Podcasts about Skip Spence

Episode 4 of our Grape Expectations Series features Moby Grape & Skip Spence biographer Cam Cobb talking about Skip's rollercoaster ride through those early days of Moby Grape, a tale which includes disastrous tours, lawsuits, police busts, horribly nefarious managers, a fake touring version of the band, mysterious black magic witches, drug-induced madness, insane asylums, and attempted murder with an axe.  And, no joke—that's just within the band's first two years.  Here's just a few of the many things that Cam discusses with Discograffiti in Part 2 of our discussion:A step-by-step reconstruction of the hunt for talent that wound up pulling together the original band;The manifold ways in which Matthew Katz failed them as a manager;How The Summer of Love ironically wound up beating this great band down;A discussion about why Skip's songs of biblical reckoning took a sharp left into novelty-adjacent Weird Al territory!*** This episode includes a cameo appearance by the great JERRY MILLER, who talks with Cam about the band's early days as they began to gel as a unit!There'll be a short sneak peak running publicly for free, but the entirety of this podcast will only be accessible on the Major Tier of Discograffiti's Patreon. Don't miss it, or you'll only be getting part of the story. Get it as a one-off, get the full series, or better yet just subscribe.Full Episode: Patreon.com/Discograffiti (available on the Major Tier & up)Free Sneak Peek: linktr.ee/discograffitiPurchase the full Grape Expectations Collection at a discount: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/collection/1467935⁠Subscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week!) of must-hear binge-listening. It's completely free to be a basic member, $1 to get your backstage pass, $5/month for the weekly Sunday show by & for our community, $10 for weekly early release, ad-free, super-extended Director's Cuts of the main show plus access to half our Patreon episode archive, & $20 for Discograffiti's weekly bonus episodes and access to our entire Patreon episode archive. There are now over 300 Patreon episodes.Order Cam Cobb's Skip Spence bio: ⁠https://a.co/d/iuSyBGc⁠CONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow:⁠ ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠⁠YouTube Channel:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw⁠Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/Discograffiti⁠Order the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart):⁠ www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404⁠Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp:⁠ https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzak⁠Order the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop:⁠ https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/all⁠Venmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site:⁠ http://discograffiti.com/⁠CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroewww.Patreon.com/discograffiti#mobygrape #sanfrancisco #sixties #billgraham #fillmorewest #gordonstevens #doobiebrothers #weirdherald #billydeanandrus #donstevenson #peterlewis #bobmosley #jerrymiller #robertplant #skipspence #avalonballroom #familydog #thebyrds #jeffersonairplane #matthewkatz #camcobb #bellevue #jormakaukonen #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #grapeexpectations #thematrix #martybalin #omarspence 

Episode 3 of our Grape Expectations Series features two—count ‘em, TWO SEPARATE INTERVIEWS with drummer Don Stevenson and guitarist Peter Lewis, each of whom gives their own Rashomon-like perspective on the fascinating early part of Moby Grape's career. Disastrous tours, lawsuits, police busts, horribly nefarious managers, a fake touring version of the band, mysterious black magic witches, and drug-induced madness.  And, no joke—that's just within the band's first two years. The first episode of my conversations with both Don & Peter features both men discussing their first two records, the self-titled debut and Wow, right up to when Skip had his breakdown.Here's just a few of the many things that Don & Peter both separately discuss with Discograffiti in Part 1 of our conversation:How the band initially coalesced;The early days finding their sound at The Ark;How the major label feeding frenzy over the band wound up impacting them;Don's infamous front cover middle finger;An in-depth discussion of their legendary self-titled debut;The steep downhill slide that began literally on the night of their launch party;And the time Skip broke down crying in the studio when the reaction to his new song wasn't as he'd expected.Then, for good measure, Peter drops a bomb at the end of the whole thing.Listen: linktr.ee/discograffitiI support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income. If you're a Moby Grape & Skip Spence superfan like me, The Director's Cut of this episode is ad-free and features A WHOPPING 52 ADDITIONAL MINUTES of essential material. Purchase The Director's Cut as a one-off at Patreon.com/Discograffiti.Purchase the full Grape Expectations Collection: https://www.patreon.com/collection/1467935Subscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon at the Major Tier and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week) of must-hear binge-listening: Patreon.com/DiscograffitiCONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiscograffitiOrder the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzakOrder the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site: http://discograffiti.com/CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroeThere is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.  If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.  www.Patreon.com/discograffiti#mobygrape #sanfrancisco #sixties #billgraham #fillmorewest #gordonstevens #doobiebrothers #weirdherald #billydeanandrus #donstevenson #peterlewis #bobmosley #jerrymiller #robertplant #skipspence #avalonballroom #familydog #thebyrds #jeffersonairplane #matthewkatz #camcobb #bellevue #jormakaukonen #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #grapeexpectations #thematrix #martybalin #omarspence 

The great Bob Mosley—Mr. Blues himself—is known for a soul-belting voice that is a true force of nature.  As a man who's transcended his share of real blues (a bout of homelessness, a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia that'd sideline the average person), conversely Bob has fronted multiple bands, been idolized by Robert Plant, and played in a late-1970s supergroup with Neil Young called The Ducks. Here's just a few of the many things that Bob discusses with Discograffiti in this podcast:What it was like opening for The Rolling Stones;How he first found out that he could sing like that;His favorite song on Moby Grape's classic debut;What it was like living on the street;His relationship with Skip Spence, both of whom endured a lifetime struggle with the same severe psychological diagnoses, yet neither man ever admitted defeat. There'll be a short sneak peak running publicly for free, but the entirety of this podcast will only be accessible on the Major Tier of Discograffiti's Patreon. Don't miss it, or you'll only be getting part of the story. Get it as a one-off, or better yet just subscribe.Full Episode: Patreon.com/Discograffiti (available on the Major Tier & up)Free Sneak Peek: linktr.ee/discograffitiSubscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week!) of must-hear binge-listening. I support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income.It's completely free to be a basic member, $1 to get your backstage pass, $5/month for the weekly Sunday show by & for our community, $10 for weekly early release, ad-free, super-extended Director's Cuts of the main show plus half our Patreon episode archive, & $20 for Discograffiti's weekly bonus episodes and our entire Patreon episode archive. There are now over 300 Patreon episodes.CONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiscograffitiOrder the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzakOrder the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site: http://discograffiti.com/CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroeThere is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.  If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.  www.Patreon.com/discograffiti#mobygrape #sanfrancisco #sixties #billgraham #fillmorewest #gordonstevens #doobiebrothers #weirdherald #billydeanandrus #donstevenson #peterlewis #bobmosley #jerrymiller #robertplant #skipspence #avalonballroom #familydog #thebyrds #jeffersonairplane #matthewkatz #camcobb #bellevue #jormakaukonen #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #grapeexpectations #thematrix #martybalin #omarspence 

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Grape Expectations, an immersive, 5-week-long, Rashomon-style series about the amazing band Moby Grape, featuring all three living band members and their biographer.  There is no crazier story in the history of music than that of The Grape. It includes disastrous tours, lawsuits, police busts, horribly nefarious managers, a fake touring version of the band, mysterious black magic witches, drug-induced madness, insane asylums, and attempted murder with an axe.  And, no joke—that's just within the band's first two years. The first episode features Moby Grape and Skip Spence biographer Cam Cobb talking about Skip's dizzying years leading up to the formation of Moby Grape!Here's just a few of the many things that Cam discusses with Discograffiti in Part 1 of this podcast:Skip's wandering childhood;Coming up with Billy Dean Andrus in the South Bay folk scene;His first (little-known) acid trip;The truth behind the wild legend of Skip passing through both Quicksilver and Jefferson Airplane in literally one afternoon;Skip's initial songwriting efforts;And his whirlwind 10-month tenure in The Airplane!Listen: linktr.ee/discograffitiI support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income. If you're a Moby Grape & Skip Spence superfan like me, The Director's Cut of this episode is ad-free and features 11 additional minutes of essential material. Purchase The Director's Cut as a one-off:Purchase the full Grape Expectations Collection: https://www.patreon.com/collection/1467935Subscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon at the Major Tier and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week) of must-hear binge-listening: Patreon.com/DiscograffitiOrder Cam Cobb's Skip Spence bio: https://a.co/d/iuSyBGcCONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiscograffitiOrder the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzakOrder the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site: http://discograffiti.com/CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroeThere is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.  If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.  www.Patreon.com/discograffiti#mobygrape #sanfrancisco #sixties #billgraham #fillmorewest #gordonstevens #doobiebrothers #weirdherald #billydeanandrus #donstevenson #peterlewis #bobmosley #jerrymiller #robertplant #skipspence #avalonballroom #familydog #thebyrds #jeffersonairplane #matthewkatz #camcobb #bellevue #jormakaukonen #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #grapeexpectations #thematrix #martybalin #omarspence 

In this first of a two part episode of LEGENDS: Podcast by All Day Vinyl, host Scott Dudelson sits down with Don Stevenson, the vocalist, songwriter, drummer and co-founder of the iconic Moby Grape — one of the most dynamic, underrated bands to emerge from the 1960s San Francisco rock scene. From smoky late-night clubs in the Pacific Northwest to the chaos of Monterey Pop, Don takes us on a deeply personal journey through rock history. He opens up about first meeting Jerry Miller (his Moby Grape co-founder), backing up Etta James in after-hours joints, and the wild ride that led to forming Moby Grape alongside Skip Spence, Bob Mosley, and Peter Lewis. You'll hear the story of their audition, the creative fire that birthed classics like Hey Grandma, 805, and Murder in My Heart for the Judge — and what it was like recording their genre-defining debut album in just seven days. ** Don shares behind-the-scenes stories about: The infamous middle finger album cover that became a collector's grail How poor management cost the band a place in the Monterey Pop Festival documentary What it felt like to be touted as “the next Beatles”… and how it all unraveled Recording new solo work with Jerry Miller and Omar Spence, son of Skip Spence

Guests: Don Stevenson, drummer/songwriter of Moby Grape & Cam Cobb, author of Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence. He was one of the Holy Trinity of critically revered and maybe unjustly labeled “acid casualties” of late ‘60s/early ‘70s music. Along with Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett and the 13th Floor Elevators' Roky Erickson, Skip Spence was a star-crossed figure idolized for his all-too-brief contributions to shaping psychedelia through his work with Moby Grape and his one incredibly stark and endlessly intriguing solo album, Oar. His briefly burning creativity and agonizingly slow decline are profiled in a wonderfully comprehensive new book, Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence (Omnibus Press). Author Cam Cobb spoke with a multitude of Skip's family, friends, and bandmates to create the first authoritative chronicle of his artistic development and achievements and a sympathetic one of his long battle with mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. For this special edition of “Reading Is Funktamental,” we hear direct from one of the musicians who knew Spence best, Don Stevenson, the drummer and co-writer of many of Moby Grape's most popular songs, including “Hey Grandma,” “8:05” and “Murder in My Heart for the Judge.” My written review of the book can be found here at PopMatters, https://www.popmatters.com/moby-grape-skip-pence-biography "Reading is Funktamental" is a monthly one-hour show about great books written about music and music-makers. In each episode, host Sal Cataldi speaks to the authors of some of the best reads about rock, jazz, punk, world, experimental music, and much more. From time to time, the host and authors will be joined by notable musicians, writers, and artists who are die-hard fans of the subject matter covered. Expect lively conversation and a playlist of great music to go with it. "Reading Is Funktamental" can be heard the second Wednesday of every month from 10 – 11 AM on Wave Farm: WGXC 90.7 FM and online at wavefarm.org. It can also be found as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms. Sal Cataldi is a musician and writer based in Saugerties. He is best known for his work with his genre-leaping solo project, Spaghetti Eastern Music, and is also a member of the ambient guitar duo, Guitars A Go Go, the poetry and music duo, Vapor Vespers, and the quartet, Spaceheater. His writing on music, books and film has been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, PopMatters, Seattle Times, Huffington Post, Inside+Out Upstate NY, and NYSMusic.com, where he is the book reviewer.

PATRICK SIMMONS  'THE LOST INTERVIEWS' with RAY SHASHO Episode 16 Interviewed Tuesday, November 15, 2011  I had the opportunity to interview Doobie Brothers legendary guitarist and songwriter Patrick Simmons a few days before the 2011 Orlando Calling festival. Pat Simmons was introduced to future Doobie Brothers bandmates Tom Johnston and John Hartman by Moby Grape's Skip Spence in 1969 forming the foundation to what would eventually be one of the most esteemed classic rock bands in history.  Pat is usually identified as the Doobie Brother with the longest hair. His heartfelt vocal styles are significant to the band's success. He's an important musician with eclectic musical styles and tastes. Some of his many compositions with the band include the classic “Black Water” (which became their first number one hit) “South City Midnight Lady,” “Dependin' On You,” “Dangerous,” “Echoes Of Love” and “Clear as the Driven Snow.” His on-stage presence is both surreal and overwhelming during his solo of “Jesus Is Just Alright.” Here's my interview with singer, songwriter, guitar virtuoso, and founding member of The Doobie Brothers … Patrick Simmons Doobie Brothers official website http://www.doobiebros.com/ Patrick Simmons musical credits on allmusic.com http://www.allmusic.com/artist/patrick-simmons-p20546/credits     Support us on PayPal!

TOM JOHNSTON THE DOOBIE BROTHERS ‘THE LOST INTERVIEWS' with RAY SHASHO EPISODE 15 INTERVIEWED FEBRUARY 17TH 2013   The Doobie Brothers are one of those bands that we've depended on, year after year, and expect to see performing invariably at outdoor music festivals, pavilions, arenas, casinos and bike week events across the nation. The group has been exhilarating audiences for decades yet appear timeless onstage. One of the principal reasons for the longevity and success of the Doobie Brothers has a lot to do with an unmitigated affection shared between the band and its audience. It's been an amazing love affair that has persevered for over forty-two years. When the Doobie Brothers finally call it quits … rock ‘n' roll will probably call it quits too.  Tom Johnston is the voice, lyricist and guitarist on numerous classic hit recordings by the Doobie Brothers. Inspired by listening to R&B music on the radio, California native Johnston started his first band at 14, eventually broadening his musical horizons by singing with soul and blues groups. After moving to San Jose to finish college, Tom met Skip Spence, original drummer for the Jefferson Airplane. Spence introduced Johnston to drummer John Hartman. Spence was also a founding member of Moby Grape which had a major influence on the Doobie Brothers. Tom Johnston, John Hartman and bassist Greg Murphy formed the power trio “Pud.” When “Pud” unraveled, the evolution of the Doobie Brothers began to take shape. While living in a home dubbed as their “musical headquarters,” guitarist Patrick Simmons and bassist Dave Shogren joined the group. The band quickly generated a huge following in California. In 1971, the Doobie Brothers launched their self- titled debut album, The Doobie Brothers on the Warner Brothers label with legendary producers Ted Templeman and Lenny Waronker. The first track on the album, “Nobody” penned by Tom Johnston, would later resurface in 2010 on their latest release, World Gone Crazy. Their second studio album Toulouse Street (named for a street in the French Quarter of New Orleans) introduced new bassist Tiran Porter and second drummer Michael Hossack (Navy Veteran). The album spawned the Tom Johnston penned classic hits, “Listen to the Music” (#11 Top 100 Billboard Hit -1972), “Rockin' Down the Highway” and “Jesus Is Just Alright,” (#35 Billboard Top 100 Hit -1973) written by Arthur Reynolds (1965) and performed by The Byrds (1969). In 1973, the Doobie Brothers released, The Captain and Me spotlighting some of the bands most memorable classic rock tunes penned by Tom Johnston … “Long Train Runnin'”(#8 Billboard Hot 100 Hit) and perhaps the bands anthem song, “China Grove” (#15 Billboard Hot 100 Hit). The Captain and Me also featured a guest performance by future Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. The Doobie Brothers fourth studio album, What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits released in 1974 spawned the Tom Johnston penned songs, “Another Park, Another Sunday” (#32 Billboard Hot 100 Hit) and “Eyes of Silver” (#52 Billboard Hot 100 Hit). The album also featured Pat Simmons penned tribute to “The Big Easy,” “Black Water” (#1 Billboard Hot 100 Hit -1975). Stampede released in 1975 was the final album before Michael McDonald took over lead vocalist duties from an ailing Tom Johnston. The album featured the cover version, “Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While)” (#11 Billboard Hot 100 Hit -1975) written by the Motown team of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Subsequent albums …Takin' It to the Streets (1976), Livin' on the Fault Line (1977), Minute by Minute (1978) and One Step Closer (1980) featured a successful second incarnation of the band, which primarily consisted of Michael McDonald(vocals, keyboards) Patrick Simmons (guitars/vocals) Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (guitars, steel guitars), Tiran Porter(bass, vocals), John Hartman (drums) and Keith Knudsen (drums). *Tom Johnston played and sang “Turn It Loose” and “Wheels of Fortune” on the album Takin' It to the Streets. John McFee was added to the Doobie Brothers lineup in 1979 replacing Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and was featured on One Step Closer. After a successful run, the band's signature sound and direction became disillusioned. While working on his solo project, Tom Johnston rejoined the band for a Farewell Tour, and then the Doobie Brothers would call it quits as a band for the next five years. The reformation of the Doobie Brothers was contrived when the band's alumni were asked by drummer Keith Knudsen to perform at a concert to benefit veterans' causes. The band discovered that tickets were in great demand and soon embarked on a twelve-city tour.   In 1989, Cycles, the tenth studio recording by the Doobie Brothers, now on Capitol Records, witnessed the return of Tom Johnston and drummer Michael Hossack to the studio as a band. Tom Johnston's distinctive vocals returned, and the band re-established their musical roots. Subsequent releases … Brotherhood (1991), Sibling Rivalry (2000) and World Gone Crazy (2010). World Gone Crazy was the Doobie Brothers highest charting album since 1989 receiving rave reviews and featuring the longtime core lineup of Tom Johnston and Pat Simmons. The Doobie Brothers band functions like a well-oiled machine, touring consistently year after year and enchanting music enthusiasts worldwide. The current lineup of Tom Johnston (vocals/guitar), Pat Simmons (vocals/guitars), John McFee (guitar/strings/vocals), John Cowan (bass), Guy Allison (keyboards/vocals), Marc Russo (saxophones), Ed Toth (drums) and Tony Pia (drums)… represent a musical legacy that defines the quintessence of rock ‘n' roll and a band that we've always depended on throughout the years. The Doobie Brothers have sold more than 40-million albums worldwide. …So why aren't they in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?   Tom Johnston and the Doobie Brothers will be performing live as part of the Bands, Brew & BBQ concert series at Busch Gardens in Tampa on Sunday, February 24th. For tickets visit … http://seaworldparks.com/buschgardens-tampa/Events/Bands-Brew-and-BBQ or call 1-888-800-5447 for further information. Eagle Rock Entertainment recently released ‘Let The Music Play' –The Story of The Doobie Brothers on DVD, Blue-ray and Digital Video. -Available to purchase at amazon.com. I had the great pleasure of speaking with Tom Johnston recently about the band's current and future projects, family, and the future of rock ‘n' roll. Here's my interview with singer/songwriter/guitarist/and founding member of classic rock legends the Doobie Brothers … TOM JOHNSTON.   Support us on PayPal!

Cam Cobb is a university professor and rock journalist from Canada. His music writing has appeared in such magazines as Record Collector, Shindig!, and Ugly Things. His new book, Weighted Down - The Complicated Life of Skip Spence, is out now. Show theme by Bis.GET TICKETS TO MY CONVERSATION WITH GILES SMITH ON THURSDAY, MAY 9th.Want more? Join The James McMahon Music Podcast Patreon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5jY33R9cXAThankyou to our Patreon members! John Foley.Wilfreda Beehive.Joe Frost.Conor McNicholas.John Earls.Laura Norton.Mike Clewley.Ricky Murray.Danielle Walker.Claire Harris.Dana Landman. Laura Kelly Dunlop. Michael Woods.Billy Reeves.Eric Meredith.Caitlin Moran.Eve Barlow.Nige Tassell.  Twitter - @jamesjammcmahon Substack - https://spoook.substack.com YouTube - www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Vf_1E1Sza2GUyFNn2zFMA Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/jamesmcmahonmusicpod/

Cam Cobb – Weighted Down: The complicated life of Skip Spence...with TRE's Giles Brown

Cam Cobb is the author of Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence - the biography on the legendary '60s cult musician known for his time in era-defining bands Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, and Moby Grape. While celebrated by the likes of Tom Waits, Beck, and Robert Plant, Spence's life was sadly plagued by substance abuse, erratic behavior, and poor mental health. Spence's story is the story of the 60s and one that has never been told in full until now. Weighted Down is a first-hand narrative of Skip Spence, told by his friends, bandmates, and family, and includes a trove of never-before-seen photographs. Cobb joins the podcast to tell us about this captivating story of Spence. Purchase a copy of Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip SpenceEpisode PlaylistListen To Skip Spence's "Land Of The Sun" (left off of 1996 X-Files tribute album Songs In The Key Of X)---------- BookedOnRock.comThe Booked On Rock YouTube ChannelFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKINSTAGRAMTIKTOKXFind Your Nearest Independent BookstoreContact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe

Discover the incredible journey of the legendary 1960's San Francisco Country-Psych Rock band, Moby Grape in this episode of the Legends:Podcast by All Day Vinyl featuring founding member, singer/guitarist Peter Lewis of the Moby Grape.  In conversation with host Scott Dudelson, Lewis talks about his new album "Imagination" and shares incredible stories about Skip Spence including the infamous incident where he attempted to attack drummer Don Stevenson with an Axe while believing he was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, the amazing story behind the iconic Moby Grape debut album cover photo, his recollections of being offered acid by David Crosby at Monterey Pop Festival and so much more. Listeners get a mesmerizing glance into Peter's life from his early beginnings to his current album, all while experiencing the history of one of San Francisco's seminal 1960s bands.  This episode paints an in-depth portrait of the band's trials and tribulations including being ripped off by their manager as well as its high points and the chances of a future Moby Grape reunion concert. Make sure to stay tuned to the 'Legends Podcast' for more behind-the-scene peeks into music history. Please subscribe, rate, and follow us on Instagram and YouTube at All Day Vinyl to stay updated with our latest episodes.

In this episode we speak to singer/guitarist Peter Lewis, founding member of the great 60's band Moby Grape.  We discussthe bands shortened career but long-standing influence on rock and roll.  We also deep dive into Peter's latest great solo album Imagination.

Don Stevenson of Moby Grape returns for another interview. This time we talk about Moby Grape's grim times in 1968, and go track-by-track on their wonderful yet overlooked third album, Moby Grape '69. The band's biographer, Cam Cobb, joins the conversation.   Cam Cobb's definitive book on the band, "What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story", can be found here: http://jawbonepress.com/moby-grape/ Cam's forthcoming book on Skip Spence: "Weighted Down - The Complicated Life of Skip Spence" https://omnibuspress.com/products/weighted-down-the-complicated-life-of-skip-spence For all things Moby Grape, visit the website: https://mobygrape.us/ Please support the podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/uglythingspod, where you can enjoy special bonus content plus much more. Become a Patreon today! Check out Ugly Things Magazine: https://ugly-things.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don Stevenson of Moby Grape returns for another interview. This time we talk about Moby Grape's grim times in 1968, and go track-by-track on their wonderful yet overlooked third album, Moby Grape '69. The band's biographer, Cam Cobb, joins the conversation.   Cam Cobb's definitive book on the band, "What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story", can be found here: http://jawbonepress.com/moby-grape/ Cam's forthcoming book on Skip Spence: "Weighted Down - The Complicated Life of Skip Spence" https://omnibuspress.com/products/weighted-down-the-complicated-life-of-skip-spence For all things Moby Grape, visit the website: https://mobygrape.us/ Please support the podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/uglythingspod, where you can enjoy special bonus content plus much more. Become a Patreon today! Check out Ugly Things Magazine: https://ugly-things.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Stax talks to drummer/songwriter Don Stevenson and Moby Grape biographer Cam Cobb. Don shares stories about the band's formation and the making of their monumental 1967 debut album. Cam Cobb's definitive book on the band, "What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story", can be found here: http://jawbonepress.com/moby-grape/ Cam's forthcoming book on Skip Spence: "Weighted Down - The Complicated Life of Skip Spence" https://omnibuspress.com/products/weighted-down-the-complicated-life-of-skip-spence For all things Moby Grape, visit the website: https://mobygrape.us/ Please support the podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/uglythingspod, where you can enjoy special bonus content plus much more. Check out Ugly Things Magazine: https://ugly-things.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Stax talks to drummer/songwriter Don Stevenson and Moby Grape biographer Cam Cobb. Don shares stories about the band's formation and the making of their monumental 1967 debut album. Cam Cobb's definitive book on the band, "What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story", can be found here: http://jawbonepress.com/moby-grape/ Cam's forthcoming book on Skip Spence: "Weighted Down - The Complicated Life of Skip Spence" https://omnibuspress.com/products/weighted-down-the-complicated-life-of-skip-spence For all things Moby Grape, visit the website: https://mobygrape.us/ Please support the podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/uglythingspod, where you can enjoy special bonus content plus much more. Check out Ugly Things Magazine: https://ugly-things.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Simmons born October 19, 1948 is an American musician best known as a founding member of the rock band The Doobie Brothers (whom he was inducted as a member of into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, he has been the only consistent member of the band throughout their tenure. In 1970, a California-based power trio consisting of Tom Johnston, Skip Spence, and John Hartman, teamed up with Simmons to form a group together. They would call themselves “The Doobie Brothers”, after their friend Keith "Dyno" Rosen, who either lived with or next to the band told them Why don't you call yourself the Doobie Brothers because you're always smoking pot? Simmons wrote and sang many songs for the Doobie Brothers, including "South City Midnight Lady", "Dependin' On You", "Echoes of Love", "Wheels of Fortune" and "Black Water", the group's first #1 record. Patrick sang lead on many Doobie Brothers songs, such as Listen to the Music. The group's 1978 studio album, Minute by Minute, which reached number one for five weeks, and won the band a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, while the single "What A Fool Believes" from the album won three Grammys itself. The Doobie Brothers were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 200 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on November 7, 2020.[2][3] The group has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide.

In this episode, I discuss the many medicinal uses of Licorice... and I tell you how to make my soon to be world-famous chili con carne. I discuss underground houses/greenhouses, Rocky Erikson and SKip Spence, the importance of teaching your kids to eat diverse, adult food, green woodworking, axes.. and more!Read about my new book: Medicinal Ferns and Fern Allies, an Herbalist's Guide https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/11/medicinal-ferns-and-fern-allies.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMSZSJPSRead about my new cookbook, The Omnivore's Guide to Home Cooking for Preppers, Homesteaders, Permaculture People and Everyone Else: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-omnivores-guide-to-home-cooking-for.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGKX37Q2Visit my Substack and sign up for my free newsletter: https://judsoncarroll.substack.com/Read about my new other book, Medicinal Shrubs and Woody Vines of The American Southeast an Herbalist's Guide https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/06/medicinal-shrubs-and-woody-vines-of.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2T4Y5L6 andGrowing Your Survival Herb Garden for Preppers, Homesteaders and Everyone Elsehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-your-survival-herb-garden-for.htmlhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X4LYV9RThe Encyclopedia of Medicinal Bitter Herbs: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-encyclopedia-of-bitter-medicina.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5MYJ35RandChristian Medicine, History and Practice: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/01/christian-herbal-medicine-history-and.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B09P7RNCTBHerbal Medicine for Preppers, Homesteaders and Permaculture People: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2021/10/herbal-medicine-for-preppers.htmlAlso available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B09HMWXL25Podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/show/southern-appalachian-herbsBlog: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/Free Video Lessons: https://rumble.com/c/c-618325

Vincent Gleeson is a singer-songwriter from Lexington Kentucky who plays an interesting mix of folk and jazz. Vincent primarily sings songs about the struggles of addiction, love, and poverty but also has some songs of happiness thrown in the mix. His influences include Nick Drake, Skip Spence, Coleman Hawkins, and Elliott Smith. Vincent honed his finger picking style through years of practicing ten hours per day, along with a three year stretch of busking five or six days a week. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tophillrecording/support

Renown for his LEGENDARY Poster art, from Detroit to San Francisco and beyond, artist/musician/storyteller/Military Vet Dennis Loren has been a staple in visuals and artistic music since the dawn of rock and roll. Dennis takes us on a journey from Michigan to San Francisco and back--right up to delivering Carlos Santana's mail back in the day to marking The White Stripes music take over in the late '90s. Still working art for San Francisco music collective Moonalice (among others), Loren was there when Hendrix arrived, when the Dead and Moby Grape escaped, from Skip Spence's first visions of grandeur to when Roky Erickson was on his final comeback in grand style. MC5/Stooges/New York Dolls. You name it, Dennis had a part of it. Please enjoy Part 3 of 3--our final hour last fall. Dennis takes us into his relationship with Brian Wilson and gives insight on the drama between Beach Boys organizations. Dennis also lays out the Fillmore font and contention between the Family Dog and the Fillmore shows. Finally, he wraps with his work with supergroup Moonalice, as an artist--sometime ON CALL artist--in the world of poster and album art. Happy New Year!

  Renown for his LEGENDARY Poster art, from Detroit to San Francisco and beyond, artist/musician/storyteller/Military Vet Dennis Loren has been a staple in visuals and artistic music since the dawn of rock and roll. Dennis takes us on a journey from Michigan to San Francisco and back--right up to delivering Carlos Santana's mail back in the day to marking The White Stripes music take over in the late '90s. Still working art for San Francisco music collective Moonalice (among others), Loren was there when Hendrix arrived, when the Dead and Moby Grape escaped, from Skip Spence's first visions of grandeur to when Roky Erickson was on his final comeback in grand style. MC5/Stooges/New York Dolls. You name it, Dennis had a part of it. Please enjoy Part 2 of 3--our second meeting from the fall, following the massive storm that broke up the first taping. Dig in...three straight weeks with the vision of Dennis Loren...  

Renown for his LEGENDARY Poster art, from Detroit to San Francisco and beyond, artist/musician/storyteller/Military Vet Dennis Loren has been a staple in visuals and artistic music since the dawn of rock and roll. Dennis takes us on a journey from Michigan to San Francisco and back--right up to delivering Carlos Santana's mail back in the day to marking The White Stripes music take over in the late '90s. Still working art for San Francisco music collective Moonalice (among others), Loren was there when Hendrix arrived, when the Dead and Moby Grape escaped, from Skip Spence's first visions of grandeur to when Roky Erickson was on his final comeback in grand style. MC5/Stooges/New York Dolls. You name it, Dennis had a part of it. Please enjoy Part 1 of 3--our original taping was cut short by a massive storm. Dig in...three straight weeks with the vision of Dennis Loren...

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on "Omaha" by Moby Grape. 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/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.

Episode one hundred and fifty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “See Emily Play", the birth of the UK underground, and the career of Roger Barrett, known as Syd. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "First Girl I Loved" by the Incredible String Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, due to the number of Pink Floyd songs. I referred to two biographies of Barrett in this episode -- A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman is the one I would recommend, and the one whose narrative I have largely followed. Some of the information has been superseded by newer discoveries, but Chapman is almost unique in people writing about Barrett in that he actually seems to care about the facts and try to get things right rather than make up something more interesting. Crazy Diamond by Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson is much less reliable, but does have quite a few interview quotes that aren't duplicated by Chapman. Information about Joe Boyd comes from Boyd's book White Bicycles. In this and future episodes on Pink Floyd I'm also relying on Nick Mason's Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd: All the Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. The compilation Relics contains many of the most important tracks from Barrett's time with Pink Floyd, while Piper at the Gates of Dawn is his one full album with them. Those who want a fuller history of his time with the group will want to get Piper and also the box set Cambridge St/ation 1965-1967. Barrett only released two solo albums during his career. They're available as a bundle here. Completists will also want the rarities and outtakes collection Opel.  ERRATA: I talk about “Interstellar Overdrive” as if Barrett wrote it solo. The song is credited to all four members, but it was Barrett who came up with the riff I talk about. And annoyingly, given the lengths I went to to deal correctly with Barrett's name, I repeatedly refer to "Dave" Gilmour, when Gilmour prefers David. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A note before I begin -- this episode deals with drug use and mental illness, so anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to skip this one. But also, there's a rather unique problem in how I deal with the name of the main artist in the story today. The man everyone knows as Syd Barrett was born Roger Barrett, used that name with his family for his whole life, and in later years very strongly disliked being called "Syd", yet everyone other than his family called him that at all times until he left the music industry, and that's the name that appears on record labels, including his solo albums. I don't believe it's right to refer to people by names they choose not to go by themselves, but the name Barrett went by throughout his brief period in the public eye was different from the one he went by later, and by all accounts he was actually distressed by its use in later years. So what I'm going to do in this episode is refer to him as "Roger Barrett" when a full name is necessary for disambiguation or just "Barrett" otherwise, but I'll leave any quotes from other people referring to "Syd" as they were originally phrased. In future episodes on Pink Floyd, I'll refer to him just as Barrett, but in episodes where I discuss his influence on other artists, I will probably have to use "Syd Barrett" because otherwise people who haven't listened to this episode won't know what on Earth I'm talking about. Anyway, on with the show. “It's gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.” That's a quote from a chapter titled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" from the classic children's book The Wind in the Willows -- a book which for most of its length is a fairly straightforward story about anthropomorphic animals having jovial adventures, but which in that one chapter has Rat and Mole suddenly encounter the Great God Pan and have a hallucinatory, transcendental experience caused by his music, one so extreme it's wiped from their minds, as they simply cannot process it. The book, and the chapter, was a favourite of Roger Barrett, a young child born in Cambridge in 1946. Barrett came from an intellectual but not especially bookish family. His father, Dr. Arthur Barrett, was a pathologist -- there's a room in Addenbrooke's Hospital named after him -- but he was also an avid watercolour painter, a world-leading authority on fungi, and a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society who was apparently an extraordinarily good singer; while his mother Winifred was a stay-at-home mother who was nonetheless very active in the community, organising a local Girl Guide troupe. They never particularly encouraged their family to read, but young Roger did particularly enjoy the more pastoral end of the children's literature of the time. As well as the Wind in the Willows he also loved Alice in Wonderland, and the Little Grey Men books -- a series of stories about tiny gnomes and their adventures in the countryside. But his two big passions were music and painting. He got his first ukulele at age eleven, and by the time his father died, just before Roger's sixteenth birthday, he had graduated to playing a full-sized guitar. At the time his musical tastes were largely the same as those of any other British teenager -- he liked Chubby Checker, for example -- though he did have a tendency to prefer the quirkier end of things, and some of the first songs he tried to play on the guitar were those of Joe Brown: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] Barrett grew up in Cambridge, and for those who don't know it, Cambridge is an incubator of a very particular kind of eccentricity. The university tends to attract rather unworldly intellectual overachievers to the city -- people who might not be able to survive in many other situations but who can thrive in that one -- and every description of Barrett's father suggests he was such a person -- Barrett's sister Rosemary has said that she believes that most of the family were autistic, though whether this is a belief based on popular media portrayals or a deeper understanding I don't know. But certainly Cambridge is full of eccentric people with remarkable achievements, and such people tend to have children with a certain type of personality, who try simultaneously to live up to and rebel against expectations of greatness that come from having parents who are regarded as great, and to do so with rather less awareness of social norms than the typical rebel has. In the case of Roger Barrett, he, like so many others of his generation, was encouraged to go into the sciences -- as indeed his father had, both in his career as a pathologist and in his avocation as a mycologist. The fifties and sixties were a time, much like today, when what we now refer to as the STEM subjects were regarded as new and exciting and modern. But rather than following in his father's professional footsteps, Roger Barrett instead followed his hobbies. Dr. Barrett was a painter and musician in his spare time, and Roger was to turn to those things to earn his living. For much of his teens, it seemed that art would be the direction he would go in. He was, everyone agrees, a hugely talented painter, and he was particularly noted for his mastery of colours. But he was also becoming more and more interested in R&B music, especially the music of Bo Diddley, who became his new biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love?"] He would often spend hours with his friend Dave Gilmour, a much more advanced guitarist, trying to learn blues riffs. By this point Barrett had already received the nickname "Syd". Depending on which story you believe, he either got it when he started attending a jazz club where an elderly jazzer named Sid Barrett played, and the people were amused that their youngest attendee, like one of the oldest, was called Barrett; or, more plausibly, he turned up to a Scout meeting once wearing a flat cap rather than the normal scout beret, and he got nicknamed "Sid" because it made him look working-class and "Sid" was a working-class sort of name. In 1962, by the time he was sixteen, Barrett joined a short-lived group called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, on rhythm guitar. The group's lead singer, Geoff Mottlow, would go on to join a band called the Boston Crabs who would have a minor hit in 1965 with a version of the Coasters song "Down in Mexico": [Excerpt: The Boston Crabs, "Down in Mexico"] The bass player from the Mottoes, Tony Sainty, and the drummer Clive Welham, would go on to form another band, The Jokers Wild, with Barrett's friend Dave Gilmour. Barrett also briefly joined another band, Those Without, but his time with them was similarly brief. Some sources -- though ones I consider generally less reliable -- say that the Mottoes' bass player wasn't Tony Sainty, but was Roger Waters, the son of one of Barrett's teachers, and that one of the reasons the band split up was that Waters had moved down to London to study architecture. I don't think that's the case, but it's definitely true that Barrett knew Waters, and when he moved to London himself the next year to go to Camberwell Art College, he moved into a house where Waters was already living. Two previous tenants at the same house, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, had formed a loose band with Waters and various other amateur musicians like Keith Noble, Shelagh Noble, and Clive Metcalfe. That band was sometimes known as the Screaming Abdabs, The Megadeaths, or The Tea Set -- the latter as a sly reference to slang terms for cannabis -- but was mostly known at first as Sigma 6, named after a manifesto by the novelist Alexander Trocchi for a kind of spontaneous university. They were also sometimes known as Leonard's Lodgers, after the landlord of the home that Barrett was moving into, Mike Leonard, who would occasionally sit in on organ and would later, as the band became more of a coherent unit, act as a roadie and put on light shows behind them -- Leonard was himself very interested in avant-garde and experimental art, and it was his idea to play around with the group's lighting. By the time Barrett moved in with Waters in 1964, the group had settled on the Tea Set name, and consisted of Waters on bass, Mason on drums, Wright on keyboards, singer Chris Dennis, and guitarist Rado Klose. Of the group, Klose was the only one who was a skilled musician -- he was a very good jazz guitarist, while the other members were barely adequate. By this time Barrett's musical interests were expanding to include folk music -- his girlfriend at the time talked later about him taking her to see Bob Dylan on his first UK tour and thinking "My first reaction was seeing all these people like Syd. It was almost as if every town had sent one Syd Barrett there. It was my first time seeing people like him." But the music he was most into was the blues. And as the Tea Set were turning into a blues band, he joined them. He even had a name for the new band that would make them more bluesy. He'd read the back of a record cover which had named two extremely obscure blues musicians -- musicians he may never even have heard. Pink Anderson: [Excerpt: Pink Anderson, "Boll Weevil"] And Floyd Council: [Excerpt: Floyd Council, "Runaway Man Blues"] Barrett suggested that they put together the names of the two bluesmen, and presumably because "Anderson Council" didn't have quite the right ring, they went for The Pink Floyd -- though for a while yet they would sometimes still perform as The Tea Set, and they were sometimes also called The Pink Floyd Sound. Dennis left soon after Barrett joined, and the new five-piece Pink Floyd Sound started trying to get more gigs. They auditioned for Ready Steady Go! and were turned down, but did get some decent support slots, including for a band called the Tridents: [Excerpt: The Tridents, "Tiger in Your Tank"] The members of the group were particularly impressed by the Tridents' guitarist and the way he altered his sound using feedback -- Barrett even sent a letter to his girlfriend with a drawing of the guitarist, one Jeff Beck, raving about how good he was. At this point, the group were mostly performing cover versions, but they did have a handful of originals, and it was these they recorded in their first demo sessions in late 1964 and early 1965. They included "Walk With Me Sydney", a song written by Roger Waters as a parody of "Work With Me Annie" and "Dance With Me Henry" -- and, given the lyrics, possibly also Hank Ballard's follow-up "Henry's Got Flat Feet (Can't Dance No More) and featuring Rick Wright's then-wife Juliette Gale as Etta James to Barrett's Richard Berry: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Walk With Me Sydney"] And four songs by Barrett, including one called "Double-O Bo" which was a Bo Diddley rip-off, and "Butterfly", the most interesting of these early recordings: [Excerpt: The Tea Set, "Butterfly"] At this point, Barrett was very unsure of his own vocal abilities, and wrote a letter to his girlfriend saying "Emo says why don't I give up 'cos it sounds horrible, and I would but I can't get Fred to join because he's got a group (p'raps you knew!) so I still have to sing." "Fred" was a nickname for his old friend Dave Gilmour, who was playing in his own band, Joker's Wild, at this point. Summer 1965 saw two important events in the life of the group. The first was that Barrett took LSD for the first time. The rest of the group weren't interested in trying it, and would indeed generally be one of the more sober bands in the rock business, despite the reputation their music got. The other members would for the most part try acid once or twice, around late 1966, but generally steer clear of it. Barrett, by contrast, took it on a very regular basis, and it would influence all the work he did from that point on. The other event was that Rado Klose left the group. Klose was the only really proficient musician in the group, but he had very different tastes to the other members, preferring to play jazz to R&B and pop, and he was also falling behind in his university studies, and decided to put that ahead of remaining in the band. This meant that the group members had to radically rethink the way they were making music. They couldn't rely on instrumental proficiency, so they had to rely on ideas. One of the things they started to do was use echo. They got primitive echo devices and put both Barrett's guitar and Wright's keyboard through them, allowing them to create new sounds that hadn't been heard on stage before. But they were still mostly doing the same Slim Harpo and Bo Diddley numbers everyone else was doing, and weren't able to be particularly interesting while playing them. But for a while they carried on doing the normal gigs, like a birthday party they played in late 1965, where on the same bill was a young American folk singer named Paul Simon, and Joker's Wild, the band Dave Gilmour was in, who backed Simon on a version of "Johnny B. Goode". A couple of weeks after that party, Joker's Wild went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] But The Pink Floyd Sound weren't as musically tight as Joker's Wild, and they couldn't make a living as a cover band even if they wanted to. They had to do something different. Inspiration then came from a very unexpected source. I mentioned earlier that one of the names the group had been performing under had been inspired by a manifesto for a spontaneous university by the writer Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi's ideas had actually been put into practice by an organisation calling itself the London Free School, based in Notting Hill. The London Free School was an interesting mixture of people from what was then known as the New Left, but who were already rapidly aging, the people who had been the cornerstone of radical campaigning in the late fifties and early sixties, who had run the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons and so on, and a new breed of countercultural people who in a year or two would be defined as hippies but at the time were not so easy to pigeonhole. These people were mostly politically radical but very privileged people -- one of the founder members of the London Free School was Peter Jenner, who was the son of a vicar and the grandson of a Labour MP -- and they were trying to put their radical ideas into practice. The London Free School was meant to be a collective of people who would help each other and themselves, and who would educate each other. You'd go to the collective wanting to learn how to do something, whether that's how to improve the housing in your area or navigate some particularly difficult piece of bureaucracy, or how to play a musical instrument, and someone who had that skill would teach you how to do it, while you hopefully taught them something else of value. The London Free School, like all such utopian schemes, ended up falling apart, but it had a wider cultural impact than most such schemes. Britain's first underground newspaper, the International Times, was put together by people involved in the Free School, and the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which is now one of the biggest outdoor events in Britain every year with a million attendees, came from the merger of outdoor events organised by the Free School with older community events. A group of musicians called AMM was associated with many of the people involved in the Free School. AMM performed totally improvised music, with no structure and no normal sense of melody and harmony: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] Keith Rowe, the guitarist in AMM, wanted to find his own technique uninfluenced by American jazz guitarists, and thought of that in terms that appealed very strongly to the painterly Barrett, saying "For the Americans to develop an American school of painting, they somehow had to ditch or lose European easel painting techniques. They had to make a break with the past. What did that possibly mean if you were a jazz guitar player? For me, symbolically, it was Pollock laying the canvas on the floor, which immediately abandons European easel technique. I could see that by laying the canvas down, it became inappropriate to apply easel techniques. I thought if I did that with a guitar, I would just lose all those techniques, because they would be physically impossible to do." Rowe's technique-free technique inspired Barrett to make similar noises with his guitar, and to think less in terms of melody and harmony than pure sound. AMM's first record came out in 1966. Four of the Free School people decided to put together their own record label, DNA, and they got an agreement with Elektra Records to distribute its first release -- Joe Boyd, the head of Elektra in the UK, was another London Free School member, and someone who had plenty of experience with disruptive art already, having been on the sound engineering team at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric. AMM went into the studio and recorded AMMMusic: [Excerpt: AMM, "What Is There In Uselesness To Cause You Distress?"] After that came out, though, Peter Jenner, one of the people who'd started the label, came to a realisation. He said later "We'd made this one record with AMM. Great record, very seminal, seriously avant-garde, but I'd started adding up and I'd worked out that the deal we had, we got two percent of retail, out of which we, the label, had to pay for recording costs and pay ourselves. I came to the conclusion that we were going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records just to pay the recording costs, let alone pay ourselves any money and build a label, so I realised we had to have a pop band because pop bands sold a lot of records. It was as simple as that and I was as naive as that." Jenner abandoned DNA records for the moment, and he and his friend Andrew King decided they were going to become pop managers. and they found The Pink Floyd Sound playing at an event at the Marquee, one of a series of events that were variously known as Spontaneous Underground and The Trip. Other participants in those events included Soft Machine; Mose Allison; Donovan, performing improvised songs backed by sitar players; Graham Bond; a performer who played Bach pieces while backed by African drummers; and The Poison Bellows, a poetry duo consisting of Spike Hawkins and Johnny Byrne, who may of all of these performers be the one who other than Pink Floyd themselves has had the most cultural impact in the UK -- after writing the exploitation novel Groupie and co-writing a film adaptation of Spike Milligan's war memoirs, Byrne became a TV screenwriter, writing many episodes of Space: 1999 and Doctor Who before creating the long-running TV series Heartbeat. Jenner and King decided they wanted to sign The Pink Floyd Sound and make records with them, and the group agreed -- but only after their summer holidays. They were all still students, and so they dispersed during the summer. Waters and Wright went on holiday to Greece, where they tried acid for the first of only a small number of occasions and were unimpressed, while Mason went on a trip round America by Greyhound bus. Barrett, meanwhile, stayed behind, and started writing more songs, encouraged by Jenner, who insisted that the band needed to stop relying on blues covers and come up with their own material, and who saw Barrett as the focus of the group. Jenner later described them as "Four not terribly competent musicians who managed between them to create something that was extraordinary. Syd was the main creative drive behind the band - he was the singer and lead guitarist. Roger couldn't tune his bass because he was tone deaf, it had to be tuned by Rick. Rick could write a bit of a tune and Roger could knock out a couple of words if necessary. 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' was the first song Roger ever wrote, and he only did it because Syd encouraged everyone to write. Syd was very hesitant about his writing, but when he produced these great songs everyone else thought 'Well, it must be easy'" Of course, we know this isn't quite true -- Waters had written "Walk with me Sydney" -- but it is definitely the case that everyone involved thought of Barrett as the main creative force in the group, and that he was the one that Jenner was encouraging to write new material. After the summer holidays, the group reconvened, and one of their first actions was to play a benefit for the London Free School. Jenner said later "Andrew King and myself were both vicars' sons, and we knew that when you want to raise money for the parish you have to have a social. So in a very old-fashioned way we said 'let's put on a social'. Like in the Just William books, like a whist drive. We thought 'You can't have a whist drive. That's not cool. Let's have a band. That would be cool.' And the only band we knew was the band I was starting to get involved with." After a couple of these events went well, Joe Boyd suggested that they make those events a regular club night, and the UFO Club was born. Jenner and King started working on the light shows for the group, and then bringing in other people, and the light show became an integral part of the group's mystique -- rather than standing in a spotlight as other groups would, they worked in shadows, with distorted kaleidoscopic lights playing on them, distancing themselves from the audience. The highlight of their sets was a long piece called "Interstellar Overdrive", and this became one of the group's first professional recordings, when they went into the studio with Joe Boyd to record it for the soundtrack of a film titled Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. There are conflicting stories about the inspiration for the main riff for "Interstellar Overdrive". One apparent source is the riff from Love's version of the Bacharach and David song "My Little Red Book". Depending on who you ask, either Barrett was obsessed with Love's first album and copied the riff, or Peter Jenner tried to hum him the riff and Barrett copied what Jenner was humming: [Excerpt: Love, "My Little Red Book"] More prosaically, Roger Waters has always claimed that the main inspiration was from "Old Ned", Ron Grainer's theme tune for the sitcom Steptoe and Son (which for American listeners was remade over there as Sanford and Son): [Excerpt: Ron Grainer, "Old Ned"] Of course it's entirely possible, and even likely, that Barrett was inspired by both, and if so that would neatly sum up the whole range of Pink Floyd's influences at this point. "My Little Red Book" was a cover by an American garage-psych/folk-rock band of a hit by Manfred Mann, a group who were best known for pop singles but were also serious blues and jazz musicians, while Steptoe and Son was a whimsical but dark and very English sitcom about a way of life that was slowly disappearing. And you can definitely hear both influences in the main riff of the track they recorded with Boyd: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Interstellar Overdrive"] "Interstellar Overdrive" was one of two types of song that The Pink Floyd were performing at this time -- a long, extended, instrumental psychedelic excuse for freaky sounds, inspired by things like the second disc of Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention. When they went into the studio again with Boyd later in January 1967, to record what they hoped would be their first single, they recorded two of the other kind of songs -- whimsical story songs inspired equally by the incidents of everyday life and by children's literature. What became the B-side, "Candy and a Currant Bun", was based around the riff from "Smokestack Lightnin'" by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] That song had become a favourite on the British blues scene, and was thus the inspiration for many songs of the type that get called "quintessentially English". Ray Davies, who was in many ways the major songwriter at this time who was closest to Barrett stylistically, would a year later use the riff for the Kinks song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains", but in this case Barrett had originally written a song titled "Let's Roll Another One", about sexual longing and cannabis. The lyrics were hastily rewritten in the studio to remove the controversial drug references-- and supposedly this caused some conflict between Barrett and Waters, with Waters pushing for the change, while Barrett argued against it, though like many of the stories from this period this sounds like the kind of thing that gets said by people wanting to push particular images of both men. Either way, the lyric was changed to be about sweet treats rather than drugs, though the lascivious elements remained in. And some people even argue that there was another lyric change -- where Barrett sings "walk with me", there's a slight "f" sound in his vocal. As someone who does a lot of microphone work myself, it sounds to me like just one of those things that happens while recording, but a lot of people are very insistent that Barrett is deliberately singing a different word altogether: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Candy and a Currant Bun"] The A-side, meanwhile, was inspired by real life. Both Barrett and Waters had mothers who used  to take in female lodgers, and both had regularly had their lodgers' underwear stolen from washing lines. While they didn't know anything else about the thief, he became in Barrett's imagination a man who liked to dress up in the clothing after he stole it: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Arnold Layne"] After recording the two tracks with Joe Boyd, the natural assumption was that the record would be put out on Elektra, the label which Boyd worked for in the UK, but Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra records, wasn't interested, and so a bidding war began for the single, as by this point the group were the hottest thing in London. For a while it looked like they were going to sign to Track Records, the label owned by the Who's management, but in the end EMI won out. Right as they signed, the News of the World was doing a whole series of articles about pop stars and their drug use, and the last of the articles talked about The Pink Floyd and their association with LSD, even though they hadn't released a record yet. EMI had to put out a press release saying that the group were not psychedelic, insisting"The Pink Floyd are not trying to create hallucinatory effects in their audience." It was only after getting signed that the group became full-time professionals. Waters had by this point graduated from university and was working as a trainee architect, and quit his job to become a pop star. Wright dropped out of university, but Mason and Barrett took sabbaticals. Barrett in particular seems to have seen this very much as a temporary thing, talking about how he was making so much money it would be foolish not to take the opportunity while it lasted, but how he was going to resume his studies in a year. "Arnold Layne" made the top twenty, and it would have gone higher had the pirate radio station Radio London, at the time the single most popular radio station when it came to pop music, not banned the track because of its sexual content. However, it would be the only single Joe Boyd would work on with the group. EMI insisted on only using in-house producers, and so while Joe Boyd would go on to a great career as a producer, and we'll see him again, he was replaced with Norman Smith. Smith had been the chief engineer on the Beatles records up to Rubber Soul, after which he'd been promoted to being a producer in his own right, and Geoff Emerick had taken over. He also had aspirations to pop stardom himself, and a few years later would have a transatlantic hit with "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" under the name Hurricane Smith: [Excerpt: Hurricane Smith, "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?"] Smith's production of the group would prove controversial among some of the group's longtime fans, who thought that he did too much to curtail their more experimental side, as he would try to get the group to record songs that were more structured and more commercial, and would cut down their improvisations into a more manageable form. Others, notably Peter Jenner, thought that Smith was the perfect producer for the group. They started work on their first album, which was mostly recorded in studio three of Abbey Road, while the Beatles were just finishing off work on Sgt Pepper in studio two. The album was titled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, after the chapter from The Wind in the Willows, and other than a few extended instrumental showcases, most of the album was made up of short, whimsical, songs by Barrett that were strongly infused with imagery from late-Victorian and Edwardian children's books. This is one of the big differences between the British and American psychedelic scenes. Both the British and American undergrounds were made up of the same type of people -- a mixture of older radical activists, often Communists, who had come up in Britain in the Ban the Bomb campaigns and in America in the Civil Rights movement; and younger people, usually middle-class students with radical politics from a privileged background, who were into experimenting with drugs and alternative lifestyles. But the  social situations were different. In America, the younger members of the underground were angry and scared, as their principal interest was in stopping the war in Vietnam in which so many of them were being killed. And the music of the older generation of the underground, the Civil Rights activists, was shot through with influence from the blues, gospel, and American folk music, with a strong Black influence. So that's what the American psychedelic groups played, for the most part, very bluesy, very angry, music, By contrast, the British younger generation of hippies were not being drafted to go to war, and mostly had little to complain about, other than a feeling of being stifled by their parents' generation's expectations. And while most of them were influenced by the blues, that wasn't the music that had been popular among the older underground people, who had either been listening to experimental European art music or had been influenced by Ewan MacColl and his associates into listening instead to traditional old English ballads, things like the story of Tam Lin or Thomas the Rhymer, where someone is spirited away to the land of the fairies: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Thomas the Rhymer"] As a result, most British musicians, when exposed to the culture of the underground over here, created music that looked back to an idealised childhood of their grandparents' generation, songs that were nostalgic for a past just before the one they could remember (as opposed to their own childhoods, which had taken place in war or the immediate aftermath of it, dominated by poverty, rationing, and bomb sites (though of course Barrett's childhood in Cambridge had been far closer to this mythic idyll than those of his contemporaries from Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, or London). So almost every British musician who was making music that might be called psychedelic was writing songs that were influenced both by experimental art music and by pre-War popular song, and which conjured up images from older children's books. Most notably of course at this point the Beatles were recording songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" about places from their childhood, and taking lyrical inspiration from Victorian circus posters and the works of Lewis Carroll, but Barrett was similarly inspired. One of the books he loved most as a child was "The Little Grey Men" by BB, a penname for Denys Watkins-Pitchford. The book told the story of three gnomes,  Baldmoney, Sneezewort, and Dodder, and their adventures on a boat when the fourth member of their little group, Cloudberry, who's a bit of a rebellious loner and more adventurous than the other three, goes exploring on his own and they have to go off and find him. Barrett's song "The Gnome" doesn't use any precise details from the book, but its combination of whimsy about a gnome named Grimble-gromble and a reverence for nature is very much in the mould of BB's work: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "The Gnome"] Another huge influence on Barrett was Hillaire Belloc. Belloc is someone who is not read much any more, as sadly he is mostly known for the intense antisemitism in some of his writing, which stains it just as so much of early twentieth-century literature is stained, but he was one of the most influential writers of the early part of the twentieth century. Like his friend GK Chesterton he was simultaneously an author of Catholic apologia and a political campaigner -- he was a Liberal MP for a few years, and a strong advocate of an economic system known as Distributism, and had a peculiar mixture of very progressive and extremely reactionary ideas which resonated with a lot of the atmosphere in the British underground of the time, even though he would likely have profoundly disapproved of them. But Belloc wrote in a variety of styles, including poems for children, which are the works of his that have aged the best, and were a huge influence on later children's writers like Roald Dahl with their gleeful comic cruelty. Barrett's "Matilda Mother" had lyrics that were, other than the chorus where Barrett begs his mother to read him more of the story, taken verbatim from three poems from Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children -- "Jim, Who Ran away from his Nurse, and was Eaten by a Lion", "Henry King (Who chewed bits of String, and was cut off in Dreadful Agonies)", and "Matilda (Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death)" -- the titles of those give some idea of the kind of thing Belloc would write: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "Matilda Mother (early version)"] Sadly for Barrett, Belloc's estate refused to allow permission for his poems to be used, and so he had to rework the lyrics, writing new fairy-tale lyrics for the finished version. Other sources of inspiration for lyrics came from books like the I Ching, which Barrett used for "Chapter 24", having bought a copy from the Indica Bookshop, the same place that John Lennon had bought The Psychedelic Experience, and there's been some suggestion that he was deliberately trying to copy Lennon in taking lyrical ideas from a book of ancient mystic wisdom. During the recording of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the group continued playing live. As they'd now had a hit single, most of their performances were at Top Rank Ballrooms and other such venues around the country, on bills with other top chart groups, playing to audiences who seemed unimpressed or actively hostile. They also, though made two important appearances. The more well-known of these was at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, a benefit for International Times magazine with people including Yoko Ono, their future collaborator Ron Geesin, John's Children, Soft Machine, and The Move also performing. The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream is now largely regarded as *the* pivotal moment in the development of the UK counterculture, though even at the time some participants noted that there seemed to be a rift developing between the performers, who were often fairly straightforward beer-drinking ambitious young men who had latched on to kaftans and talk about enlightenment as the latest gimmick they could use to get ahead in the industry, and the audience who seemed to be true believers. Their other major performance was at an event called "Games for May -- Space Age Relaxation for the Climax of Spring", where they were able to do a full long set in a concert space with a quadrophonic sound system, rather than performing in the utterly sub-par environments most pop bands had to at this point. They came up with a new song written for the event, which became their second single, "See Emily Play". [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] Emily was apparently always a favourite name of Barrett's, and he even talked with one girlfriend about the possibility of naming their first child Emily, but the Emily of the song seems to have had a specific inspiration. One of the youngest attendees at the London Free School was an actual schoolgirl, Emily Young, who would go along to their events with her schoolfriend Anjelica Huston (who later became a well-known film star). Young is now a world-renowned artist, regarded as arguably Britain's greatest living stone sculptor, but at the time she was very like the other people at the London Free School -- she was from a very privileged background, her father was Wayland Young, 2nd Baron Kennet, a Labour Peer and minister who later joined the SDP. But being younger than the rest of the attendees, and still a little naive, she was still trying to find her own personality, and would take on attributes and attitudes of other people without fully understanding them,  hence the song's opening lines, "Emily tries, but misunderstands/She's often inclined to borrow somebody's dream til tomorrow". The song gets a little darker towards the end though, and the image in the last verse, where she puts on a gown and floats down a river forever *could* be a gentle, pastoral, image of someone going on a boat ride, but it also could be a reference to two rather darker sources. Barrett was known to pick up imagery both from classic literature and from Arthurian legend, and so the lines inevitably conjure up both the idea of Ophelia drowning herself and of the Lady of Shallot in Tennyson's Arthurian poem, who is trapped in a tower but finds a boat, and floats down the river to Camelot but dies before the boat reaches the castle: [Excerpt: The Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play"] The song also evokes very specific memories of Barrett's childhood -- according to Roger Waters, the woods mentioned in the lyrics are meant to be woods in which they had played as children, on the road out of Cambridge towards the Gog and Magog Hills. The song was apparently seven minutes long in its earliest versions, and required a great deal of editing to get down to single length, but it was worth it, as the track made the top ten. And that was where the problems started. There are two different stories told about what happened to Roger Barrett over the next forty years, and both stories are told by people with particular agendas, who want particular versions of him to become the accepted truth. Both stories are, in the extreme versions that have been popularised, utterly incompatible with each other, but both are fairly compatible with the scanty evidence we have. Possibly the truth lies somewhere between them. In one version of the story, around this time Barrett had a total mental breakdown, brought on or exacerbated by his overuse of LSD and Mandrax (a prescription drug consisting of a mixture of the antihistamine diphenhydramine and the sedative methaqualone, which was marketed in the US under the brand-name Quaalude), and that from late summer 1967 on he was unable to lead a normal life, and spent the rest of his life as a burned-out shell. The other version of the story is that Barrett was a little fragile, and did have periods of mental illness, but for the most part was able to function fairly well. In this version of the story, he was neurodivergent, and found celebrity distressing, but more than that he found the whole process of working within commercial restrictions upsetting -- having to appear on TV pop shows and go on package tours was just not something he found himself able to do, but he was responsible for a whole apparatus of people who relied on him and his group for their living. In this telling, he was surrounded by parasites who looked on him as their combination meal-ticket-cum-guru, and was simply not suited for the role and wanted to sabotage it so he could have a private life instead. Either way, *something* seems to have changed in Barrett in a profound way in the early summer of 1967. Joe Boyd talks about meeting him after not having seen him for a few weeks, and all the light being gone from his eyes. The group appeared on Top of the Pops, Britain's top pop TV show, three times to promote "See Emily Play", but by the third time Barrett didn't even pretend to mime along with the single. Towards the end of July, they were meant to record a session for the BBC's Saturday Club radio show, but Barrett walked out of the studio before completing the first song. It's notable that Barrett's non-cooperation or inability to function was very much dependent on circumstance. He was not able to perform for Saturday Club, a mainstream pop show aimed at a mass audience, but gave perfectly good performances on several sessions for John Peel's radio show The Perfumed Garden, a show firmly aimed at Pink Floyd's own underground niche. On the thirty-first of July, three days after the Saturday Club walkout, all the group's performances for the next month were cancelled, due to "nervous exhaustion". But on the eighth of August, they went back into the studio, to record "Scream Thy Last Scream", a song Barrett wrote and which Nick Mason sang: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Scream Thy Last Scream"] That was scheduled as the group's next single, but the record company vetoed it, and it wouldn't see an official release for forty-nine years. Instead they recorded another single, "Apples and Oranges": [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Apples and Oranges"] That was the last thing the group released while Barrett was a member. In November 1967 they went on a tour of the US, making appearances on American Bandstand and the Pat Boone Show, as well as playing several gigs. According to legend, Barrett was almost catatonic on the Pat Boone show, though no footage of that appears to be available anywhere -- and the same things were said about their performance on Bandstand, and when that turned up, it turned out Barrett seemed no more uncomfortable miming to their new single than any of the rest of the band, and was no less polite when Dick Clark asked them questions about hamburgers. But on shows on the US tour, Barrett would do things like detune his guitar so it just made clanging sounds, or just play a single note throughout the show. These are, again, things that could be taken in two different ways, and I have no way to judge which is the more correct. On one level, they could be a sign of a chaotic, disordered, mind, someone dealing with severe mental health difficulties. On the other, they're the kind of thing that Barrett was applauded and praised for in the confines of the kind of avant-garde underground audience that would pay to hear AMM or Yoko Ono, the kind of people they'd been performing for less than a year earlier, but which were absolutely not appropriate for a pop group trying to promote their latest hit single. It could be that Barrett was severely unwell, or it could just be that he wanted to be an experimental artist and his bandmates wanted to be pop stars -- and one thing absolutely everyone agrees is that the rest of the group were more ambitious than Barrett was. Whichever was the case, though, something had to give. They cut the US tour short, but immediately started another British package tour, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Move, Amen Corner and the Nice. After that tour they started work on their next album, A Saucerful of Secrets. Where Barrett was the lead singer and principal songwriter on Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he only sings and writes one song on A Saucerful of Secrets, which is otherwise written by Waters and Wright, and only appears at all on two more of the tracks -- by the time it was released he was out of the group. The last song he tried to get the group to record was called "Have You Got it Yet?" and it was only after spending some time rehearsing it that the rest of the band realised that the song was a practical joke on them -- every time they played it, he would change the song around so they would mess up, and pretend they just hadn't learned the song yet. They brought in Barrett's old friend Dave Gilmour, initially to be a fifth member on stage to give the band some stability in their performances, but after five shows with the five-man lineup they decided just not to bother picking Barrett up, but didn't mention he was out of the group, to avoid awkwardness. At the time, Barrett and Rick Wright were flatmates, and Wright would actually lie to Barrett and say he was just going out to buy a packet of cigarettes, and then go and play gigs without him. After a couple of months of this, it was officially announced that Barrett was leaving the group. Jenner and King went with him, convinced that he was the real talent in the group and would have a solo career, and the group carried on with new management. We'll be looking at them more in future episodes. Barrett made a start at recording a solo album in mid-1968, but didn't get very far. Jenner produced those sessions, and later said "It seemed a good idea to go into the studio because I knew he had the songs. And he would sometimes play bits and pieces and you would think 'Oh that's great.' It was a 'he's got a bit of a cold today and it might get better' approach. It wasn't a cold -- and you knew it wasn't a cold -- but I kept thinking if he did the right things he'd come back to join us. He'd gone out and maybe he'd come back. That was always the analogy in my head. I wanted to make it feel friendly for him, and that where we were was a comfortable place and that he could come back and find himself again. I obviously didn't succeed." A handful of tracks from those sessions have since been released, including a version of “Golden Hair”, a setting by Barrett of a poem by James Joyce that he would later revisit: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, “Golden Hair (first version)”] Eleven months later, he went back into the studio again, this time with producer Malcolm Jones, to record an album that later became The Madcap Laughs, his first solo album. The recording process for the album has been the source of some controversy, as initially Jones was producing the whole album, and they were working in a way that Barrett never worked before. Where previously he had cut backing tracks first and only later overdubbed his vocals, this time he started by recording acoustic guitar and vocals, and then overdubbed on top of that. But after several sessions, Jones was pulled off the album, and Gilmour and Waters were asked to produce the rest of the sessions. This may seem a bit of a callous decision, since Gilmour was the person who had replaced Barrett in his group, but apparently the two of them had remained friends, and indeed Gilmour thought that Barrett had only got better as a songwriter since leaving the band. Where Malcolm Jones had been trying, by his account, to put out something that sounded like a serious, professional, record, Gilmour and Waters seemed to regard what they were doing more as producing a piece of audio verite documentary, including false starts and studio chatter. Jones believed that this put Barrett in a bad light, saying the outtakes "show Syd, at best as out of tune, which he rarely was, and at worst as out of control (which, again, he never was)." Gilmour and Waters, on the other hand, thought that material was necessary to provide some context for why the album wasn't as slick and professional as some might have hoped. The eventual record was a hodge-podge of different styles from different sessions, with bits from the Jenner sessions, the Jones sessions, and the Waters and Gilmour sessions all mixed together, with some tracks just Barrett badly double-tracking himself with an acoustic guitar, while other tracks feature full backing by Soft Machine. However, despite Jones' accusations that the album was more-or-less sabotaged by Gilmour and Waters, the fact remains that the best tracks on the album are the ones Barrett's former bandmates produced, and there are some magnificent moments on there. But it's a disturbing album to listen to, in the same way other albums by people with clear talent but clear mental illness are, like Skip Spence's Oar, Roky Erickson's later work, or the Beach Boys Love You. In each case, the pleasure one gets is a real pleasure from real aesthetic appreciation of the work, but entangled with an awareness that the work would not exist in that form were the creator not suffering. The pleasure doesn't come from the suffering -- these are real artists creating real art, not the kind of outsider art that is really just a modern-day freak-show -- but it's still inextricable from it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Dark Globe"] The Madcap Laughs did well enough that Barrett got to record a follow-up, titled simply Barrett. This one was recorded over a period of only a handful of months, with Gilmour and Rick Wright producing, and a band consisting of Gilmour, Wright, and drummer Jerry Shirley. The album is generally considered both more consistent and less interesting than The Madcap Laughs, with less really interesting material, though there are some enjoyable moments on it: [Excerpt: Syd Barrett, "Effervescing Elephant"] But the album is a little aimless, and people who knew him at the time seem agreed that that was a reflection of his life. He had nothing he *needed* to be doing -- no  tour dates, no deadlines, no pressure at all, and he had a bit of money from record royalties -- so he just did nothing at all. The one solo gig he ever played, with the band who backed him on Barrett, lasted four songs, and he walked off half-way through the fourth. He moved back to Cambridge for a while in the early seventies, and he tried putting together a new band with Twink, the drummer of the Pink Fairies and Pretty Things, Fred Frith, and Jack Monck, but Frith left after one gig. The other three performed a handful of shows either as "Stars" or as "Barrett, Adler, and Monck", just in the Cambridge area, but soon Barrett got bored again. He moved back to London, and in 1974 he made one final attempt to make a record, going into the studio with Peter Jenner, where he recorded a handful of tracks that were never released. But given that the titles of those tracks were things like "Boogie #1", "Boogie #2", "Slow Boogie", "Fast Boogie", "Chooka-Chooka Chug Chug" and "John Lee Hooker", I suspect we're not missing out on a lost masterpiece. Around this time there was a general resurgence in interest in Barrett, prompted by David Bowie having recorded a version of "See Emily Play" on his covers album Pin-Ups, which came out in late 1973: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "See Emily Play"] At the same time, the journalist Nick Kent wrote a long profile of Barrett, The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett, which like Kent's piece on Brian Wilson a year later, managed to be a remarkable piece of writing with a sense of sympathy for its subject and understanding of his music, but also a less-than-accurate piece of journalism which led to a lot of myths and disinformation being propagated. Barrett briefly visited his old bandmates in the studio in 1975 while they were recording the album Wish You Were Here -- some say even during the recording of the song "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", which was written specifically about Barrett, though Nick Mason claims otherwise -- and they didn't recognise him at first, because by this point he had a shaved head and had put on a great deal of weight. He seemed rather sad, and that was the last time any of them saw him, apart from Roger Waters, who saw him in Harrod's a few years later. That time, as soon as Barrett recognised Waters, he dropped his bag and ran out of the shop. For the next thirty-one years, Barrett made no public appearances. The last time he ever voluntarily spoke to a journalist, other than telling them to go away, was in 1982, just after he'd moved back to Cambridge, when someone doorstopped him and he answered a few questions and posed for a photo before saying "OK! That's enough, this is distressing for me, thank you." He had the reputation for the rest of his life of being a shut-in, a recluse, an acid casualty. His family, on the other hand, have always claimed that while he was never particularly mentally or physically healthy, he wasn't a shut-in, and would go to the pub, meet up with his mother a couple of times a week to go shopping, and chat to the women behind the counter at Sainsbury's and at the pharmacy. He was also apparently very good with children who lived in the neighbourhood. Whatever the truth of his final decades, though, however mentally well or unwell he actually was, one thing is very clear, which is that he was an extremely private man, who did not want attention, and who was greatly distressed by the constant stream of people coming and looking through his letterbox, trying to take photos of him, trying to interview him, and so on. Everyone on his street knew that when people came asking which was Syd Barrett's house, they were meant to say that no-one of that name lived there -- and they were telling the truth. By the time he moved back, he had stopped answering to "Syd" altogether, and according to his sister "He came to hate the name latterly, and what it meant." He did, in 2001, go round to his sister's house to watch a documentary about himself on the TV -- he didn't own a TV himself -- but he didn't enjoy it and his only comment was that the music was too noisy. By this point he never listened to rock music, just to jazz and classical music, usually on the radio. He was financially secure -- Dave Gilmour made sure that when compilations came out they always included some music from Barrett's period in the group so he would receive royalties, even though Gilmour had no contact with him after 1975 -- and he spent most of his time painting -- he would take photos of the paintings when they were completed, and then burn the originals. There are many stories about those last few decades, but given how much he valued his privacy, it wouldn't be right to share them. This is a history of rock music, and 1975 was the last time Roger Keith Barrett ever had anything to do with rock music voluntarily. He died of cancer in 2006, and at his funeral there was a reading from The Little Grey Men, which was also quoted in the Order of Service -- "The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.” There was no rock music played at Barrett's funeral -- instead there were a selection of pieces by Handel, Haydn, and Bach, ending with Bach's Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major, one of his favourite pieces: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Allemande from the Partita No. IV in D major"]  As they stared blankly in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before. Mole rubbed his eyes and stared at Rat, who was looking about him in a puzzled sort of way. “I beg your pardon; what did you say, Rat?” he asked. “I think I was only remarking,” said Rat slowly, “that this was the right sort of place, and that here, if anywhere, we should find him. And look! Why, there he is, the little fellow!” And with a cry of delight he ran towards the slumbering Portly. But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.

Martin and Sam welcome Hannah McGregor for another trio of Waits's abandoned children: a hobo lullabye, his contribution to the Shrek-niverse and a tribute to one of 1969's most unusual solo projects. Plus: how hard would it be for two women in their 30s to fit inside one overcoat?!? website: songbysongpodcast.com twitter: @songbysongpod e-mail: songbysongpodcast@gmail.com Music extracts used for illustrative/review purposes include: Bottom Of The World, Orphans: Brawlers Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits (2006) Little Drop Of Poison, Orphans: Brawlers Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits (2006) Books Of Moses, Orphans: Brawlers Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits (2006) Books Of Moses, Oar, Skip Spence (1969) We think your Song by Song experience will be enhanced by hearing, in full, the songs featured in the show, which you can get hold of from your favourite record shop or online platform. Please support artists by buying their music, or using services which guarantee artists a revenue - listen responsibly.

Some kind of Skip Spence reference, because you should skip this episode.    Join Harry and Ben as they review minute 185 of Zack Snyder's Justice League. 

Do you think Skip Spence's "Diana" was about Wonderwoman's alter ego?   Join Harry and Ben as they review minute 45 of 242 of Zack Snyder's Justice League. 

"CHAOS AND COURTROOMS- THE STORY OF MOBY GRAPE":https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-of-moby-grape-chaos-and-courtrooms-acid-and-white-witches

Tom Johnston was born August 15, 1948, in Visalia, CA. Johnston fell in love with R&B music at a young age and learned to play the songs of Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and James Brown when he received his first guitar at the age of 12. He played in soul, blues, and even a Mexican wedding band in his teens and continued playing in a blues group while attending college in San Jose. It was there he met the legendary lead singer of Moby Grape, Skip Spence, who was drumming for the Jefferson Airplane at the time. Spence introduced Johnston to John Hartman and the two would play together in numerous bands, finally finding success when they formed the Doobie Brothers. Johnston wrote/sang lead vocals Listen to the Music Rockin' Down the Highway and China Grove among other hits for the band.

Born out of Northern California's chaotic, late-1960s musical stew, The Doobie Brothers' rugged, real and authentic approach to rock and roll made them biker bar stalwarts. But their self-titled debut album in '71 went beyond just leather and motorcycles, revealing even more musical layers; sweet three-part harmonies and rootsy, introspective, acoustic flavors. The Doobie Brothers' legacy has been built upon not just hit records, but also an unrivaled commitment to musical integrity and a steadfast allegiance to their enthusiastic fan base. The bands ability to evolve in a constantly changing industry and connections to generations of listening audiences is a testament to their craft. It all began in 1969, when a drummer named John Hartman arrived in Northern California. He was there to meet Skip Spence from the band Moby Grape and become part of a supposed band reunion that never quite got off the ground. But it wasn't all for naught. Spence (who had also played in the Jefferson Airplane) introduced Hartman to his friend Tom Johnston, a local singer/songwriter/guitarist -and they connected. Hartman and Johnston began playing local Bay Area bars. They soon met singer/guitarist Pat Simmons, whose finger-style playing richly complimented Johnston's R&B strumming-style, and the foundation for The Doobie Brothers was set. While their debut album in 1971 did not chart, just a year a later, their second record, Toulouse Street, became a breakout sensation. Producer Ted Templeman helped the band craft a sound that was organic, yet radio friendly, and brought in Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne to add unique musical textures.

We are very pleased this week to welcome Eric Drew Feldman – bass, keyboards, producer, collaborator – with Captain Beefheart, PJ Harvey, The Residents, Snakefinger, Pere Ubu, The Pixies, Frank Black, et. al. His choice of Skip Spence's 1969 solo masterpiece, "Oar," leads us down a crooked path, littered with anecdotes, illuminations, insights, and of course to Skip's own not insignificant travails as a musician and as a person. Thanks to Mark Guerita of That Facebook Group Got Me High for arranging this get together.

There is an unproductive trope of there being a fine line between genius and madman. Constantly, we are encouraged to believe that the works of “artists in asylums” are somehow this perpetual motion machine where mental illness fuels creativity which, in turn, fractures the creator even more creating a cycle toward an inevitable dark end, where we are only left with the work to scrutinize or admire. The truth is a lot less dramatic, but no less sad. Social circumstances, interpersonal relationships, biology, substances, and societal expectations each play relevant roles in determining the well-being of every person: artist, genius, or just the poor soul sleeping on the street. Art and artist are separate. Just as a mental condition and person are separate. Influenced and interlaced, certainly, but we so often forget that works do not define the person, rather the person defines the work.Many of us are captivated by albums that were created while the artists were in mental hospitals. They are rare artifacts that unfortunately end up defining the artist for their careers while giving an undue amount of weight to the condition of their mind rather than the beauty within it. The artistry that comes from the pain and confusion of confinement . . . in a hospital and in one's mind. The records are snapshots of musicians on the brink that utilized songs to communicate their struggle or alleviate suffering. Today, we are exploring Institutional Albums by Roky Erickson, Skip Spence, and Danial Johnston.Sources used for this episode include:13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History by Paul DrummondEye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul DrummondHighway Hi-Fi is a proud member of the Pantheon Music Podcast Network - Home of the Finest Music Podcasts

There is an unproductive trope of there being a fine line between genius and madman. Constantly, we are encouraged to believe that the works of “artists in asylums” are somehow this perpetual motion machine where mental illness fuels creativity which, in turn, fractures the creator even more creating a cycle toward an inevitable dark end, where we are only left with the work to scrutinize or admire. The truth is a lot less dramatic, but no less sad. Social circumstances, interpersonal relationships, biology, substances, and societal expectations each play relevant roles in determining the well-being of every person: artist, genius, or just the poor soul sleeping on the street. Art and artist are separate. Just as a mental condition and person are separate. Influenced and interlaced, certainly, but we so often forget that works do not define the person, rather the person defines the work.Many of us are captivated by albums that were created while the artists were in mental hospitals. They are rare artifacts that unfortunately end up defining the artist for their careers while giving an undue amount of weight to the condition of their mind rather than the beauty within it. The artistry that comes from the pain and confusion of confinement . . . in a hospital and in one's mind. The records are snapshots of musicians on the brink that utilized songs to communicate their struggle or alleviate suffering. Today, we are exploring Institutional Albums by Roky Erickson, Skip Spence, and Danial Johnston.Sources used for this episode include:13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History by Paul DrummondEye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul DrummondHighway Hi-Fi is a proud member of the Pantheon Music Podcast Network - Home of the Finest Music Podcasts

There is an unproductive trope of there being a fine line between genius and madman. Constantly, we are encouraged to believe that the works of “artists in asylums” are somehow this perpetual motion machine where mental illness fuels creativity which, in turn, fractures the creator even more creating a cycle toward an inevitable dark end, where we are only left with the work to scrutinize or admire. The truth is a lot less dramatic, but no less sad. Social circumstances, interpersonal relationships, biology, substances, and societal expectations each play relevant roles in determining the well-being of every person: artist, genius, or just the poor soul sleeping on the street. Art and artist are separate. Just as a mental condition and person are separate. Influenced and interlaced, certainly, but we so often forget that works do not define the person, rather the person defines the work. Many of us are captivated by albums that were created while the artists were in mental hospitals. They are rare artifacts that unfortunately end up defining the artist for their careers while giving an undue amount of weight to the condition of their mind rather than the beauty within it. The artistry that comes from the pain and confusion of confinement . . . in a hospital and in one’s mind. The records are snapshots of musicians on the brink that utilized songs to communicate their struggle or alleviate suffering. Today, we are exploring Institutional Albums by Roky Erickson, Skip Spence, and Danial Johnston. Sources used for this episode include: 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History by Paul Drummond Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul Drummond Highway Hi-Fi is a proud member of the Pantheon Music Podcast Network - Home of the Finest Music Podcasts

There is an unproductive trope of there being a fine line between genius and madman. Constantly, we are encouraged to believe that the works of “artists in asylums” are somehow this perpetual motion machine where mental illness fuels creativity which, in turn, fractures the creator even more creating a cycle toward an inevitable dark end, where we are only left with the work to scrutinize or admire. The truth is a lot less dramatic, but no less sad. Social circumstances, interpersonal relationships, biology, substances, and societal expectations each play relevant roles in determining the well-being of every person: artist, genius, or just the poor soul sleeping on the street. Art and artist are separate. Just as a mental condition and person are separate. Influenced and interlaced, certainly, but we so often forget that works do not define the person, rather the person defines the work. Many of us are captivated by albums that were created while the artists were in mental hospitals. They are rare artifacts that unfortunately end up defining the artist for their careers while giving an undue amount of weight to the condition of their mind rather than the beauty within it. The artistry that comes from the pain and confusion of confinement . . . in a hospital and in one’s mind. The records are snapshots of musicians on the brink that utilized songs to communicate their struggle or alleviate suffering. Today, we are exploring Institutional Albums by Roky Erickson, Skip Spence, and Danial Johnston. Sources used for this episode include: 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History by Paul Drummond Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul Drummond Highway Hi-Fi is a proud member of the Pantheon Music Podcast Network - Home of the Finest Music Podcasts

This episode we discuss musicians who mentally went crazy and completely lost their minds.  This includes Moby Grape’s Skip Spence, session drummer Jim Gordon, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, and producer Phil Spector.  We can all relate as we go crazy in quarantine!

There is something rotten about LinkedIn and people start to notice. Is the platform dominated by well-organized groups of branding “specialists”, pseudo-influencers and self-appointed mentors who are scamming job seekers or is it just “another conspiracy theory”? Join us for today’s episode where we discuss this and many other employment-related topics with job consultant and Danish labour market expert Greete Eluri. In This Episode we had: ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Anders Dal “Where were you” CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK: Most common challenges experienced by job seekers in Denmark and how to solve them by Greete Eluri BULLSHIT OF THE WEEK: There’s something rotten about LinkedIn and how one innocent article managed to expose it. Read 5 Conspiracy Theories about Oleg and 5 reasons why they may be true (Plus ONE serious question: WHY DO WE CARE?) here WISDOM OF THE WEEK: Job Consultant’s Wisdom Nuggets by Greete Eluri FROM THE LEFT WEEK: Anna Recommends: “The Boys” ——————- INTRO and jingles for the show produced by Supermoon Music Recording Studio About Song of the Week: Anders Dal once bought a nice guitar and started to write songs. Here’s a first song of that project called ‘Where Were You (Tomorrow Is A Ticket)’ which is recorded at Burning Velvet’s studio in Svendborg. The track is backed by Nicolai Schmith of Burning Velvet and Moogie Johnson. It’s mixed by David Villanueva at Supermoon Records and mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedMastering. This track recalls artists such as Neil Young, Nick Drake and Skip Spence. Where to find Anders? Anders Flickr Song of the week: Anders Dal “Where were you” Find out more! You’ve Got 5 Options is a talk-show based Radio Program, where we discuss ordinary topics in an extraordinary way. Inspired by the idea that every challenge has 5 solutions, every transformation process has 5 steps and every great interview has 5 key questions, we have chosen FIVE as a common theme for every program we broadcast. If you want to learn more about us, please don't hesitate to visit our webpage at https://the5options.com You can also listen to us on Mondays & Wednesdays at 11 30 CET, and odd Fridays at 14 00 CET and 98,7 FM in Denmark or worldwide here:

On transmission 9 you'll get the lowdown on 5 albums from 5 decades that span 5 different genres. A bit of a rollercoaster. I dig into the following: Emperor's "Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk" Marissa Nadler's "July" Skip Spence's "Oar" Lene Lovich's "Stateless" and Ice-T's "Power" Hope you dig it. As always you can hit me up at songsfromthefarside@gmail.com if you wanna. Otherwise, get down and enjoy the show.

In 1968, Skip Spence tried to murder his Moby Grape bandmates with an axe under the influence of acid and black magic. He was put in an insane asylum for 6 months. When he was released he had pages and pages of songs so he bought a Harley, drove to Nashville and recorded an album in 2 weeks. Then he rode away at the age of 22 and never released another song. His album was the lowest selling in Columbia's history but soon became a massive influence on artists from the 90s. That album was Oar.

Tom Johnston was born August 15, 1948, in Visalia, CA. Johnston fell in love with R&B music at a young age and learned to play the songs of Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and James Brown when he received his first guitar at the age of 12. He played in soul, blues, and even a Mexican wedding band in his teens and continued playing in a blues group while attending college in San Jose. It was there he met the legendary lead singer of Moby Grape, Skip Spence, who was drumming for the Jefferson Airplane at the time. Spence introduced Johnston to John Hartman and the two would play together in numerous bands, finally finding success when they formed the Doobie Brothers. Johnston wrote/sang lead vocals Listen to the Music Rockin' Down the Highway and China Grove among other hits for the band.

Armed with three virtuoso guitarists and five members who could all sing and write, Moby Grape had the greatest commercial potential of any San Francisco band in 1967. They quickly blew it all thanks to internal tensions, the acid-intensified psychological collapse of guitarist Skip Spence and Columbia's hysterical hype, which included releasing five simultaneous singles from this debut album. No to mention the worst record contract of all time.

Hey hey Brothers & Sisters....This weeks episode starts off with:Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps - Who slapped John?....out of a band called The Virginians a new band was created for Gene Vincent in 1956 with "Galloping" Cliff Gallup on lead guitar....his echo laden 6 string is the bible for thousands of R&R guitarists ever since.Set 1:Traveling to Brisbane, Australia where The Saints hold the mantle of the 1st "punk" band. Formed in 1975 their 1st record pre-dates the Sex Pistols by about 6 months. We just heard "A minor aversion" off of their sophomore LP ETERNALLY YOURS from 1978.Tramline - Somewhere down the line / Island 1968 [A&M in the US]. Covering Little Johnny Taylor's killer 45 from 1963 on Galaxy Records.Paul Revere & the Raiders - Him or Me [What's it gonna be] / Columbia 1967. The Jim Valley / Keith Ellison era of the band. Mark Lindsey is hands down one of the best vocalists of all the 60's bands....based in Oregon.Traveling south from the pacific northwest to San Francisco where the rocks 1st psych bands, The Charlatans made history with their residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Las Vegas. Another reason that the Charlatans' stay at the Red Dog is regarded by critics and historians as significant is that, immediately before their first performance at the club, the band members took LSD. As a result, the Charlatans are sometimes called the first acid rock band, although their sound is not representative of the feedback-drenched, improvisational music that would later come to define the sub-genre. And hey.....Dan Hicks was their drummer.Bed Music: Link Wray - The FuzzSet 2Staying in San Fran where the Jefferson Airplane signed to RCA for $40,000. A bargain by today's standards where mediocrity is rewarded with multi-million dollar contracts. The Airplane on their 1st LP had Signe Anderson on vocals not Grace Slick and their drummer was mega loony Skip Spence who left to form Moby Grape.20 years before the JA were thinking of recording a cat who called himself Slim Gaillard made up his own language and with his trio recorded one of the hippest 78's - Yep Roc Heresy...his made up language was called "Vout"Marvin Gaye checks in with a radio ad for TeenbeatPaul Butterfield Blues Band up next covering Marvin Gaye w/ "One more heartache" a 45 rpm and also the lead track off of "The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw" who everybody who follows the PBBBand knows is the pseudonym of Elvin Bishop who stepped into the "big boy" shoes of the late, great Michael Bloomfield...Moving up the coast to LA where Merrill Fankhauser formed MU with Jeff Cotton. Cotton was in Merrell & The Exiles, then in a band called Blues In A Bottle. He then replaced Ry Cooder in The Magic Band. He was credited as 'Steel appendage' guitarist on Trout Mask Replica. Left the Magic Band circa late 1970 and eventually teamed up again with Merrell (Fankhauser) on the album "Return To Mu". His pseudonym in the Magic Band was Antennae Jimmy Semens. We heard "Brother Lew" off their first offering....MU.Set 3:Dion and the Del Satins - Drip Drop / Columbia 1963. A cover of The Drifters tune done a few years earlier. Dion was the first artist this author took notice of when he was starting to notice the difference between boys and girls...Al Kooper - Something going on / Music Masters 1995. A live recording made at NYC's Bottom Line with some really great musicians including New York guitarist Jimmy Vivino who is the younger brother of local legend: Uncle Floyd.The Onion Radio News- An Applebee's managerThe Peanut Butter Conspiracy - Too Many do / Columbia 1967. A favorite of mine back in the day and still on my turntable these many years later. Guitarist Billy Wolfe kills it! The Pseudo-Realists - The Williams Effect / Oxymoron Records 1983. Used as "bed" music whilst

This week special guest Dr. Cam Cobb returns to finish the story of Moby Grape. Cam’s the author of “What’s Big and Purple and lives in the Ocean - The Moby Grape story” This week, Cam and I conclude the tale of Moby Grape and their journey from being the “Next Big Thing” of 1967 to madness, drugs, mental institutions and utter creative and personal dissolution. We’ll talk about Skip Spence’s infamous axe-wielding breakdown at Columbia Records headquarters and how the rest of the Grape managed to cut some great music amidst the ruin.

Skip Spence's life is dissected as is his album Oar, learn more than you've ever forgotten about legendary studio Abbey Road and hear Marc's Abbey Road anecdotes - tempting.

AS WE PREPARE NEW EPISODES WITH ENHANCED SOUND QUALITY, WE PRESENT THIS FLAWED BUT GROOVY OFFERING.

This episode has Matt drop the tale of obscure musician, member of Jefferson Airplane and avid psychedelic drug abuser Alexander Skip Spence! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's 2018....a new year, but Love That Album podcast is still here to party like it's 2011 when it got started. For episode 108, Maurice is presenting a solo show to talk about a pair of tribute albums. Tribute albums can be a fairly dodgy excuse to get a variety of performers to do a cover of the artist in question. These albums can lack cohesion and just be a collection of songs rather than a solid work in its own right. Often, some of the actual covers lack any real inspiration. Maurice presents two albums he feels stand apart from the tribute pack. The first is Till The Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus and Beat The Retreat: Songs By Richard Thompson. Tune in to hear why these albums work so well. The songs presented by a wealth of great songwriting contemporaries combine adventurous arrangements some distance from the familiar versions, along with " comfort food" arrangements. Eric Reanimator chimes in for his Album I Love segment with a couple of tribute albums. He talks about Never Say Dinosaur, a tribute to Petra and More Oar: A Tribute to Skip Spence. So let us pay tribute to these tribute albums, and hopefully you'll pay tribute to the podcast by giving it a listen. You can download the show by searching for Love That Album in the iTunes store or downloading streaming directly from http://lovethatalbum.blogspot.com.   Send the show feedback at rrrkitchen@yahoo.com.au (written or mp3 voicemail) or join the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/lovethatalbum.   If you enjoy what you hear on the podcast, please tell a friend or ten to tune into the podcast.

LONER LEGENDS brings the second season of Drifter's Sympathy to a close with special spotlights on Pete Hamm, Roger Rodier, Moondog and the great Skip Spence, who might've unknowingly kicked off this entire genre. Spence's story is used as a jumping off point as he embodied the classic tragedy of someone who was impossibly talented, taken off the path towards happiness by schizophrenia and addiction. A pure source of loner wisdom & confusion, Spence embodied the true spirit of 'private music' on his record "Oar", transmitting his idiosyncratic frequency from his own planet alone. Drifter's Sympathy will be forced to take a 2 month break to prepare for Season 3 and allow Emil the time to mix records again!... >> we'll be posting some updates on the Drifter's Sympathy Facebook page soon.✨🔦✨

Time once again for the Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio podcast, hanging tough for 70 episodes now dating back to 2012. Who'da thunk it?? Certainly not us. This episode doesn't break the predictable mold we've established over that time all that much, and hopefully that's cool. New stuff this time from DOCTOR NOD, THE WORMS, HERON OBLIVION, WITCHING WAVES, THE GØGGS, COUNTER INTUITS and THE COOLIES, and comfortable old favorites of yours & mine like DRUNKS WITH GUNS, SKIP SPENCE, COME, VACUUM, DEAD C and the VELVET UNDERGROUND. We're gonna have a real good time together. Playlist: THE WORMS - Everything in Order DOCTOR NOD - Shaky Parts TRASH - On and On With Lou Reed THE COOLIES - Punks Not Bread WITCHING WAVES - Pitiless HERON OBLIVION - Oriar SKIP SPENCE - Cripple Creek WE WANT HELP - Tell Me The Reason Why People Don't Like Me SPACEMEN 3 - Mary-Anne VELVET UNDERGROUND - I'm Set Free (live) THE GØGGS - Billy is a Runaway DRUNKS WITH GUNS - Drunks Theme VERTIGO - Rub COME - SVK THE DEAD C - Bad Politics COUNTER INTUITS - Rocket Surgery THE PLUGZ - Move WAVIS O'SHAVE - Mauve Shoes Are Awful VACUUM - Accident

Will and Barrett discuss new music by Margot & the Nuclear So and So's, an old one by Skip Spence, and Madison upstarts El-Tin Fun.