Shankar's next album, India's Master Musician: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Charu Keshi"] Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bock, and Bock would also try to find ways to combine Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians including Bud Shank (who we'll hear about again in a future episode) on flute: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken-word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Willy the Shake"] But they also put out spoken-word albums that appealed to Bock's interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Heard. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chet Baker Sings!, but as well as being a jazz fan Heard was very connected in the world of the arts -- he was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley -- and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality. He practiced yoga, and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism: [Excerpt: Gerald Heard, "Paraphrased from the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu"] We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", when Ralph Mentzner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions" -- Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the mescaline trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic drug use, though Heard was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement -- though he always advised Leary and his associates not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle rather than risk the wrath of the establishment -- and he's cited by almost everyone in Leary's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him advocating LSD use. It was Heard's books that made Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religions and associate of Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Heard was one of the people who gave Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Bock also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964 he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on The Psychedelic Experience, which Shankar did as a favour for his friend even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation as its ideas were too controversial: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience (film)] And Heard introduced Bock to other ideas around philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bock became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959 teaching a new style of meditation which he called Transcendental Meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even his birth name -- both "Maharishi" and "Yogi" are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as "the Maharishi". What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu, and only have a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather getting a proper understanding requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language, so my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them as they pertain to mid-sixties psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable, and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school as I understand them seem to centre around an idea of non-separation -- that God is in all things, and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase "I am that, thou art that, all this is that", which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "All This is That"] The other phrase they're singing there, "Jai Guru Dev" is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati -- it means "all hail the divine teacher" or "glory to the heavenly one", and "guru dev" or "guru deva" was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death, as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in "Across the Universe" as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor, and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither -- the rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dev, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claim that the system he taught was Guru Dev's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the monastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught -- but of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism (as best I understand this) is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate -- you should go off and become a monk and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life -- the student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi, or renunciate, but that you could skip straight from being a student to being a Sanyasi and spend your life as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said: "Obviously enough there are two ways of life: the way of the Sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A Sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realises, through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life." What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial, or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions, while there are other people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh -- and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings you could get *more* of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching. There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent seventy years living in a cave and eating only rice -- and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bock became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures: [Excerpt: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Deep Meditation"] Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures, in 1961. In the early sixties, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded, but Bock remained in charge of the label, and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. Aura was much less successful than the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl-group record, "Shooby Dooby", by the Lewis Sisters, two jazz-singing white schoolteachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown: [Excerpt: The Lewis Sisters, "Shooby Dooby"] The most successful act that Aura ever had was Sonny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top twenty hit in 1956 with "Confidential", a song he'd recorded on Specialty Records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Dorinda Morgan: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "Confidential"] But Knight's biggest hit on Aura, "If You Want This Love", only made number seventy-one on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "If You Want This Love"] Knight would later go on to write a novel, The Day the Music Died, which Greil Marcus described as "the bitterest book ever written about how rock'n'roll came to be and what it turned into". Marcus said it was about "how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself: as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts; as white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men". Given that Knight was the artist who did the *best* out of Aura Records, that says a great deal about the label. But one of the bands that Aura signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screamin' Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audiences wanted and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing. They put out two singles on Aura, "Henrietta": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Henrietta"] and "Soul Train": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Soul Train"] Ray Daniels was a stage name -- his birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name -- and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band, and music wasn't really his ideal career. Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrence did, he'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brothers' band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was OK. What he really liked, though, was jazz -- he was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner, and so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Aura Records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still legal, and been fascinated by its effects, but worried that he couldn't control them -- he couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bock, Bock told him that the best method he knew for doing that was transcendental meditation. Bock gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums, and told him to go to a lecture on transcendental meditation, run by the head of the Maharishi's west-coast organisation, as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robby Krieger, and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had -- they'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusioned with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation, while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA -- though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in "not joining the Army". UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bock California had become the centre of American interest in music from India -- so much so that in 1967 Ravi Shankar would open up a branch of his own Kinnara Music School there. (And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies I've used for the Doors says that Krieger heard about the Maharishi while studying at the Kinnara school. As the only branch of the Kinnara school that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a *really* long commute he wasn't studying there at this point.) Densmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz -- just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens' drummer, who had started missing rehearsals -- he'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brothers, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarek's from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later accounts, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry and European art film, but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid -- he'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of "practical jokes" which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead -- lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy (or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret) and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robby Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, "as if it was common knowledge". His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of rootlessness -- he never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with friends or girlfriends -- and a lack of sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly, but would always disrupt the shows -- he was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive boor when drunk -- by shouting out for them to play "Louie Louie", a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had -- the first time he'd ever performed live -- and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate ways, with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach -- Morrison had decided to stay in LA, and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time, and had lost a great deal of weight, and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs -- this was summer 1965, and the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and the Stones' "Satisfaction" had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than "Louie Louie". Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing, and as Manzarek later put it "he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice". The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Densmore, "Moonlight Drive": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Moonlight Drive"] Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure, for Morrison, though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos, were under Rick and the Ravens' name, and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seem to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty Records, which now owned Aura, and who saw no commercial potential in them, even in one that later became a number one hit when rerecorded a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Hello I Love You"] Although to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks, and stuck new words to it: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"] But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry, and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals but who they otherwise knew as a loud annoying drunk in the audience would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone they were signed by Columbia Records, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a Byrds album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the Byrds themselves, later writing "The Byrds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all. They couldn't play jazz. Hell, they probably didn't even know anything about jazz. They were folk-rock, for cri-sake. Country music. For whites only." (Ray Manzarek was white). They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment -- Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the Animals and the Dave Clark Five used. But they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmore, and that his thoughts had been "Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head." But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school -- Bill Wolff and Robby Krieger. Wolff and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school -- they had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school -- and had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencos by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino: [Excerpt: Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino, "Caracolés"] And they'd decided they were going to become the new Dos Flamencos. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk-revivalists like Spider John Koerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Krieger and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school, and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz musicians. At this time Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a Damascene conversion -- the next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustic for a red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolff, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band. Krieger had the advantage over Wolff for two reasons -- one of which was actually partly Wolff's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography: "A critic once said I had 'the worst hair in rock 'n' roll'. It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky, Jewfro, so one day my friend Bill Wolff and I experimented with Ultra Sheen, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to Black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolff, as we all called him, said 'You're starting to look like that jerk Bryan MacLean'". According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him better looking than Wolff, at least until the straightener wore off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolff, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord, and then use a resonant tube -- these days usually a specially-made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for older blues musicians often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down -- to slide across the strings. Slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues, especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"] But while the members of the group all claimed to be blues fans -- Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club in the South Side of Chicago where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience -- none of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was, and Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottle necks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band -- Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likeable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions, but Manzarek soon grew to resent Densmore, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, about the divorce of heaven and hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the twenty-second of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died). Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea -- Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception instead. Initially the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man", originally recorded by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] And a version of "Alabama Song", a song written by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, from the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with English language lyrics by Elisabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lotte Lenya, and it was her version that the group based their version on, at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend: [Excerpt: Lotte Lenya, "Alabama Song"] Though it's likely given their tastes in jazz that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dolphy and John Lewis: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy and John Lewis, "Alabama Song"] But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one, but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called "Light My Fire", and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying "we're not a folk-rock band" and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the Mamas and the Papas, but the other band members liked it -- but it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much but which seems to me to be very likely to have at least been a subconscious influence -- "She's Not There" by the Zombies: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Now, there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record. First, like the Doors, the Zombies were a keyboard-driven band. Second, there's the dynamics of the songs -- both have soft, slightly jazzy verses and then a more straight-ahead rock chorus. And finally there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for "She's Not There" goes from Am to D repeatedly: [demonstrates] While the verse for "Light My Fire" goes from Am to F sharp minor -- and for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp, and A, while the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A, and C sharp -- they're very similar chords. So "She's Not There" is: [demonstrates] While "Light My Fire" is: [demonstrates] At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asus2 chord rather than an A minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A minor and played that instead. Now again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge "She's Not There" as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was. But either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released, and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semitone too slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos -- and apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you, that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pyres, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song, in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus -- in Krieger's original version, he'd sung "Come on baby, light my fire" three times, but Morrison changed the last line to "try to set the night on fire", which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of "My Favorite Things": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] But Manzarek in his autobiography says it was inspired by Ole, the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Ole"] Both are of course similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the “Light My Fire” instrumental section, though none of the Doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group (and of course "Light My Fire" is in four-four rather than three-four): [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over. Both Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro, but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when, and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it, and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger, though, the story is rather different, and the evidence seems to be weighted in Krieger's favour. In early live performances of the song, they started the song with the Am-F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (live at the Matrix)"] But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts with a change from G to D, then from D to F, before going into a circle of fifths -- not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like "Hey Joe", but a descending one, the same sequence as in "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" or "I Will Survive", ending on an A flat: [demonstrates] To get from the A flat to the A minor or Asus2 chord on which the verse starts, he simply then shifted up a semitone from A flat to A major for two bars: [demonstrates] Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line which was inspired by one of Bach's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779"] Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by other than that it was one of the two-part inventions, and to be honest none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears, and I think more than anything he was just going for a generalised baroque style rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque -- the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothchild, the producer who we will talk about more later, came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just general noodling it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's staff producers wanted to work with them and so they were dropped -- though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards. And others say that they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal, and without any proper gigs, though they started picking up the odd private party here and there -- Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well -- Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next -- they tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the Animals or the Rolling Stones than a group with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the Vox organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano. Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play basslines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group -- though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour -- and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands. Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music – though on records they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group were still trying to get a record deal, they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was *the* place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there like the Whisky A-Go-Go, but those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular, club on the strip called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers. At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Krieger later said "It's rarely talked about, but Ray was a natural born showman, and his knack for stirring drama would serve the Doors' legacy well in later years" But Morrison soon gained enough confidence to sing by himself. But they weren't bringing in any customers, and the London Fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped -- and the club itself shut not long after. But luckily for the group, just before the end of their booking, the booker for the Whisky A-Go-Go, Ronnie Haran walked in with a genuine pop star, Peter Asher, who as half of Peter & Gordon had had a hit with "A World Without Love", written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Haran was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act -- that would always be a group that had records out -- but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed -- after Morrison first tried to play it cool and told Haran they would have to consider it, to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the Whisky would be Them, Van Morrison's group -- one of the cover versions they had been playing had been Them's "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] They supported Them for two weeks at the Whisky, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities according to the other members of the Doors, and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night Them played the venue, Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of “Gloria” which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residencies at the Whisky, and over the summer of 1966 the Doors were the support act for the Mothers of Invention, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Strip was the centre of Californian musical life, before that centre moved to San Francisco, and the Doors were right at the heart of it. Though it wasn't all great -- this was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip, as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song, by the Standells: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned. That Standells song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love. And it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the Doors -- just like when they'd been picked up by the Whisky A Go-Go just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog, so they got signed to a record deal just as they were about to lose their job at the Whisky. They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. "The End" had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it in to one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band, and Morrison had added lyrics to it. Lyrics that were partly inspired by his own fraught relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Oedipal payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whisky A Go Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra Records. Elektra had for a long time been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music, first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robby Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whisky A Go Go, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jac Holzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Holzman saw them he was unimpressed -- they sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands -- but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgement and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of "Alabama Song", and everything clicked into place for Holzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled -- Elektra wasn't a major label like Columbia, but they were a label that nurtured artists and wouldn't just toss them aside. They were even happier when soon after they signed to Elektra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R -- Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jac Holzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothchild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] They were Robby Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothchild on that level. And while Rothchild had mostly worked in New York, he was in LA that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the Doors were part of -- other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in the Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundi, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison, though Buckley had a much larger range: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] There was one problem, though -- Rothchild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman, instead. But Holzman persuaded him because Rothchild owed him a favour -- Rothchild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside Holzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income, and Holzman also did all the paperwork with Rothchild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance Rothchild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session though. The first day, they'd tried recording a version of "The End", but it hadn't worked, so on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of "The End" had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about, and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game -- which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished and it still worked fine. But Morrison had taken a *lot* of acid, and on the way home after the session he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire. He got his girlfriend to turn the car back around, drove back to the studio, climbed over the fence, saw the glowing red lightbulbs in the studio, became convinced that they were fires, and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher, before leaving convinced he had saved the band's equipment -- and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally went well, and the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album, "Break on Through", didn't make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Break on Through"] But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album, and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing "Light My Fire" -- at this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music. Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record, too, if it was the length of a normal single, and so Rothchild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven-and-a-half-minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing microsurgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length, but they were horrified when Rothchild actually played it for them. As far as the group were concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothchild and Botnick cut that section down to just this: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (single edit)"] The group were mortified -- what had been done to their song? That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, it was just... a pop song. Rothchild explained that that was the point -- to get the song played on AM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked them
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