Podcasts about Son House

It's the month of June and we have just four episodes remaining in Season Four. Our guest this week is one of many Michigan musicians who have made their musical chops in the Greater Detroit area. New Baltimore native, Michael Hishon, aka ‘Michigan Mick', released his first album ‘Big Leg Woman' in 2024, and he stops in to talk about it in detail, along with a discussion about his baptism into the Blues as a young man on a hot Sunday night in the attic, when he turned on the family's Zenith radio, and happened upon a gospel program with music from Mahalia Jackson and Son House among others. He also had great stories about his first contract to record on a label at age 18, albeit short lived, his work in the automotive industry and lots more. Be sure to check out his album after the interview, won't you?Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100071174016081 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0cogz7VNb4if6kqOV6w6WF YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZZzoi7B4iGvwA2mChefRVg Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Big+Leg+Woman+Michigan+Mick&crid=3BQG6ZCAPKBWQ&sprefix=big+leg+woman+michigan+mick%2Caps%2C124&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 _________________________Facebook: Time SignaturesYouTube: Time SignaturesFacebook: Capital Area Blues SocietyWebsite: Capital Area Blues SocietyFriends of Time Signatures _______Website: University of Mississippi Libraries Blues ArchiveWebsite: Killer Blues Headstone ProjectWebsite: Blues Society Radio NetworkWebsite: Keeping the Blues Alive Foundation

PopaHALLics #139 "Deception"The truth is, er, fluid in the pop culture discussed in this episode, from a married spy trying to determine if his spouse is doing wrong, to an Australian pretending to have a fatal disease for profit and influence, to a supervillain seemingly going straight who might still be very bent. In Theaters:"Black Bag." In this spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh, a legendary intelligence agent (Michael Fassbender) must determine if his wife/fellow spy (Cate Blanchett) has committed treason—and whether his loyalty is to his marriage or his country.Streaming:"Apple Cider Vinegar," Netflix. In this limited series based on true events, two young women (Kaitlyn Dever and  Alycia Debnam-Carey) set out to cure their life-threatening illnesses through health and wellness, influencing their global online community along the way. Unfortunately, they aren't really ill. "Daredevil: Born Again," Disney +. Marvel's blind superhero returns, sort of. After a disturbing event, attorney Matt Murdoch (Charlie Cox) hangs up his Daredevil suit. But wait—does his nemesis Kingpin/Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) have an ulterior motive in running for mayor of New York?Books:"Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis," by Ian Zack. Davis, a blind street preacher and amazingly talented guitarist, is not as well-known today as contemporaries like Son House and Lightning Hopkins. Yet, as this 2016 biography explains, Davis had an outsized influence on music because of his many guitar students and admirers, who include Bob Dylan, Stefan Grossman, Eric Clapton, Hot Tuna, and more. "The Blackbird Oracle," by Deborah Harkness. In the fifth installment in the bestselling All Souls series, witch/Oxford scholar Diana and vampire geneticist Matthew seek to avoid the testing of their twins' magical skills. Attempting to forge a new future for her family, Diana must face "a confrontation with her family's dark past and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power."Music:On PopaHALLics #139 Playlist (Rev. Gary Davis), experience the music of the blind guitarist/street preacher (see "Say No to the Devil" above) as interpreted by Jackson Browne, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Mavis Staples, and more, as well as Davis himself. We've also added a few tunes by Kate's new discovery, the 1960s/70s French rock band Les Variations.Click through the links above to watch, read, and listen to what we're discussing.

Join us for a real, Blues People conversation about the blues on Jack Dappa Blues Radio! In this live broadcast, I—Lamont Jack Pearley, a traditional blues artist and folklorist—will take you deep into the blues as an oral tradition in the American South.The blues ain't just music; it's a living, breathing record of our history. It carries the voices, struggles, and triumphs of Black American life, passed down through song, rhythm, and storytelling. The blues tells us where we've been, who we are, and how we make sense of the world around us.Throughout the show, we'll dig into the roots of blues as oral history. We'll break down songs like Son House's Am I Right or Wrong and American Defense, Howlin' Wolf's Smokestack Lightnin', Muddy Waters' Louisiana Blues, and more, getting into the messages woven into their lyrics and performances. We'll also talk about floating verses—how blues artists built on each other's words and passed them along like folklore—and the dialect and storytelling style that make the blues one-of-a-kind.This live broadcast is more than just a lecture—it's a conversation. We'll be playing classic blues recordings, talking through their meaning, and opening up the lines for you to join in. Share your thoughts, ask questions, and become part of the ongoing tradition of keeping the blues alive.So tune in, turn it up, and let's get into it—one story, one song, one truth at a time.

Retomamos la serie “Producido por…” con quizá el más sobresaliente de la música rock “americana” de lo que llevamos de siglo: Dan Auerbach. Fundador de The Black Keys, se dedicó desde 2010 a producir a grandes talentos: The Pretenders, Jessica Lee Mayfield, Dr. John, Ray LaMontagne, Lana Del Rey, Valerie June, Nikki Lane, cuando Auerbach decidió salir de Akron, Ohio y residir en Nashville, creó el sello Easy Eye Sound en la primavera de 2017, firmando, entre otros, al gran Robert Finley. En menos de un siete años la lista de artistas descubiertos o rescatados es admirable: Marcus King, Jeremie Albino, Britti, Early James, The Velveteers, Shannon & The Clams, Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto, Hermanos Gutiérrez, Ceelo Green, Nat Myers, Jon Muq, Yola, Son House, Hank Williams Jr., John Anderson o al mismísimo Tony Joe White antes de que falleciera, por nombrar algunos. Ha producido y publicado una veintena de álbumes.Un pasote.  DISCO 1 HERMANOS GUTIERREZ Low Sun (2) DISCO 2 DAN AUERBACH Shine On Me (4) DISCO 3 SHANNON AND THE CLAMS Oh So Close, Yet So Far (4)  DISCO 4 MARCUS KING The Well (2) DISCO 5 BRITTI Nothing Compares To You (5) DISCO 6 JON MUQ One You Love (2)  DISCO 7 NAT MYERS Pray For Rain(10) DISCO 8 YOLA Ride Out in The Country (3) DISCO 9 SONNY SMITH Lost (2) DISCO 10 JEREMIE ALBINO I Don’t Mind Waiting (1)  DISCO 11 ROBERT FINLEY You Got It And I Need It (10) DISCO 12 GLENN SCHWARTZ  Daughter of Zion (2)  DISCO 13 EARLY JAMES Gravy Train (6) DISCO 14 SON HOUSE The Way Your Mother Did (5) DISCO 15 THE ARCS Keep on Dreaming (ESCA) + THE VELVETEERS See Me (ESCA)Escuchar audio

Solomon Hicks performs live at the Funky Biscuit in South Florida on Edition 676 of Blues Radio International, with music from Son House, Sue Foley and Little Johnny Jones.Image by Michael Wolf.Find more at BluesRadioInternational.net

Send us a textIntro song: Apologize by OneRepublic (#66)Album 14: Breakaway by Kelly Clarkson (2004)Song 1: BreakawaySong 2: Because of YouSong 3: Walk AwayAlbum 13: Original Delta Blues by Son House (1965)Song 1: Empire State ExpressSong 2: Preachin' BluesSong 3: Downhearted Blues

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Henry Thomas  | Don't Ease Me In  | Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Miss Me Blues  | Lightnin' Hopkns: Blues Master  | Son House  | Government Fleet Blues  | The Delta Blues Of Son House  | Bert Deivert  | Going Down South  | Kid Man Blues  |   | Andres Roots  | Lindberg Boogie  | House Arrest EP  |   | Mark Telesca & Mick Kolassa  | Why Don't We Do It in the Road  | You Can't Do That (Acoustic Blues Beatles)  | Thom Bresh  | Coffee Break - Instrumental  | @ Home  |   |   | Garfield Akers  | Cottonfield Blues (Pt.1)  | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A)  | 2007 JSP Records  | Alger ''Texas'' Alexander  | Water Bound Blues (1929)  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1928 - 1930)  | Adam Franklin  | Rollin' Stone (Waters)  | Guitar Blues  |   | Pete Johnson  | Zero Hours - Original  | Pete Johnson Selected Hits Vol4 [Charley]  | Big Joe Turner  | Howlin' Winds  | Rocks In My Bed  |   | Robert Pete Williams  | Got Me Way Down Here  | Robert Pete Williams  | Joe McCoy  | Evil Devil Woman Blues  | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A)  | 2007 JSP Records  | Corey Harris & Henry Butler*  | There's No Substitute For Love  | Vu-Du Menz  |   | David Evans  | Don't Leave Me Here  | Lonesome Midnight Dream

The word hokum originated in vaudeville to mean a risqué performance laced with wordplay, euphemisms and double entendre.When it appeared on the label of a 1928 hit for Vocalion Records by a new group called Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, the term rapidly entered the jazzy lexicon of The Roarin' Twenties.When the group moved on to Paramount Records as The Famous Hokum Boys, it quickly picked up imitators at other studios, often using variations on the same word in their own names. Eventually “hokum” came to describe an entire species of novelty tunes, all those sexy, silly blues of the 1920s and '30s.About Tampa RedHokum's first star, Tampa Red, was one of the most prolific blues artists of his era, recording some 335 songs, 75 percent between 1928 and 1942. Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia, near Albany in the first decade of the 20th century. When their parents died, he and his older brother Eddie moved to Tampa, Florida, to be reared by their aunt and their grandmother. There he also adopted their surname, Whittaker.Emulating Eddie, Hudson Whittaker played guitar around the Tampa area, especially inspired by an old street musician called Piccolo Pete, who taught the youngster his first blues licks.After perfecting a slide guitar technique, he moved to Chicago in 1925 and began working as a street musician himself. He took the name "Tampa Red" to celebrate to his childhood home.Enter TomRed's big break came when he was hired to accompany established blues star Ma Rainey. There he also met pianist/composer Thomas A. Dorsey, who as working as “Georgia Tom.” Red and Tom became fast friends and music partners.Tom introduced Red to records exec J. Mayo Williams, who arranged a studio session in 1928. Their first effort was a dud, but their next song — the cheeky “It's Tight Like That” — became a national sensation, selling a million copies. Red later recalled seeing people standing outside of record stores just waiting to buy the disc. Since the song was composed by both Red and Tom, they shared $4,000 in royalties from that single song. (That would be about $75,000 today.)While his partnership with Dorsey ended in 1932, Red remained much in demand in recording studios throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was later "rediscovered" in the blues revival of the late 1950s, along with other early blues artists, like Son House and Skip James. Red made his last recordings in 1960.About the SongTampa Red recorded “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” in 1934, but unlike so many of the tunes he waxxed, he didn't write this one.Instead, the song was composed and recorded five years earlier by a curious genre-blending mandolinist named Al Miller.Starting in 1927, Miller played and sang in a style that combined elements of country, blues and jazz on sides for Black Patti records. His eclectic mix of sounds and material gave way to a heavy concentration on bawdry once he arrived at Brunswick for a series of recordings with his Market Street Boys. Miller recorded his “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” on March 8, 1929. It was his big seller. Five years later, after Tampa Red also scored with it, the song even started attracting the attention of artists in the fledgling country and western genre. In 1937, for instance, Milton Brown, called by some “the father of Western swing,” did a rendition for Decca. The following year, The Callahan Brothers (Walter and Homer) of Madison County, Ky., recorded it on the Conqueror label.Our Take on the TuneIf there's such a thing as a "standard" in jug band music, ”Somebody's Been Using That Thing” is certainly one of them. While The Flood's heroes recorded it 90 years ago, the band didn't get around to doing it until back in 2009 when Joe Dobbs recommended it. That was right after he received a recording of it by our old buddy, Ed Light, and his DC-area band with one great name: The All New Genetically Altered Jug Band. We've been Floodifying the tune ever since, as this track from a recent rehearsal demonstrates. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Pete Prown is the author of The Ultimate Book of Blues Guitar Legends: The Players and Guitars That Shaped the Music. It features over 150 of the genre's greatest players and performers from the prewar era to present. From blues pioneers like Robert Johnson, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Memphis Minnie to today's hottest guitar slingers like Derek Trucks, Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark Jr., and Samantha Fish, Prown presents his subjects by blues-defining eras and subgenres, including: early acoustic and country blues, Chicago blues, the British Invasion, blues rock, and more. Examine specific noteworthy guitars each player made famous, as well as effects pedals, amplifiers, and career overviews that include the players' first-person revelations and insights.Purchase a copy of The Ultimate Book of Blues Guitar Legends: The Players and Guitars That Shaped the MusicVisit PetPrown.com Episode Playlist ---------- BookedOnRock.com The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKINSTAGRAMTIKTOKX Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  | Rory Block  | Like A Rolling Stone  | Positively 4th Street  |   | Martin Mc Neill  | Pickin The Blues  | Lately I've Let Things Slide  | Son House  | A Down The Staff  | Son House-Real Delta Blues  | Playboy Fuller  | Gonna Play My Guitar - A Letter To Muddy Waters  | 20 Classic Blues Songs from the 1920's  | Pistol Pete Wearn  | Weeping Willow  | Blues, Ballads & Barnstormers  | Paul Cowley  | Stagerlee  | Stroll Out West  |   | Michael Messer  | Love  | Second Mind 2002  |   | Ry Cooder, Jim Dickenson (B) & Jim Keltner (D)  | Coming In On A Wing And A Prayer  | Broadcast From the Plant [Live on KSAN (The Record Plant) CA]  | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Prayer  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity  | R. L. Burnside  | Hobo Blues  | First Recordings  |   | Snooks Eaglin  | You And Me  | Soul's Edge  |   | Arthur Montana Taylor  | Lowdown Bugle (Tk 1) (rec Chicago 18/4/46)  | Montana Taylor  |   | Big Bill Broonzy  | Big Bill Broonzy Sings The Blues

"Cannabis, COVID, and Concerts: A Grateful Dead Fan's Journey"Larry Mishkin is back from a break spent in South Carolina with his granddaughter he shares his experience of contracting a mild case of COVID, attributing his quick recovery to his cannabis use. He references studies suggesting that certain strains of sativa marijuana may mitigate COVID symptoms.The episode features a detailed discussion of a special Grateful Dead concert from July 15, 1989, at Deer Creek Music Theater in Noblesville, Indiana. Larry reminisces about the venue, the band's setlist, and the memorable experience shared with friends. He highlights key performances from the show, including "Bertha," "Greatest Story Ever Told," "Candyman," "Walkin' Blues," and others.Larry also covers recent music news, mentioning Melissa Etheridge's performance in Colorado and her upcoming summer tour. He shares updates on the String Cheese Incident's New Orleans-themed show at Red Rocks and Phish's recent appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where they performed "Evolve" from their new album. Grateful DeadDeer Creek Music Theater CenterNoblesville, INGrateful Dead Live at Deer Creek Music Center on 1989-07-15 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive With:  Judy, Andy K., Lary V., AWell and others First Dead show ever at Deer Creek which had just opened that year.  Became a regular stop on the Dead's summer tour thereafter and one of the favorite places for the Deadheads given its relatively small size as compared to the stadium venues that soon became the norm for summer tours.  Ironically, two days after this one-off Dead played their final 3 shows at Alpine Valley, switched to Tinley Park in 1990 and then starting in 1991 Chicago summer  tour shows were confined to Soldier Field with 60,000 attendees. INTRO:                                 Bertha                                                Track #2                                                1:20 – 3:00 Garcia/Hunter – first appeared on Grateful Dead (live) aka Skull and Roses or Skullfuck (1971)Played: 401First:  February 18, 1971 at Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY, USALast:  June 27, 1995 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, Detroit, MI  SHOW No. 1:                    Walkin Blues                                                Track #5                                                1:38 – 3:20 "Walkin' Blues" or "Walking Blues" is a blues standard written and recorded by American Delta blues musician Son House in 1930. Although unissued at the time, it was part of House's repertoire and other musicians, including Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, adapted the song and recorded their own versions. "Walkin' Blues" was not a commercial success when it was issued as a "race record" marketed to black listeners.  However, the song was received with great enthusiasm by a small group of white jazz record collectors and critics. Producer John Hammond chose "Walkin' Blues" and "Preachin' Blues" as the records to be played at his 1938 From Spirituals to Swing concert, when Johnson himself could not appear (Johnson had died a few months earlier).[15] The 1961 Johnson compilation album King of the Delta Blues Singers was marketed to white enthusiasts. According to most sources, John Hammond was involved in the production and the selection of tracks. The album included the two House-style songs and a song with House-style guitar figures ("Cross Road Blues" and excluded songs in the commercial style of the late 1930s. Notable exclusions were Johnson's one commercial hit, "Terraplane Blues", and two songs which he passed on to the mainstream of blues recording, "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Dust My Broom". Dead first played it in 1966, once in 1982 and 4 times in 1985.  Then, beginning in 1987 it became a standard part of Dead song lists, peaking in 1988 when it was played 23 times.  Became one of Bobby's early first set blues numbers with Minglewood Blues, CC Rider and Little Red Rooster. Played: 141First:  October 7, 1966 at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN, USA   SHOW No. 2:                    Crazy Fingers                                                Track #12                                                4:30 – 6:12 Pretty standard second set song, usually pre-drums.  Fist played in 1975, a few times in 1976 and then dropped until 1982 at Ventura County Fairgrounds (day after my first show).  Played 7 times that year, dropped until 1985 (10 times), then dropped until 1987 and then played regularly until the end.  Great tune, Jerry often forgot the lyrics and this version is great because Bobby saves him on the lyrics when Jerry starts to go astray.  Good fun considering how many times Bobby would forget the words to his songs. But one of those things you remember if you see it happen Garcia/Hunter, released on Blues For Allah (Sept. 1, 1975)Played: 145 timesFirst:  June 17, 1975 at Winterland Arena, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  July 5, 1995 at Riverport Amphitheatre in Maryland Heights, MO (St. Louis)  SHOW No. 3:                    Truckin                                                Track #13                                                7:00 – end Hunter/Garcia/Weir/Lesh/Kreutzman (Pigpen went inside to take a nap) by the side of a pool.Released on American Beauty (November, 1970) final tune on the albumPlayed: 532 timesFirst:  August 17, 1970 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  July 6, 1995 at Riverport Amphitheatre in Maryland Heights, MO                                                  INTO                                                Smokestack Lightning                                                Track #14                                                0:00 – 0:36  "Smokestack Lightning" (also "Smoke Stack Lightning" or "Smokestack Lightnin'") is a blues song recorded by Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett) in 1956. It became one of his most popular and influential songs. It is based on earlier blues songs, and numerous artists later interpreted it.  Recorded at Chess Records in Chicago and released in March, 1956 with You Can't Be Beat on the B side. Wolf had performed "Smokestack Lightning" in one form or another at least by the early 1930s,[1] when he was performing with Charley Patton in small Delta communities.[1] The song, described as "a hypnotic one-chord drone piece",[2] draws on earlier blues, such as Tommy Johnson's "Big Road Blues",[3] the Mississippi Sheiks' "Stop and Listen Blues",[4] and Charley Patton's "Moon Going Down".[5][6] Wolf said the song was inspired by watching trains in the night: "We used to sit out in the country and see the trains go by, watch the sparks come out of the smokestack. That was smokestack lightning." In a song review for AllMusic, Bill Janovitz described "Smokestack Lightning" as "almost like a distillation of the essence of the blues... a pleasingly primitive and raw representation of the blues, pure and chant-like. Wolf truly sounds like a man in otherwise inexpressible agony, flailing for words."[8] In 1999, the song received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award, honoring its lasting historical significance.[13]Rolling Stone magazine ranked it at number 291 in its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time"[7] and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it in its list of the "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll".[14] In 1985, the song was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in the "Classics of Blues Recordings" category[15] and, in 2009, it was selected for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress. Janovitz also identifies "Smokestack Lightning" as a blues standard "open to varied interpretation, covered by artists ranging from the Yardbirds to Soundgarden, all stamping their personal imprint on the song".[8] Clapton identifies the Yardbirds' performances of the song as the group's most popular live number.[17] They played it almost every show, and sometimes it could last up to 30 minutes. Dead often played it out of Truckin, would also play the blues tune Spoonful out of Truckin. Played:  63 timesFirst:  November 19, 1966 at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  October 18, 1994 at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY, USA   SHOW No. 4:                    Space                                                Track #17                                                7:45 – 9:20  On November 28, 1973, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and drummer Mickey Hart staged a performance at San Francisco's Palace Of Fine Arts. At the time, Hart – whose 80th birthday is today – was on a sabbatical from the Dead, having last performed in public with Garcia and the band in February 1971. Hart would rejoin the Dead for good in October 1974.A poster promoting the concert shows a clean-shaven Garcia dressed in black beside an equally freshly shaven Hart wearing all white. At the bottom of the advertisement was printed “An Experiment in Quadrophonic Sound.”Hart recalled his experience at the duo concert with Garcia in 1973 that was not only a Seastones precursor but also planted the seeds for the band's mind-bending “Space” jams.“There were so many exciting that we've done together. Adventurous musical things. He was also into adventure and creating new spaces, so we had that in common. We got together many times out of the ring – where he first discovered synthesizers, being able to synthesize his guitar, which led to MIDI.“The first concert we did was in 1973. It was just a duo. He got an Arp [Odyssey], an electric instrument, a keyboard, and he plugged his guitar into it and that was the first time I had heard his guitar I had heard his guitar running through sophisticated synthesizers.“I just thought of that concert, which kind of was the beginning of ‘Space' – ‘Drums' and ‘Space' actually – it might have been the very beginning of it. And I think of that on his birthday, the seminal things we did together.” After the November 28, 1973 concert, the Grateful Dead began to occasionally incorporate elements of a “Space” jam into their shows. In January 1978, Dead shows almost always included a nightly “Drums” jam paired with a freeform “Space” jam, consistently showing up mid-second set throughout the rest of their career. Played:  1086First:  March 19, 1966 at Carthay Studios, Los Angeles, CA, USALast:  July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago, IL   OUTRO:                               Brokedown Palace                                                Track #22                                                5:04 – 6:43  The lyric to “Brokedown Palace” was written by Robert Hunter as part of a suite of songs that arrived via his pen during a stay in London in 1970. He entitled it “Broke-Down Palace,” and now that it exists as a piece of writing, it seems to have always existed. It was composed on the same afternoon as “Ripple” and “To Lay Me Down,” with the aid of a half bottle of retsina.Its first performance was on August 18, 1970, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and became a staple of the live repertoire. After the 1975 hiatus, “Brokedown Palace” appeared almost exclusively as the closing song of the show, as an encore. It had the effect of sending us out of the show on a gentle pillow of sound, the band bidding us “Fare you well, fare you well…”Garcia/HunterReleased on American Beauty (Nov. 1970) Played: 219 timesFirst:  August 18, 1970 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  June 25, 1995 at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

One of our favorite shows is finally back and we're ready to drop everything we've cared about up until this point (cough The Acolyte cough), to discuss how much we love watching dragons fly on our televisions every week, as well as the occasional cunning sibling murder. Too soon, too soon.  This is a heavy spoiler episode that dives into House of the Dragon, so if you haven't watched the show or Episode 1 yet, please be aware that we do not hold back.  This is also the perfect opportunity to catch up on the show thus far before episode 2 premieres tonight! We threw in some fun nerd news in the beginning as well. The usual rants,comments, and weekly shenanigans - you know the drill.  

Welcome to Show Boys, a podcast that delves into the world of film, tv and gaming. For the summer season Chad and Nick are back to take over Thursdays with the return of their Companion Series for House of the Dragon Season 2. In this week's episode, the boys recap Episode 1 - A Son for a Son and the implications this premiere episode might have on the whole season! Patreon Link: https://www.patreon.com/showboyspodcast Catch reruns of our massive backlog of content over on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/showboyspodcast Follow PokéBoys on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PokeBoysPodcast Visit our website for everything Show Boys related! https://showboysmedia.com/ Come for the podcast, stay for the community. Join our discord today! https://discord.gg/gPqSu7QmnQ Interested in supporting the podcast? Visit our Patreon page and sign up to become a Patron for some cool perks, or toss us a bone on Venmo @Show-Boys! Merch Shop! https://my-store-be6562.creator-spring.com/ Like what you hear? Let us know in the comments and please consider subscribing!

Reposted from Dragon ‘Cast, which you can find and subscribe to at: podcastica.com/podcast/dragon-cast—In the season premiere of Dragon Cast, hosts Veronica, Renny, and Wendy delve into the highly anticipated first episode of House of the Dragon Season 2, titled "A Son for a Son." They explore the aftermath of Season 1's events, focusing on the intricate power struggles within House Targaryen and the realm of Westeros. The hosts analyze character developments, highlight key themes of loyalty and ambition, and discuss the visual spectacle and storytelling prowess that continue to define the series. With fan theories and predictions in tow, they provide a comprehensive review of this compelling return to the world of dragons and intrigue.  Next up: HotD S2E2! Once you've seen it, we'd love know your thoughts!You can email or send a voice message to dragoncastica@gmail.com.Or check out our Facebook group, where we put up comment posts for each episode, at facebook.com/groups/podcastica.

Get bonus episodes on Patreon!   House of the Dragon is BACK, and we couldn't be more excited to dive into this world again. Friend of the show Tristan is here to partake in our rousing discussion of the Season 2 premiere. The infamous Blood & Cheese incident steals the show, and we debate the impact of what should have been a monumental moment for our characters. Maggie does a full deep dive into the show's new intro sequence, comparing it to the medieval Bayeux Tapestry and analyzing the implications of this real-life connection. We examine the looming presence of grief and guilt in this episode, particularly as it affects our two female leads. We do a breakdown of some key characters and their performances, including King Aegon, Larys Strong, and Helaena Targaryen. Our episode ends with a round-up of listener feedback, and we ponder where the show will go from here.   Check out the Bayeux Tapestry: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/ LINKS: Patreon, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Cam's stories Feedback & Theories: secondbreakfastpod@gmail.com   00:00 Welcome Back 01:00 Blood & Cheese: Devastating or Disappointing? 17:25 That Crafty New Intro Sequence 23:37 The Bayeux Tapestry Connection 29:31 Helaena the Secret Narrator  35:08 Compounding Horrors: Guilt & Grief 40:07 Alicent's Isolation & Larys' Elevation 53:24 Reconsidering King Aegon II 01:00:38 Season or Sequel? 01:06:29 Audience Poll Results

Dragoncast has returned! Join the Dragons as they discuss the season 2 premiere of HBO's House of the Dragon series “A Son for a Son”. Hosts: Adam (drownedsnow), Matt (Blu3arm0r), Casey (blue-eyed-queen), Kevin (nuncle Kevin), Stephanie (gsdg), David (davidhhh), and … Continue reading →

Dragoncast has returned! Join the Dragons as they discuss the season 2 premiere of HBO's House of the Dragon series “A Son for a Son”. Hosts: Adam (drownedsnow), Matt (Blu3arm0r), Casey (blue-eyed-queen), Kevin (nuncle Kevin), Stephanie (gsdg), David (davidhhh), and … Continue reading →

Welcome listeners to SEASON 4 - Episode 18 of The Yonkō Table! Featuring your host Yonkō The GrandMasterHoop, fellow Yonkō DrJaceAttorney, and Supernovas Toasty, DrReeka and DrMondo! The small council has returned to the Realm to deep dive House of the Dragon Season 2! With stakes at an all time high, Team Black and Team Green are drawing battle lines to see who will sit atop the Iron Throne! Does Aemond need to be held accountable? Why is Alicent a hypocrite? Will Rhaenyra have her revenge? AND WAS A SON FOR A SON DESERVED?! This and so much more, so quit swabbing the deck, come have a seat, and get fed with this week's episode of The Yonkō Table! Discord: https://tinyurl.com/44bpr4hn Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/u2tcbdvx Youtube: https://tinyurl.com/2mudtdwm Be sure to follow us on: Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/nxhw66te Facebook: facebook.com/yonkotable Instagram: instagram.com/theyonkotable Patreon: https://tinyurl.com/yzv488vr

Leo Schumaker's "Bluesland" music podcast of Bluesland radio show February 29, 2024. Also iinterview with James "Super "Chikan" Johnson.Great music featured including Elmore James, Tommy Castro, Son House, Tinsley Ellis, Roy Orbison, Muddy Waters and more. Also an interview with James "Super Chikan" Johnson in support of the upcoming movie "A Life In Blues" and his music. Just click on the link/picture and turn up your speakers. 

Singles Going Around- Dead Leaves And The Dirty GroundThe Who- "Shakin' All Over"The Rolling Stones- Gotta Get Away"Booker T & The M.G.'s- "Twist and Shout"The Beatles- "Strawberry Fields Forever"Os Mutantes-"Nao Va Se Perder Por Ai"Van Morrison- "When That Evening Sun Goes Down"Son House- "Death Letter"The Kinks- "Till The End of the Day"Bob Dylan- "I Want You"T. Rex- "Born To Boogie"The White Stripes- "Forever For Her"Mel Brown- "I'm Goin' To Jackson"David Bowie- "Song For Bob Dylan"The Kinks- "Dandy"The Wailers- "Simmer Down"

Au panthéon du blues, dans l'ombre de Robert Johnson, de Ma Rainey, de Muddy Waters et des autres, une silhouette se fait discrète… c'est pourtant un homme né au cœur du Delta du Mississippi, un musicien qui fait le lien entre les générations du blues, quelqu'un qui a, toute sa vie, transmis cette musique. A son doigt, un bottleneck, en bandoulière, sa brillante national duolian. Cet homme, c'est Son House, prêcheur et musicien, adoré et oublié, redécouvert et vénéré. Pour nous raconter son histoire, Olivier Renault est à notre micro, lui qui a écrit une biographie du maitre House parue aux éditions le mot et le reste. Et notre histoire, nous la commençons presque par la fin. Nous sommes en 1964 et trois jeunes hommes, blancs, passionnés de musique, sautent dans une Volkswagen et se lancent, tambour battant, dans un drôle de chasse à l'homme à travers le pays, car ils ont entendu dire qu'une ancienne légende du Delta du Mississippi aurait été aperçue au coin d'une rue… Sujets traités : Son House, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Muddy Waters, Mississippi,musicien,blues Merci pour votre écoute Un Jour dans l'Histoire, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 13h15 à 15h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes d'Un Jour dans l'Histoire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/5936 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

1931, Grafton. Son House sort des studios, fier d'avoir enregistré ses morceaux pour la première fois sur disque. Fier d'avoir accompagné l'immense Charley Patton dans cette aventure. Son talent, le son unique et métallique de sa guitare, cela devrait le mené au succès. Sauf que … non… La crise de 1929 est passée par là et les disques ne se vendent pas. Son House reprend son travail de conducteur de tracteur, joue avec ses copains, la vie suit son cours… Jusqu'à ce qu'à l'été 1941, un été d'une terrible chaleur, un musicologue bien connu des amoureux du blues, Alan Lomax, se rende dans la région avec son enregistreur. Alan Lomax n'a jamais entendu parler de Son House mais cela va bientôt changer . Sujets traités : Son House , Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Muddy Waters, Mississippi,musicien,blues, Charley Patton , guitare, Alan Lomax Merci pour votre écoute Un Jour dans l'Histoire, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 13h15 à 15h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes d'Un Jour dans l'Histoire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/5936 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Julia Simon's book, "The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson," is new in paperback via Penn State University Press. This book, originally released in late 2022, examines the life and times of New Orleans blues and jazz great Lonnie Johnson through his music, from his first cut, "Mr. Johnson's Blues," on Okeh Record in the mid 20s to his unforgettable ballads and jazz songs in the 1960s. Simon describes the traits that make Johnson inconvenient for scholars and music fans alike in her book and in this interview brings this talented and often misunderstood master of the guitar, violin and voice to life. Visit Julia Simon at California-Davis, and on Facebook.-->Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/tT8d3pVUsN-->You can support Hooks & Runs by purchasing books, including the books featured in this episode, through our store at Bookshop.org. Here's the link. https://bookshop.org/shop/hooksandrunsHooks & Runs - www.hooksandruns.comHooks & Runs on TikTok -  https://www.tiktok.com/@hooksandrunsHooks & Runs on Twitter - https://twitter.com/thehooksandrunsAndrew Eckhoff on Tik TokLink: https://www.tiktok.com/@hofffestRex von Pohl (Krazy Karl's Music Emporium) on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/people/Krazy-Karlz-Music-Emporium/100063801500293/ Music: "Warrior of Light" by ikolics (Premium Beat)    

Lorsque Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) entend un disque de Robert Johnson pour la première fois, il demande à Brian Jones : Ok, il est pas mal, mais qui est le deuxième guitariste ? Brian Jones répond : il n'y a pas de deuxième guitariste. Ce n'est que lui, Robert Johnson, et ses dix doigts. Robert Johnson (1911-1938) est devenu avec le temps une influence majeure pour les grands noms du rock and roll. Né en bordure du champ de coton dans lequel travaille sa mère, Julia, rien ne le prédestine pourtant à cela. Il grandit à Robinsonville, dans le Delta du Mississippi et, comme sa mère et tous ses camarades de classe, son avenir, c'est plutôt à la plantation locale qu'il se dessine. Sauf si… sauf s'il devient un musicien, comme les deux drôles d'oiseaux, Son House et Willie Brown, qui endiablent les nuits de la région avec leurs guitares et leurs chants. Problème : Robert Johnson, une guitare à la main … est nul. Invité : Jonathan Gaudet, écrivain et musicien, auteur de « La Ballade de Robert Johnson » (Editions Le Mort et le Reste) Séquence réalisée par Jonathan Remy Merci pour votre écoute Un Jour dans l'Histoire, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 13h15 à 15h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes d'Un Jour dans l'Histoire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/5936 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Lorsque Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) entend un disque de Robert Johnson pour la première fois, il demande à Brian Jones : Ok, il est pas mal, mais qui est le deuxième guitariste ? Brian Jones répond : il n'y a pas de deuxième guitariste. Ce n'est que lui, Robert Johnson, et ses dix doigts. Robert Johnson (1911-1938) est devenu avec le temps une influence majeure pour les grands noms du rock and roll. Né en bordure du champ de coton dans lequel travaille sa mère, Julia, rien ne le prédestine pourtant à cela. Il grandit à Robinsonville, dans le Delta du Mississippi et, comme sa mère et tous ses camarades de classe, son avenir, c'est plutôt à la plantation locale qu'il se dessine. Sauf si… sauf s'il devient un musicien, comme les deux drôles d'oiseaux, Son House et Willie Brown, qui endiablent les nuits de la région avec leurs guitares et leurs chants. Problème : Robert Johnson, une guitare à la main … est nul. Invité : Jonathan Gaudet, écrivain et musicien, auteur de « La Ballade de Robert Johnson » (Editions Le Mort et le Reste) Séquence réalisée par Jonathan Remy Merci pour votre écoute Un Jour dans l'Histoire, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 13h15 à 15h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes d'Un Jour dans l'Histoire sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/5936 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Mais il y a une histoire qui s'est également poursuivie, celle de Robert Johnson. En effet, l'album King of the Delta Blues Singers a déclenché une recherche d'informations sur Johnson au sein de la communauté des spécialistes et musiciens blancs du blues, et des gens comme Al Wilson de Canned Heat, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Paul Oliver, Peter Guralnick, Steve LaVere et Mack McCormick ont commencé à enquêter sur la vie de Johnson et à écrire des articles et des livres à son sujet.  PLAYLIST Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues" Uncle Dave Macon, "Death of John Henry" Willie Brown, "M&O Blues" Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting for a Train" Lonnie Johnson et Louis Armstrong, "Hotter Than That" Charlie Patton, "You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die" Son House, "Preaching the Blues" Johnnie Temple, "Lead Pencil Blues" Robert Jr Lockwood, "Steady Rollin' Man" Robert Johnson, "They're Red Hot" Robert Johnson, "Sweet Home Chicago" Kokomo Arnold, "Old Original Kokomo Blues". Robert Johnson, "Come on In My Kitchen" Robert Johnson, "Love in Vain"

Nous allons ouvrir un gros dossier :  "Crossroad blues ». Cet épisode va nous permettre de parler du morceau mythique et fondateur « Crossroad» ou crossroad blues et l'histoire des début discographique du blues, De Cream le premier supergroupe de l'histoire du rock, et pour finir  du mythe de Robert Johnson et du ramassis de conneries qui l'accompagnent. Cet épisode sera donc en 3 parties…. PLAYLIST The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites ?" "One O' Them Things" The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues" Ciro's Club Coon Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues" Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues", Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues" Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues" Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues" Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues" Blind Blake, "Southern Rag" Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues" Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love" Son House, Mississippi County Farm Blues" Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues" Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" Charlie Patton, "Poor Me" The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World" Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues" The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" Robert Johnson, "Crossroads" Willie Brown, "M&O Blues" Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin' Charlie Patton, "34 Blues" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right" Alexis Korner et Davey Graham, "3/4 AD" John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)" Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)" " At the Jazz Band Ball" The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission" Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There" The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)" The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty" Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm" Bande Annonce : Gonks Go Beat !

More vinyl reissues from the Ace Records stable feature this week. 45s and albums released this month and next. We also have newies from Arthur Baker & Jesse Rankins, Mildlife and Sonlife. All this plus the White Stripes sing Son HouseTune into new broadcasts of Blues & Grooves, Sunday from 4 - 5 PM EST / 9 - 10 PM GMT.For more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/blues-and-grooves///Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart" and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. 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 There are two Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two . For information on Janis Joplin I used three biographies -- Scars of Sweet Paradise by Alice Echols, Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, and Buried Alive by Myra Friedman. I also referred to the chapter '“Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul' in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton. Some information on Bessie Smith came from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, a book I can't really recommend given the lack of fact-checking, and Bessie by Chris Albertson. I also referred to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis And the best place to start with Joplin's music is this five-CD box, which contains both Big Brother and the Holding Company albums she was involved in, plus her two studio albums and bonus tracks. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode contains discussion of drug addiction and overdose, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse, child abandonment, and racism. If those subjects are likely to cause you upset, you may want to check the transcript or skip this one rather than listen. Also, a subject I should probably say a little more about in this intro because I know I have inadvertently caused upset to at least one listener with this in the past. When it comes to Janis Joplin, it is *impossible* to talk about her without discussing her issues with her weight and self-image. The way I write often involves me paraphrasing the opinions of the people I'm writing about, in a mode known as close third person, and sometimes that means it can look like I am stating those opinions as my own, and sometimes things I say in that mode which *I* think are obviously meant in context to be critiques of those attitudes can appear to others to be replicating them. At least once, I have seriously upset a fat listener when talking about issues related to weight in this manner. I'm going to try to be more careful here, but just in case, I'm going to say before I begin that I think fatphobia is a pernicious form of bigotry, as bad as any other form of bigotry. I'm fat myself and well aware of how systemic discrimination affects fat people. I also think more generally that the pressure put on women to look a particular way is pernicious and disgusting in ways I can't even begin to verbalise, and causes untold harm. If *ANYTHING* I say in this episode comes across as sounding otherwise, that's because I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. Like all people, Janis Joplin had negative characteristics, and at times I'm going to say things that are critical of those. But when it comes to anything to do with her weight or her appearance, if *anything* I say sounds critical of her, rather than of a society that makes women feel awful for their appearance, it isn't meant to. Anyway, on with the show. On January the nineteenth, 1943, Seth Joplin typed up a letter to his wife Dorothy, which read “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.” As you can probably tell from that message, the Joplin family were a strange mixture of ultraconformism and eccentricity, and those two opposing forces would dominate the personality of their firstborn daughter for the whole of her life.  Seth Joplin was a respected engineer at Texaco, where he worked for forty years, but he had actually dropped out of engineering school before completing his degree. His favourite pastime when he wasn't at work was to read -- he was a voracious reader -- and to listen to classical music, which would often move him to tears, but he had also taught himself to make bathtub gin during prohibition, and smoked cannabis. Dorothy, meanwhile, had had the possibility of a singing career before deciding to settle down and become a housewife, and was known for having a particularly beautiful soprano voice. Both were, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent people, but they were also as committed as anyone to the ideals of the middle-class family even as they chafed against its restrictions. Like her mother, young Janis had a beautiful soprano voice, and she became a soloist in her church choir, but after the age of six, she was not encouraged to sing much. Dorothy had had a thyroid operation which destroyed her singing voice, and the family got rid of their piano soon after (different sources say that this was either because Dorothy found her daughter's singing painful now that she couldn't sing herself, or because Seth was upset that his wife could no longer sing. Either seems plausible.) Janis was pushed to be a high-achiever -- she was given a library card as soon as she could write her name, and encouraged to use it, and she was soon advanced in school, skipping a couple of grades. She was also by all accounts a fiercely talented painter, and her parents paid for art lessons. From everything one reads about her pre-teen years, she was a child prodigy who was loved by everyone and who was clearly going to be a success of some kind. Things started to change when she reached her teenage years. Partly, this was just her getting into rock and roll music, which her father thought a fad -- though even there, she differed from her peers. She loved Elvis, but when she heard "Hound Dog", she loved it so much that she tracked down a copy of Big Mama Thornton's original, and told her friends she preferred that: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] Despite this, she was still also an exemplary student and overachiever. But by the time she turned fourteen, things started to go very wrong for her. Partly this was just down to her relationship with her father changing -- she adored him, but he became more distant from his daughters as they grew into women. But also, puberty had an almost wholly negative effect on her, at least by the standards of that time and place. She put on weight (which, again, I do not think is a negative thing, but she did, and so did everyone around her), she got a bad case of acne which didn't ever really go away, and she also didn't develop breasts particularly quickly -- which, given that she was a couple of years younger than the other people in the same classes at school, meant she stood out even more. In the mid-sixties, a doctor apparently diagnosed her as having a "hormone imbalance" -- something that got to her as a possible explanation for why she was, to quote from a letter she wrote then, "not really a woman or enough of one or something." She wondered if "maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up.” I'm not a doctor and even if I were, diagnosing historical figures is an unethical thing to do, but certainly the acne, weight gain, and mental health problems she had are all consistent with PCOS, the most common endocrine disorder among women, and it seems likely given what the doctor told her that this was the cause. But at the time all she knew was that she was different, and that in the eyes of her fellow students she had gone from being pretty to being ugly. She seems to have been a very trusting, naive, person who was often the brunt of jokes but who desperately needed to be accepted, and it became clear that her appearance wasn't going to let her fit into the conformist society she was being brought up in, while her high intelligence, low impulse control, and curiosity meant she couldn't even fade into the background. This left her one other option, and she decided that she would deliberately try to look and act as different from everyone else as possible. That way, it would be a conscious choice on her part to reject the standards of her fellow pupils, rather than her being rejected by them. She started to admire rebels. She became a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music combined the country music she'd grown up hearing in Texas, the R&B she liked now, and the rebellious nature she was trying to cultivate: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] When Lewis' career was derailed by his marriage to his teenage cousin, Joplin wrote an angry letter to Time magazine complaining that they had mistreated him in their coverage. But as with so many people of her generation, her love of rock and roll music led her first to the blues and then to folk, and she soon found herself listening to Odetta: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] One of her first experiences of realising she could gain acceptance from her peers by singing was when she was hanging out with the small group of Bohemian teenagers she was friendly with, and sang an Odetta song, mimicking her voice exactly. But young Janis Joplin was listening to an eclectic range of folk music, and could mimic more than just Odetta. For all that her later vocal style was hugely influenced by Odetta and by other Black singers like Big Mama Thornton and Etta James, her friends in her late teens and early twenties remember her as a vocal chameleon with an achingly pure soprano, who would more often than Odetta be imitating the great Appalachian traditional folk singer Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Lord Randall"] She was, in short, trying her best to become a Beatnik, despite not having any experience of that subculture other than what she read in books -- though she *did* read about them in books, devouring things like Kerouac's On The Road. She came into conflict with her mother, who didn't understand what was happening to her daughter, and who tried to get family counselling to understand what was going on. Her father, who seemed to relate more to Janis, but who was more quietly eccentric, put an end to that, but Janis would still for the rest of her life talk about how her mother had taken her to doctors who thought she was going to end up "either in jail or an insane asylum" to use her words. From this point on, and for the rest of her life, she was torn between a need for approval from her family and her peers, and a knowledge that no matter what she did she couldn't fit in with normal societal expectations. In high school she was a member of the Future Nurses of America, the Future Teachers of America, the Art Club, and Slide Rule Club, but she also had a reputation as a wild girl, and as sexually active (even though by all accounts at this point she was far less so than most of the so-called "good girls" – but her later activity was in part because she felt that if she was going to have that reputation anyway she might as well earn it). She also was known to express radical opinions, like that segregation was wrong, an opinion that the other students in her segregated Texan school didn't even think was wrong, but possibly some sort of sign of mental illness. Her final High School yearbook didn't contain a single other student's signature. And her initial choice of university, Lamar State College of Technology, was not much better. In the next town over, and attended by many of the same students, it had much the same attitudes as the school she'd left. Almost the only long-term effect her initial attendance at university had on her was a negative one -- she found there was another student at the college who was better at painting. Deciding that if she wasn't going to be the best at something she didn't want to do it at all, she more or less gave up on painting at that point. But there was one positive. One of the lecturers at Lamar was Francis Edward "Ab" Abernethy, who would in the early seventies go on to become the Secretary and Editor of the Texas Folklore Society, and was also a passionate folk musician, playing double bass in string bands. Abernethy had a great collection of blues 78s. and it was through this collection that Janis first discovered classic blues, and in particular Bessie Smith: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Black Mountain Blues"] A couple of episodes ago, we had a long look at the history of the music that now gets called "the blues" -- the music that's based around guitars, and generally involves a solo male vocalist, usually Black during its classic period. At the time that music was being made though it wouldn't have been thought of as "the blues" with no modifiers by most people who were aware of it. At the start, even the songs they were playing weren't thought of as blues by the male vocalist/guitarists who played them -- they called the songs they played "reels". The music released by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and so on was thought of as blues music, and people would understand and agree with a phrase like "Lonnie Johnson is a blues singer", but it wasn't the first thing people thought of when they talked about "the blues". Until relatively late -- probably some time in the 1960s -- if you wanted to talk about blues music made by Black men with guitars and only that music, you talked about "country blues". If you thought about "the blues", with no qualifiers, you thought about a rather different style of music, one that white record collectors started later to refer to as "classic blues" to differentiate it from what they were now calling "the blues". Nowadays of course if you say "classic blues", most people will think you mean Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, people who were contemporary at the time those white record collectors were coming up with their labels, and so that style of music gets referred to as "vaudeville blues", or as "classic female blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] What we just heard was the first big blues hit performed by a Black person, from 1920, and as we discussed in the episode on "Crossroads" that revolutionised the whole record industry when it came out. The song was performed by Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer, and was originally titled "Harlem Blues" by its writer, Perry Bradford, before he changed the title to "Crazy Blues" to get it to a wider audience. Bradford was an important figure in the vaudeville scene, though other than being the credited writer of "Keep A-Knockin'" he's little known these days. He was a Black musician and grew up playing in minstrel shows (the history of minstrelsy is a topic for another day, but it's more complicated than the simple image of blackface that we are aware of today -- though as with many "more complicated than that" things it is, also the simple image of blackface we're aware of). He was the person who persuaded OKeh records that there would be a market for music made by Black people that sounded Black (though as we're going to see in this episode, what "sounding Black" means is a rather loaded question). "Crazy Blues" was the result, and it was a massive hit, even though it was marketed specifically towards Black listeners: [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] The big stars of the early years of recorded blues were all making records in the shadow of "Crazy Blues", and in the case of its very biggest stars, they were working very much in the same mould. The two most important blues stars of the twenties both got their start in vaudeville, and were both women. Ma Rainey, like Mamie Smith, first performed in minstrel shows, but where Mamie Smith's early records had her largely backed by white musicians, Rainey was largely backed by Black musicians, including on several tracks Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider"] Rainey's band was initially led by Thomas Dorsey, one of the most important men in American music, who we've talked about before in several episodes, including the last one. He was possibly the single most important figure in two different genres -- hokum music, when he, under the name "Georgia Tom" recorded "It's Tight Like That" with Tampa Red: [Excerpt: Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, "It's Tight Like That"] And of course gospel music, which to all intents and purposes he invented, and much of whose repertoire he wrote: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] When Dorsey left Rainey's band, as we discussed right back in episode five, he was replaced by a female pianist, Lil Henderson. The blues was a woman's genre. And Ma Rainey was, by preference, a woman's woman, though she was married to a man: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Prove it on Me"] So was the biggest star of the classic blues era, who was originally mentored by Rainey. Bessie Smith, like Rainey, was a queer woman who had relationships with men but was far more interested in other women.  There were stories that Bessie Smith actually got her start in the business by being kidnapped by Ma Rainey, and forced into performing on the same bills as her in the vaudeville show she was touring in, and that Rainey taught Smith to sing blues in the process. In truth, Rainey mentored Smith more in stagecraft and the ways of the road than in singing, and neither woman was only a blues singer, though both had huge success with their blues records.  Indeed, since Rainey was already in the show, Smith was initially hired as a dancer rather than a singer, and she also worked as a male impersonator. But Smith soon branched out on her own -- from the beginning she was obviously a star. The great jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet later said of her "She had this trouble in her, this thing that would not let her rest sometimes, a meanness that came and took her over. But what she had was alive … Bessie, she just wouldn't let herself be; it seemed she couldn't let herself be." Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923, as part of the rush to find and record as many Black women blues singers as possible. Her first recording session produced "Downhearted Blues", which became, depending on which sources you read, either the biggest-selling blues record since "Crazy Blues" or the biggest-selling blues record ever, full stop, selling three quarters of a million copies in the six months after its release: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Downhearted Blues"] Smith didn't make royalties off record sales, only making a flat fee, but she became the most popular Black performer of the 1920s. Columbia signed her to an exclusive contract, and she became so rich that she would literally travel between gigs on her own private train. She lived an extravagant life in every way, giving lavishly to her friends and family, but also drinking extraordinary amounts of liquor, having regular affairs, and also often physically or verbally attacking those around her. By all accounts she was not a comfortable person to be around, and she seemed to be trying to fit an entire lifetime into every moment. From 1923 through 1929 she had a string of massive hits. She recorded material in a variety of styles, including the dirty blues: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues] And with accompanists like Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "Cold in Hand Blues"] But the music for which she became best known, and which sold the best, was when she sang about being mistreated by men, as on one of her biggest hits, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do" -- and a warning here, I'm going to play a clip of the song, which treats domestic violence in a way that may be upsetting: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do"] That kind of material can often seem horrifying to today's listeners -- and quite correctly so, as domestic violence is a horrifying thing -- and it sounds entirely too excusing of the man beating her up for anyone to find it comfortable listening. But the Black feminist scholar Angela Davis has made a convincing case that while these records, and others by Smith's contemporaries, can't reasonably be considered to be feminist, they *are* at the very least more progressive than they now seem, in that they were, even if excusing it, pointing to a real problem which was otherwise left unspoken. And that kind of domestic violence and abuse *was* a real problem, including in Smith's own life. By all accounts she was terrified of her husband, Jack Gee, who would frequently attack her because of her affairs with other people, mostly women. But she was still devastated when he left her for a younger woman, not only because he had left her, but also because he kidnapped their adopted son and had him put into a care home, falsely claiming she had abused him. Not only that, but before Jack left her closest friend had been Jack's niece Ruby and after the split she never saw Ruby again -- though after her death Ruby tried to have a blues career as "Ruby Smith", taking her aunt's surname and recording a few tracks with Sammy Price, the piano player who worked with Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Ruby Smith with Sammy Price, "Make Me Love You"] The same month, May 1929, that Gee left her, Smith recorded what was to become her last big hit, and most well-known song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out": [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] And that could have been the theme for the rest of her life. A few months after that record came out, the Depression hit, pretty much killing the market for blues records. She carried on recording until 1931, but the records weren't selling any more. And at the same time, the talkies came in in the film industry, which along with the Depression ended up devastating the vaudeville audience. Her earnings were still higher than most, but only a quarter of what they had been a year or two earlier. She had one last recording session in 1933, produced by John Hammond for OKeh Records, where she showed that her style had developed over the years -- it was now incorporating the newer swing style, and featured future swing stars Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden in the backing band: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot"] Hammond was not hugely impressed with the recordings, preferring her earlier records, and they would be the last she would ever make. She continued as a successful, though no longer record-breaking, live act until 1937, when she and her common-law husband, Lionel Hampton's uncle Richard Morgan, were in a car crash. Morgan escaped, but Smith died of her injuries and was buried on October the fourth 1937. Ten thousand people came to her funeral, but she was buried in an unmarked grave -- she was still legally married to Gee, even though they'd been separated for eight years, and while he supposedly later became rich from songwriting royalties from some of her songs (most of her songs were written by other people, but she wrote a few herself) he refused to pay for a headstone for her. Indeed on more than one occasion he embezzled money that had been raised by other people to provide a headstone. Bessie Smith soon became Joplin's favourite singer of all time, and she started trying to copy her vocals. But other than discovering Smith's music, Joplin seems to have had as terrible a time at university as at school, and soon dropped out and moved back in with her parents. She went to business school for a short while, where she learned some secretarial skills, and then she moved west, going to LA where two of her aunts lived, to see if she could thrive better in a big West Coast city than she did in small-town Texas. Soon she moved from LA to Venice Beach, and from there had a brief sojourn in San Francisco, where she tried to live out her beatnik fantasies at a time when the beatnik culture was starting to fall apart. She did, while she was there, start smoking cannabis, though she never got a taste for that drug, and took Benzedrine and started drinking much more heavily than she had before. She soon lost her job, moved back to Texas, and re-enrolled at the same college she'd been at before. But now she'd had a taste of real Bohemian life -- she'd been singing at coffee houses, and having affairs with both men and women -- and soon she decided to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. At this point, Austin was very far from the cultural centre it has become in recent decades, and it was still a straitlaced Texan town, but it was far less so than Port Arthur, and she soon found herself in a folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. Janis would play autoharp and sing, sometimes Bessie Smith covers, but also the more commercial country and folk music that was popular at the time, like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles", a song that had originally been recorded by Wanda Jackson but at that time was a big hit for Dusty Springfield's group The Springfields: [Excerpt: The Waller Creek Boys, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"] But even there, Joplin didn't fit in comfortably. The venue where the folk jams were taking place was a segregated venue, as everywhere around Austin was. And she was enough of a misfit that the campus newspaper did an article on her headlined "She Dares to Be Different!", which read in part "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break out into song it will be handy." There was a small group of wannabe-Beatniks, including Chet Helms, who we've mentioned previously in the Grateful Dead episode, Gilbert Shelton, who went on to be a pioneer of alternative comics and create the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Shelton's partner in Rip-Off Press, Dave Moriarty, but for the most part the atmosphere in Austin was only slightly better for Janis than it had been in Port Arthur. The final straw for her came when in an annual charity fundraiser joke competition to find the ugliest man on campus, someone nominated her for the "award". She'd had enough of Texas. She wanted to go back to California. She and Chet Helms, who had dropped out of the university earlier and who, like her, had already spent some time on the West Coast, decided to hitch-hike together to San Francisco. Before leaving, she made a recording for her ex-girlfriend Julie Paul, a country and western musician, of a song she'd written herself. It's recorded in what many say was Janis' natural voice -- a voice she deliberately altered in performance in later years because, she would tell people, she didn't think there was room for her singing like that in an industry that already had Joan Baez and Judy Collins. In her early years she would alternate between singing like this and doing her imitations of Black women, but the character of Janis Joplin who would become famous never sang like this. It may well be the most honest thing that she ever recorded, and the most revealing of who she really was: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, "So Sad to Be Alone"] Joplin and Helms made it to San Francisco, and she started performing at open-mic nights and folk clubs around the Bay Area, singing in her Bessie Smith and Odetta imitation voice, and sometimes making a great deal of money by sounding different from the wispier-voiced women who were the norm at those venues. The two friends parted ways, and she started performing with two other folk musicians, Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins, and she insisted that they would play at least one Bessie Smith song at every performance: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, Larry Hanks, and Roger Perkins, "Black Mountain Blues (live in San Francisco)"] Often the trio would be joined by Billy Roberts, who at that time had just started performing the song that would make his name, "Hey Joe", and Joplin was soon part of the folk scene in the Bay Area, and admired by Dino Valenti, David Crosby, and Jerry Garcia among others. She also sang a lot with Jorma Kaukonnen, and recordings of the two of them together have circulated for years: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonnen, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] Through 1963, 1964, and early 1965 Joplin ping-ponged from coast to coast, spending time in the Bay Area, then Greenwich Village, dropping in on her parents then back to the Bay Area, and she started taking vast quantities of methamphetamine. Even before moving to San Francisco she had been an occasional user of amphetamines – at the time they were regularly prescribed to students as study aids during exam periods, and she had also been taking them to try to lose some of the weight she always hated. But while she was living in San Francisco she became dependent on the drug. At one point her father was worried enough about her health to visit her in San Francisco, where she managed to fool him that she was more or less OK. But she looked to him for reassurance that things would get better for her, and he couldn't give it to her. He told her about a concept that he called the "Saturday night swindle", the idea that you work all week so you can go out and have fun on Saturday in the hope that that will make up for everything else, but that it never does. She had occasional misses with what would have been lucky breaks -- at one point she was in a motorcycle accident just as record labels were interested in signing her, and by the time she got out of the hospital the chance had gone. She became engaged to another speed freak, one who claimed to be an engineer and from a well-off background, but she was becoming severely ill from what was by now a dangerous amphetamine habit, and in May 1965 she decided to move back in with her parents, get clean, and have a normal life. Her new fiance was going to do the same, and they were going to have the conformist life her parents had always wanted, and which she had always wanted to want. Surely with a husband who loved her she could find a way to fit in and just be normal. She kicked the addiction, and wrote her fiance long letters describing everything about her family and the new normal life they were going to have together, and they show her painfully trying to be optimistic about the future, like one where she described her family to him: "My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.) My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I'm bright and we can talk (about antimatter yet—that impressed him)! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you.…" She went back to Lamar, her mother started sewing her a wedding dress, and for much of the year she believed her fiance was going to be her knight in shining armour. But as it happened, the fiance in question was described by everyone else who knew him as a compulsive liar and con man, who persuaded her father to give him money for supposed medical tests before the wedding, but in reality was apparently married to someone else and having a baby with a third woman. After the engagement was broken off, she started performing again around the coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, and she started to realise the possibilities of rock music for her kind of performance. The missing clue came from a group from Austin who she became very friendly with, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and the way their lead singer Roky Erickson would wail and yell: [Excerpt: The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me (live)"] If, as now seemed inevitable, Janis was going to make a living as a performer, maybe she should start singing rock music, because it seemed like there was money in it. There was even some talk of her singing with the Elevators. But then an old friend came to Austin from San Francisco with word from Chet Helms. A blues band had formed, and were looking for a singer, and they remembered her from the coffee houses. Would she like to go back to San Francisco and sing with them? In the time she'd been away, Helms had become hugely prominent in the San Francisco music scene, which had changed radically. A band from the area called the Charlatans had been playing a fake-Victorian saloon called the Red Dog in nearby Nevada, and had become massive with the people who a few years earlier had been beatniks: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "32-20"] When their residency at the Red Dog had finished, several of the crowd who had been regulars there had become a collective of sorts called the Family Dog, and Helms had become their unofficial leader. And there's actually a lot packed into that choice of name. As we'll see in a few future episodes, a lot of West Coast hippies eventually started calling their collectives and communes families. This started as a way to get round bureaucracy -- if a helpful welfare officer put down that the unrelated people living in a house together were a family, suddenly they could get food stamps. As with many things, of course, the label then affected how people thought about themselves, and one thing that's very notable about the San Francisco scene hippies in particular is that they are some of the first people to make a big deal about what we now  call "found family" or "family of choice". But it's also notable how often the hippie found families took their model from the only families these largely middle-class dropouts had ever known, and structured themselves around men going out and doing the work -- selling dope or panhandling or being rock musicians or shoplifting -- with the women staying at home doing the housework. The Family Dog started promoting shows, with the intention of turning San Francisco into "the American Liverpool", and soon Helms was rivalled only by Bill Graham as the major promoter of rock shows in the Bay Area. And now he wanted Janis to come back and join this new band. But Janis was worried. She was clean now. She drank far too much, but she wasn't doing any other drugs. She couldn't go back to San Francisco and risk getting back on methamphetamine. She needn't worry about that, she was told, nobody in San Francisco did speed any more, they were all on LSD -- a drug she hated and so wasn't in any danger from. Reassured, she made the trip back to San Francisco, to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother and the Holding Company were the epitome of San Francisco acid rock at the time. They were the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which Helms ran, and their first ever gig had been at the Trips Festival, which we talked about briefly in the Grateful Dead episode. They were known for being more imaginative than competent -- lead guitarist James Gurley was often described as playing parts that were influenced by John Cage, but was equally often, and equally accurately, described as not actually being able to keep his guitar in tune because he was too stoned. But they were drawing massive crowds with their instrumental freak-out rock music. Helms thought they needed a singer, and he had remembered Joplin, who a few of the group had seen playing the coffee houses. He decided she would be perfect for them, though Joplin wasn't so sure. She thought it was worth a shot, but as she wrote to her parents before meeting the group "Supposed to rehearse w/ the band this afternoon, after that I guess I'll know whether I want to stay & do that for awhile. Right now my position is ambivalent—I'm glad I came, nice to see the city, a few friends, but I'm not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man's Cher.” In that letter she also wrote "I'm awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you. I understand your fears at my coming here & must admit I share them, but I really do think there's an awfully good chance I won't blow it this time." The band she met up with consisted of lead guitarist James Gurley, bass player Peter Albin, rhythm player Sam Andrew, and drummer David Getz.  To start with, Peter Albin sang lead on most songs, with Joplin adding yelps and screams modelled on those of Roky Erickson, but in her first gig with the band she bowled everyone over with her lead vocal on the traditional spiritual "Down on Me", which would remain a staple of their live act, as in this live recording from 1968: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me (Live 1968)"] After that first gig in June 1966, it was obvious that Joplin was going to be a star, and was going to be the group's main lead vocalist. She had developed a whole new stage persona a million miles away from her folk performances. As Chet Helms said “Suddenly this person who would stand upright with her fists clenched was all over the stage. Roky Erickson had modeled himself after the screaming style of Little Richard, and Janis's initial stage presence came from Roky, and ultimately Little Richard. It was a very different Janis.” Joplin would always claim to journalists that her stage persona was just her being herself and natural, but she worked hard on every aspect of her performance, and far from the untrained emotional outpouring she always suggested, her vocal performances were carefully calculated pastiches of her influences -- mostly Bessie Smith, but also Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Etta James, Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. That's not to say that those performances weren't an authentic expression of part of herself -- they absolutely were. But the ethos that dominated San Francisco in the mid-sixties prized self-expression over technical craft, and so Joplin had to portray herself as a freak of nature who just had to let all her emotions out, a wild woman, rather than someone who carefully worked out every nuance of her performances. Joplin actually got the chance to meet one of her idols when she discovered that Willie Mae Thornton was now living and regularly performing in the Bay Area. She and some of her bandmates saw Big Mama play a small jazz club, where she performed a song she wouldn't release on a record for another two years: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball 'n' Chain"] Janis loved the song and scribbled down the lyrics, then went backstage to ask Big Mama if Big Brother could cover the song. She gave them her blessing, but told them "don't" -- and here she used a word I can't use with a clean rating -- "it up". The group all moved in together, communally, with their partners -- those who had them. Janis was currently single, having dumped her most recent boyfriend after discovering him shooting speed, as she was still determined to stay clean. But she was rapidly discovering that the claim that San Franciscans no longer used much speed had perhaps not been entirely true, as for example Sam Andrew's girlfriend went by the nickname Speedfreak Rita. For now, Janis was still largely clean, but she did start drinking more. Partly this was because of a brief fling with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis liked Pigpen as someone else on the scene who didn't much like psychedelics or cannabis -- she didn't like drugs that made her think more, but only drugs that made her able to *stop* thinking (her love of amphetamines doesn't seem to fit this pattern, but a small percentage of people have a different reaction to amphetamine-type stimulants, perhaps she was one of those). Pigpen was a big drinker of Southern Comfort -- so much so that it would kill him within a few years -- and Janis started joining him. Her relationship with Pigpen didn't last long, but the two would remain close, and she would often join the Grateful Dead on stage over the years to duet with him on "Turn On Your Lovelight": [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] But within two months of joining the band, Janis nearly left. Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records came to see the group live, and was impressed by their singer, but not by the rest of the band. This was something that would happen again and again over the group's career. The group were all imaginative and creative -- they worked together on their arrangements and their long instrumental jams and often brought in very good ideas -- but they were not the most disciplined or technically skilled of musicians, even when you factored in their heavy drug use, and often lacked the skill to pull off their better ideas. They were hugely popular among the crowds at the Avalon Ballroom, who were on the group's chemical wavelength, but Rothchild was not impressed -- as he was, in general, unimpressed with psychedelic freakouts. He was already of the belief in summer 1966 that the fashion for extended experimental freak-outs would soon come to an end and that there would be a pendulum swing back towards more structured and melodic music. As we saw in the episode on The Band, he would be proved right in a little over a year, but being ahead of the curve he wanted to put together a supergroup that would be able to ride that coming wave, a group that would play old-fashioned blues. He'd got together Stefan Grossman, Steve Mann, and Taj Mahal, and he wanted Joplin to be the female vocalist for the group, dueting with Mahal. She attended one rehearsal, and the new group sounded great. Elektra Records offered to sign them, pay their rent while they rehearsed, and have a major promotional campaign for their first release. Joplin was very, very, tempted, and brought the subject up to her bandmates in Big Brother. They were devastated. They were a family! You don't leave your family! She was meant to be with them forever! They eventually got her to agree to put off the decision at least until after a residency they'd been booked for in Chicago, and she decided to give them the chance, writing to her parents "I decided to stay w/the group but still like to think about the other thing. Trying to figure out which is musically more marketable because my being good isn't enough, I've got to be in a good vehicle.” The trip to Chicago was a disaster. They found that the people of Chicago weren't hugely interested in seeing a bunch of white Californians play the blues, and that the Midwest didn't have the same Bohemian crowds that the coastal cities they were used to had, and so their freak-outs didn't go down well either. After two weeks of their four-week residency, the club owner stopped paying them because they were so unpopular, and they had no money to get home. And then they were approached by Bob Shad. (For those who know the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the Bob Shad in that film is named after this one -- Judd Apatow, the film's director, is Shad's grandson) This Shad was a record producer, who had worked with people like Big Bill Broonzy, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine over an eighteen-year career, and had recently set up a new label, Mainstream Records. He wanted to sign Big Brother and the Holding Company. They needed money and... well, it was a record contract! It was a contract that took half their publishing, paid them a five percent royalty on sales, and gave them no advance, but it was still a contract, and they'd get union scale for the first session. In that first session in Chicago, they recorded four songs, and strangely only one, "Down on Me", had a solo Janis vocal. Of the other three songs, Sam Andrew and Janis dueted on Sam's song "Call on Me", Albin sang lead on the group composition "Blindman", and Gurley and Janis sang a cover of "All Is Loneliness", a song originally by the avant-garde street musician Moondog: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All is Loneliness"] The group weren't happy with the four songs they recorded -- they had to keep the songs to the length of a single, and the engineers made sure that the needles never went into the red, so their guitars sounded far more polite and less distorted than they were used to. Janis was fascinated by the overdubbing process, though, especially double-tracking, which she'd never tried before but which she turned out to be remarkably good at. And they were now signed to a contract, which meant that Janis wouldn't be leaving the group to go solo any time soon. The family were going to stay together. But on the group's return to San Francisco, Janis started doing speed again, encouraged by the people around the group, particularly Gurley's wife. By the time the group's first single, "Blindman" backed with "All is Loneliness", came out, she was an addict again. That initial single did nothing, but the group were fast becoming one of the most popular in the Bay Area, and almost entirely down to Janis' vocals and on-stage persona. Bob Shad had already decided in the initial session that while various band members had taken lead, Janis was the one who should be focused on as the star, and when they drove to LA for their second recording session it was songs with Janis leads that they focused on. At that second session, in which they recorded ten tracks in two days, the group recorded a mix of material including one of Janis' own songs, the blues track "Women is Losers", and a version of the old folk song "the Cuckoo Bird" rearranged by Albin. Again they had to keep the arrangements to two and a half minutes a track, with no extended soloing and a pop arrangement style, and the results sound a lot more like the other San Francisco bands, notably Jefferson Airplane, than like the version of the band that shows itself in their live performances: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Coo Coo"] After returning to San Francisco after the sessions, Janis went to see Otis Redding at the Fillmore, turning up several hours before the show started on all three nights to make sure she could be right at the front. One of the other audience members later recalled “It was more fascinating for me, almost, to watch Janis watching Otis, because you could tell that she wasn't just listening to him, she was studying something. There was some kind of educational thing going on there. I was jumping around like the little hippie girl I was, thinking This is so great! and it just stopped me in my tracks—because all of a sudden Janis drew you very deeply into what the performance was all about. Watching her watch Otis Redding was an education in itself.” Joplin would, for the rest of her life, always say that Otis Redding was her all-time favourite singer, and would say “I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I Can't Turn You Loose (live)"] At the start of 1967, the group moved out of the rural house they'd been sharing and into separate apartments around Haight-Ashbury, and they brought the new year in by playing a free show organised by the Hell's Angels, the violent motorcycle gang who at the time were very close with the proto-hippies in the Bay Area. Janis in particular always got on well with the Angels, whose drugs of choice, like hers, were speed and alcohol more than cannabis and psychedelics. Janis also started what would be the longest on-again off-again relationship she would ever have, with a woman named Peggy Caserta. Caserta had a primary partner, but that if anything added to her appeal for Joplin -- Caserta's partner Kimmie had previously been in a relationship with Joan Baez, and Joplin, who had an intense insecurity that made her jealous of any other female singer who had any success, saw this as in some way a validation both of her sexuality and, transitively, of her talent. If she was dating Baez's ex's lover, that in some way put her on a par with Baez, and when she told friends about Peggy, Janis would always slip that fact in. Joplin and Caserta would see each other off and on for the rest of Joplin's life, but they were never in a monogamous relationship, and Joplin had many other lovers over the years. The next of these was Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, who were just in the process of recording their first album Electric Music for the Mind and Body, when McDonald and Joplin first got together: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Grace"] McDonald would later reminisce about lying with Joplin, listening to one of the first underground FM radio stations, KMPX, and them playing a Fish track and a Big Brother track back to back. Big Brother's second single, the other two songs recorded in the Chicago session, had been released in early 1967, and the B-side, "Down on Me", was getting a bit of airplay in San Francisco and made the local charts, though it did nothing outside the Bay Area: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me"] Janis was unhappy with the record, though, writing to her parents and saying, “Our new record is out. We seem to be pretty dissatisfied w/it. I think we're going to try & get out of the record contract if we can. We don't feel that they know how to promote or engineer a record & every time we recorded for them, they get all our songs, which means we can't do them for another record company. But then if our new record does something, we'd change our mind. But somehow, I don't think it's going to." The band apparently saw a lawyer to see if they could get out of the contract with Mainstream, but they were told it was airtight. They were tied to Bob Shad no matter what for the next five years. Janis and McDonald didn't stay together for long -- they clashed about his politics and her greater fame -- but after they split, she asked him to write a song for her before they became too distant, and he obliged and recorded it on the Fish's next album: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Janis"] The group were becoming so popular by late spring 1967 that when Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles' films among many other classics, came to San Francisco to film Petulia, his follow-up to How I Won The War, he chose them, along with the Grateful Dead, to appear in performance segments in the film. But it would be another filmmaker that would change the course of the group's career irrevocably: [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"] When Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival, nobody had any great expectations. They were second on the bill on the Saturday, the day that had been put aside for the San Francisco acts, and they were playing in the early afternoon, after a largely unimpressive night before. They had a reputation among the San Francisco crowd, of course, but they weren't even as big as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape or Country Joe and the Fish, let alone Jefferson Airplane. Monterey launched four careers to new heights, but three of the superstars it made -- Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who -- already had successful careers. Hendrix and the Who had had hits in the UK but not yet broken the US market, while Redding was massively popular with Black people but hadn't yet crossed over to a white audience. Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the other hand, were so unimportant that D.A. Pennebaker didn't even film their set -- their manager at the time had not wanted to sign over the rights to film their performance, something that several of the other acts had also refused -- and nobody had been bothered enough to make an issue of it. Pennebaker just took some crowd shots and didn't bother filming the band. The main thing he caught was Cass Elliot's open-mouthed astonishment at Big Brother's performance -- or rather at Janis Joplin's performance. The members of the group would later complain, not entirely inaccurately, that in the reviews of their performance at Monterey, Joplin's left nipple (the outline of which was apparently visible through her shirt, at least to the male reviewers who took an inordinate interest in such things) got more attention than her four bandmates combined. As Pennebaker later said “She came out and sang, and my hair stood on end. We were told we weren't allowed to shoot it, but I knew if we didn't have Janis in the film, the film would be a wash. Afterward, I said to Albert Grossman, ‘Talk to her manager or break his leg or whatever you have to do, because we've got to have her in this film. I can't imagine this film without this woman who I just saw perform.” Grossman had a talk with the organisers of the festival, Lou Adler and John Phillips, and they offered Big Brother a second spot, the next day, if they would allow their performance to be used in the film. The group agreed, after much discussion between Janis and Grossman, and against the wishes of their manager: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Ball and Chain (live at Monterey)"] They were now on Albert Grossman's radar. Or at least, Janis Joplin was. Joplin had always been more of a careerist than the other members of the group. They were in music to have a good time and to avoid working a straight job, and while some of them were more accomplished musicians than their later reputations would suggest -- Sam Andrew, in particular, was a skilled player and serious student of music -- they were fundamentally content with playing the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore and making five hundred dollars or so a week between them. Very good money for 1967, but nothing else. Joplin, on the other hand, was someone who absolutely craved success. She wanted to prove to her family that she wasn't a failure and that her eccentricity shouldn't stop them being proud of her; she was always, even at the depths of her addictions, fiscally prudent and concerned about her finances; and she had a deep craving for love. Everyone who talks about her talks about how she had an aching need at all times for approval, connection, and validation, which she got on stage more than she got anywhere else. The bigger the audience, the more they must love her. She'd made all her decisions thus far based on how to balance making music that she loved with commercial success, and this would continue to be the pattern for her in future. And so when journalists started to want to talk to her, even though up to that point Albin, who did most of the on-stage announcements, and Gurley, the lead guitarist, had considered themselves joint leaders of the band, she was eager. And she was also eager to get rid of their manager, who continued the awkward streak that had prevented their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival from being filmed. The group had the chance to play the Hollywood Bowl -- Bill Graham was putting on a "San Francisco Sound" showcase there, featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and got their verbal agreement to play, but after Graham had the posters printed up, their manager refused to sign the contracts unless they were given more time on stage. The next day after that, they played Monterey again -- this time the Monterey Jazz Festival. A very different crowd to the Pop Festival still fell for Janis' performance -- and once again, the film being made of the event didn't include Big Brother's set because of their manager. While all this was going on, the group's recordings from the previous year were rushed out by Mainstream Records as an album, to poor reviews which complained it was nothing like the group's set at Monterey: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] They were going to need to get out of that contract and sign with somewhere better -- Clive Davis at Columbia Records was already encouraging them to sign with him -- but to do that, they needed a better manager. They needed Albert Grossman. Grossman was one of the best negotiators in the business at that point, but he was also someone who had a genuine love for the music his clients made.  And he had good taste -- he managed Odetta, who Janis idolised as a singer, and Bob Dylan, who she'd been a fan of since his first album came out. He was going to be the perfect manager for the group. But he had one condition though. His first wife had been a heroin addict, and he'd just been dealing with Mike Bloomfield's heroin habit. He had one absolutely ironclad rule, a dealbreaker that would stop him signing them -- they didn't use heroin, did they? Both Gurley and Joplin had used heroin on occasion -- Joplin had only just started, introduced to the drug by Gurley -- but they were only dabblers. They could give it up any time they wanted, right? Of course they could. They told him, in perfect sincerity, that the band didn't use heroin and it wouldn't be a problem. But other than that, Grossman was extremely flexible. He explained to the group at their first meeting that he took a higher percentage than other managers, but that he would also make them more money than other managers -- if money was what they wanted. He told them that they needed to figure out where they wanted their career to be, and what they were willing to do to get there -- would they be happy just playing the same kind of venues they were now, maybe for a little more money, or did they want to be as big as Dylan or Peter, Paul, and Mary? He could get them to whatever level they wanted, and he was happy with working with clients at every level, what did they actually want? The group were agreed -- they wanted to be rich. They decided to test him. They were making twenty-five thousand dollars a year between them at that time, so they got ridiculously ambitious. They told him they wanted to make a *lot* of money. Indeed, they wanted a clause in their contract saying the contract would be void if in the first year they didn't make... thinking of a ridiculous amount, they came up with seventy-five thousand dollars. Grossman's response was to shrug and say "Make it a hundred thousand." The group were now famous and mixing with superstars -- Peter Tork of the Monkees had become a close friend of Janis', and when they played a residency in LA they were invited to John and Michelle Phillips' house to see a rough cut of Monterey Pop. But the group, other than Janis, were horrified -- the film barely showed the other band members at all, just Janis. Dave Getz said later "We assumed we'd appear in the movie as a band, but seeing it was a shock. It was all Janis. They saw her as a superstar in the making. I realized that though we were finally going to be making money and go to another level, it also meant our little family was being separated—there was Janis, and there was the band.” [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] If the group were going to make that hundred thousand dollars a year, they couldn't remain on Mainstream Records, but Bob Shad was not about to give up his rights to what could potentially be the biggest group in America without a fight. But luckily for the group, Clive Davis at Columbia had seen their Monterey performance, and he was also trying to pivot the label towards the new rock music. He was basically willing to do anything to get them. Eventually Columbia agreed to pay Shad two hundred thousand dollars for the group's contract -- Davis and Grossman negotiated so half that was an advance on the group's future earnings, but the other half was just an expense for the label. On top of that the group got an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars for their first album for Columbia, making a total investment by Columbia of a quarter of a million dollars -- in return for which they got to sign the band, and got the rights to the material they'd recorded for Mainstream, though Shad would get a two percent royalty on their first two albums for Columbia. Janis was intimidated by signing for Columbia, because that had been Aretha Franklin's label before she signed to Atlantic, and she regarded Franklin as the greatest performer in music at that time.  Which may have had something to do with the choice of a new song the group added to their setlist in early 1968 -- one which was a current hit for Aretha's sister Erma: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] We talked a little in the last episode about the song "Piece of My Heart" itself, though mostly from the perspective of its performer, Erma Franklin. But the song was, as we mentioned, co-written by Bert Berns. He's someone we've talked about a little bit in previous episodes, notably the ones on "Here Comes the Night" and "Twist and Shout", but those were a couple of years ago, and he's about to become a major figure in the next episode, so we might as well take a moment here to remind listeners (or tell those who haven't heard those episodes) of the basics and explain where "Piece of My Heart" comes in Berns' work as a whole. Bert Berns was a latecomer to the music industry, not getting properly started until he was thirty-one, after trying a variety of other occupations. But when he did get started, he wasted no time making his mark -- he knew he had no time to waste. He had a weak heart and knew the likelihood was he was going to die young. He started an association with Wand records as a songwriter and performer, writing songs for some of Phil Spector's pre-fame recordings, and he also started producing records for Atlantic, where for a long while he was almost the equal of Jerry Wexler or Leiber and Stoller in terms of number of massive hits created. His records with Solomon Burke were the records that first got the R&B genre renamed soul (previously the word "soul" mostly referred to a kind of R&Bish jazz, rather than a kind of gospel-ish R&B). He'd also been one of the few American music industry professionals to work with British bands before the Beatles made it big in the USA, after he became alerted to the Beatles' success with his song "Twist and Shout", which he'd co-written with Phil Medley, and which had been a hit in a version Berns produced for the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] That song shows the two elements that existed in nearly every single Bert Berns song or production. The first is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm, a feel he picked up during a stint in Cuba in his twenties. Other people in the Atlantic records team were also partial to those rhythms -- Leiber and Stoller loved what they called the baion rhythm -- but Berns more than anyone else made it his signature. He also very specifically loved the song "La Bamba", especially Ritchie Valens' version of it: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"] He basically seemed to think that was the greatest record ever made, and he certainly loved that three-chord trick I-IV-V-IV chord sequence -- almost but not quite the same as the "Louie Louie" one.  He used it in nearly every song he wrote from that point on -- usually using a bassline that went something like this: [plays I-IV-V-IV bassline] He used it in "Twist and Shout" of course: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] He used it in "Hang on Sloopy": [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] He *could* get more harmonically sophisticated on occasion, but the vast majority of Berns' songs show the power of simplicity. They're usually based around three chords, and often they're actually only two chords, like "I Want Candy": [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Or the chorus to "Here Comes the Night" by Them, which is two chords for most of it and only introduces a third right at the end: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And even in that song you can hear the "Twist and Shout"/"La Bamba" feel, even if it's not exactly the same chords. Berns' whole career was essentially a way of wringing *every last possible drop* out of all the implications of Ritchie Valens' record. And so even when he did a more harmonically complex song, like "Piece of My Heart", which actually has some minor chords in the bridge, the "La Bamba" chord sequence is used in both the verse: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] And the chorus: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] Berns co-wrote “Piece of My Heart” with Jerry Ragavoy. Berns and Ragavoy had also written "Cry Baby" for Garnet Mimms, which was another Joplin favourite: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And Ragavoy, with other collaborators

Pacific St Blues & AmericanaOctober 29, 2023Hair'em Scare'em Sunday as we tip the black fedora to Halloween Featuring: Tom Waits, Zeppelin, Muddy, Stevie & Wonder, Trucks, Winter and Son House. Hear Wolf, Kingfish, Stones, Clapton, with Buddy & Wells. It'll be creepy - ooohhhh. a. Otis Redding / Trick or Treatb. BB King / See that My Grave is Kept Cleanc.  Lightin' Hopkins / Black Ghost Blues1. Nina Simone / I Put a Spell on You2. Copeland, Collins, Cray / Blackcat Bone 3. Creedence Clearwater Revival / Tombstone Shadow4. Janiva Magness / Bad Moon Rising 5. Howlin' Wolf / Evil 6. Christone Kingfish Ingram / Ghost of Christmas Past7. Jeff Beck Group (Rod Stewart) Willie Dixon / I Ain't Superstitious 8. Albert King / Born Under a Bad Sign 9. Taj Mahal / Crossroads Blues 10. Rory Block / Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil) 11. Eric Clapton / Me and the Devil Blues 12. Alvin Youngblood Hart & James Cotton / Hellhound on My Trail 13. Larry McCray / Midnight Rambler 14. Billy Boy Arnold / Paint it Black 15. Lucinda Williams / Sympathy for the Devil 16. The Rolling Stones / Too Much Blood 17. Son House / Grinnin' in Your Face 18. Johnhy Winter / Death Letter Blues 19. Tom Waits / John the Revelator 20. Derek Trucks Band (feat Warren Haynes) / Preaching Blues 

Is this one of the best or worst method books for fingerstyle blues guitar? You can learn to play music using a variety of resources including teachers, online resources, and books. Miggs Rivera's Fingerstyle Blues is an inspiring, well-graduated method book for learning to play fingerstyle blues.  It is aimed at intermediate and advanced fingerstyle players.  Each chapter ultimately provides a full performance tune, but starts by describing a new concept or technique (or two) and providing examples that prepare you for the performance song.  As advertised, this book is focused entirely on fingerstyle blues with deep dives into various substyles including delta blues (Robert Johnson), boogies (John Lee Hooker), slide blues (Son House), and Texas blues (Lightning Hopkins).  There is even a tune that has a modern character with some jazzier chords. I love how in each chapter the book provides technical exercises that directly prepare you for the upcoming performance tune.  Often the author will simplify a section of the performance tune and then provide more complexity with each subsequent example.  The first chapter of the book presents a somewhat basic 12-bar blues, then provides 5 separate 12-bar variations that each focus on adding a new technique (hammer-on grace notes, slide grace notes, rubato bends, chords fragments, rubato bends on the higher and lower strings), and finally culminates in an all-inclusive performance tune.  Mr. Rivera really hit the nail on the head with his teaching approach. The author provides some music theory, but only that which is immediately applicable to an upcoming performance tune.  You will spend much more time playing music than analyzing music theory.  The book includes access to private/un-searchable YouTube video lessons through QR codes.  You will need a cell phone that can pull these up.  These videos are extremely helpful as they include explanations and demonstrations by the author.  These are particularly useful as they show you the proper rhythms and feel. One thing to note about this book is that it doesn't emphasize improvisation which is a huge part of blues music.  However, you could learn about improvisation elsewhere (with a private teacher or with a book like Joseph Alexander's Fingerstyle Blues Guitar) and then implement it into the tunes of this book. Authentic sounding fingerstyle blues tunes. Excellent difficulty graduation – examples build off each other and get gradually more complex and difficult.  Cohesive feel throughout the book, especially as the final performance tune pulls from the earlier tunes. Not much emphasis on improvisation. Online video lessons are extremely helpful – difficult rhythms and feel are much easier to learn with the videos. The book does introduce some modern percussive techniques used by modern players like Michael Hedges, Don Ross, Andy McKee, Mike Dawes, etc.  You will learn to play thumb slaps and various percussive hits on the guitar body. I would recommend that you use an acoustic steel string or electric guitar.  You could use a nylon string classical guitar if absolutely necessary, but I wouldn't recommend it. Independently published by Miggs Rivera.  © 2020 eBook: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar: go to http://joemcmurray.com/checkout/ to purchase a pdf of my eBook. Riding the Wave: my second fingerstyle guitar album is available on all streaming platforms. Pins on the Map: my third fingerstyle guitar album will soon be released.

Dive into the riveting juxtaposition of the blues—often dubbed "The Devil's Music"—and its spiritual counterpart, gospel music, in the 13th installment of “The Blues Legacy” with Liam J. Holland. This episode unravels the intertwined histories and mutual influences of these seemingly contrasting genres, exploring their African musical roots and the inherent tension between secular and sacred. Featuring classics from blues pioneers like Robert Johnson and Son House and delving into gospel echoes in modern hits like Beyoncé's “Halo,” this episode is a journey through existential angst, redemption, and the resolution of dichotomous themes. Discover how the spiritual kinship between blues and gospel continues to resonate in today's music, shaping emotions, and narratives. SUPPORT: https://lnk.bio/TheBluesLegacy --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theblueslegacy/message

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Tony Joe White  | Cool Town Woman  | Bad Mouthin' (2018) | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Got Her Letter This Morning  | Lonesome Life (1969) | Duster Bennett  | Pride Of Place  | Comin' Home- Unreleased & Rare Recordings, Vol. 2 1971-1975 | Half Deaf Clatch  | Death Don't Have No Mercy (Reverend Gary Davis)  | Borrowed Blues  |  | Snooks Eaglin  | I Went To The Mardi Gras  | Soul's Edge  |  | Lone Bear  | Long Way From Home  | Live In Mississippi  |  | Son House  | Motherless Children Have A Hard Time  | Son House-Real Delta Blues | Chad Strentz  | They Tell Me  | Acoustically Yours Vol 1 | Poky Lafarge and the South City Three  | Ain't The Same  | Middle Of Everywhere | Homesick James  | Unlucky  | The Country Blues  |  | Jake Leg Jug Band  | Goodbye Booze  | LIve At The Audley Theatre | Catfish Keith  | Texas Tea Party  | Live AtThe Half Moon, Putney | Julian Piper  | Cherry Ball  | Terlingua  |   |  | Michot's Melody Makers  | La Lune Est Croche  | Michot's Melody Makers Blood Moon

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Ernie Hawkins  | Sweethearts On Parade (feat. Roger Day, Paul Consentino & Joe D  | Monongahela Rye  |  | Son House  | John The Revelator  | The Delta Blues Of Son House | Big Bill Broonzy  | It's A Low Down Dirty Shame  | Chicago 1937-1938 (CD8)  1937-1940 Part 2 | Tony Joe White  | You Got Me Running  | Baby Please Don't Go | The Georgia Browns  | Who Stole De Lock.  | Curley Weaver (1933-1935) | Pistol Pete Wearn  | Rosalynd  | Blues, Ballads & Barnstormers | Alger ''Texas'' Alexander  | Water Bound Blues (1929)  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1928 - 1930) | Lightnin' Hopkins  | Goin' Away  | Goin' Away (1963)  |  | Pinetop Perkins  | Willow Weep For Me  | Heaven  |   |  | W.C. Handy Preservation Band - Carl Wolfe  | Loveless Love  | W.C. Handy's Beale Street: Where The Blues Began | Guy Davis  | Did You See My Baby  | Juba Dance  |  | Jesse Fuller  | Morning Blues  | San Francisco Bay Blues | Jo Ann Kelly  | Boll Weevil  | Do It and More  |  | Mike Goudreau  | I'm So Glad I Have You  | Acoustic Sessions  |  | Auld Man's Baccie  | Whole Lotta Rosie  | 100% Homage  |  | Half Deaf Clatch  | Tumbledown Blues  | Eat Sleep Stomp Repeat

Dive into the heart of the Mississippi Delta in episode 2 of 'The Blues Legacy: Foundations of Modern Music.' This episode transports you to the birthplace of Delta Blues, exploring the genre's roots and showcasing pioneers like Charley Patton, Son House, and the legendary Robert Johnson. Discover how this gritty, soulful sound emerged from the cotton fields to influence the course of modern music. From haunting slide guitar to evocative storytelling, learn how Delta Blues continues to reverberate through time. Click the link to show your support for the show via Patreon or Ko-fi https://lnk.bio/TheBluesLegacy --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theblueslegacy/message

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. 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/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |   |  | Son House  | Clarksdale Moan  | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD A)  | 2007 JSP Records  |   |  | Roosevelt Sykes  | Come On Back Home  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD5 | Doc Watson & Rec Live Newport Folk Fest 1963/4  | Little Orphan Girl  | The Essential Doc Watson  |   |  | Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee  | John Henry (Recorded Live At The Free Trade Hall, Manchester, E  | Chris Barber Presents The Blues Legacy Lost & Found Series  | Lightnin' Hopkins  | 4. Stool Pigeon Blues  | Folk Blues Revival  |   |   |  | Snooks Eaglin  | Mailman Passed  | That's Alright  |   |   |  | John Hammond  | My Starter Won't Start  | You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover - 1993 | Half Deaf Clatch  | Waiting For The Storm to Pass  | The Album With No Name  |   |  | Blind Willie McTell  | Experience Blues  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 2 (1931-1933) | Jelly Jaw Short  | Barefoot Blues  | When The Levee Breaks, Mississippi Blues (Rare Cuts CD C)  | 2007 JSP  Records  |   |  | Andres Roots Roundabout  | Miss Carmen James  | Three!  |   |   |   |  | Tony Joe White  | Heartbreak Hotel  | Bad Mouthin' (2018)  |   |  | Fiona Boyes  | Party at Red's  | Voodoo In The Shadows  |   |  | Seasick Steve & The Level Devils  | Cheap  | Cheap  |   |   |   |  | Seasick Steve  | Happy (To Have A Job)  | Man From Another Time  |   |  | David Evans  | Don't Leave Me Here  | Lonesome Midnight Dream  |   | 

This episode's guest is Steph Aritone, comedian & The Comedy Winelist podcaster⁠⁠. We talk Eurovision, alternative organic fish food from Poland, massage guns & inappropriate music for children's disco in the 90s. It's a delight. Listen to the full Playlist? YEAH playlist HERE (ALL) or this just this episodes tracks and references HERE (EP021) Featured Artists: Beats International, Shabba Ranks/Chevelle Frankin, Shaggy, M-Beat/General Levy, The Vines, The White Stripes, Son House, Lead Belly - - - - -  CONTACT   www.playlistyeah.com hello@playlistyeah.com   Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - TikTok- - - - -   GUEST LINKS Steph AritoneTwitter - Instagram - Linkr.ee- - - - -   OTHER LINKS   Artwork   Ryan Hunt  Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - YouTube - Esty   Susa Maule  Instagram - Etsy --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/playlistyeah/message

2022 has come to close and it's been a year of great music. The Antidote has sorted through this year's releases and delivers the best of the crop with our 2022 Top 10 list. Punk, rock, metal, blues, just about everything you could imagine. Tune in for some extraordinary music. Music by: The Harlem Gospel Travelers Fine China Jodi Essex Demon Hunter Wolves At the Gate Son House Peter Johnston RVA Citizens Nate Parrish Rusty Shipp

Wilco "Misunderstood"Lucinda Williams "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings"Grateful Dead "Deep Elem Blues"John Lee Hooker "Baby Be Strong"Prince "Nothing Compares 2 U"ZZ Top "Brown Sugar"D'Angelo "Brown Sugar"The Jimi Hendrix Experience "I Don't Live Today"Jimi Hendrix "Mannish Boy"Patti Smith "Jubilee"Precious Bryant "Don't You Wanna Jump"Doc Watson "Walk On Boy"Drive-by Truckers "Uncle Frank"S.G. Goodman "All My Love Is Coming Back To Me"Tom Petty "Hard On Me"Ben Harper "Knew The Day Was Comin'"Uncle Tupelo "Left in the Dark"R.E.M. "Orange Crush"Junior Kimbrough "Crawling King Snake"John Coltrane "You Say You Care"Son House "John The Revalator"Charlie Parr "Jimmy Bell"Bruce Springsteen "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)"Nicole Atkins "Goodnight Rhonda Lee"Chad Price "With Broken Hearts"Plains "No Record of Wrongs"

Vera Hall "Death, Have Mercy"Fleetwood Mac "Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown)"Bessie Smith "Graveyard Dream Blues"Billy Joe Shaver "The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time"Ted Leo and the Pharmacists "I'm A Ghost"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Strange Things Happening Every Day"Tampa Red "Witchin' Hour Blues"Neil Young "Vampire Blues"Lefty Frizzell "The Long Black Veil"Muddy Waters "Got My Mojo Working"Dr. John "Black John the Conqueror"Leon Redbone "Haunted House"Little Willie John "I'm Shakin'"Shotgun Jazz Band "Old Man Mose"Lil Green "Romance In the Dark"The Make-Up "They Live By Night"Uncle Tupelo "Graveyard Shift"Bessie Jones "Oh Death"Albert King "Born Under a Bad Sign"Nina Simone "I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl"Oscar Celestin "Marie Laveau"Reverend Gary Davis "Death Don't Have No Mercy"Roy Newman & His Boys "Sadie Green (The Vamp of New Orleans)"Jessie Mae Hemphill "She-Wolf"Screamin' Jay Hawkins "I Put a Spell On You"Eilen Jewell "It's Your Voodoo Working"George Olsen and His Music "Tain't No Sin to Dance Around in Your Bones"Son House "Death Letter"Johnny Cash "The Man Comes Around"Fleetwood Mac "Black Magic Woman"Blind Lemon Jefferson "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"Elvis Costello & the Roots "Wise Up Ghost"Hank Williams "Howlin' At the Moon"Bob Dylan "That Old Black Magic"The Halo Benders "Scarin'"Blind Willie Johnson "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"Steve And Justin Townes Earle "Candy Man"Billie Holiday "Sugar"Jeff Beck "I Ain't Superstitious"Cab Calloway/Cab Calloway Orchestra "St. James Infirmary"Bonnie Raitt "Devil Got My Woman"Sebadoh "Vampire"Fred McDowell "Death Came In"Howlin' Wolf "Evil"Ella Fitzgerald "Chew-Chew-Chew (Your Bubble Gum)"Robert Johnson "Hellhound On My Trail"John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers "The Super-Natural"Tom Waits "Big Joe and Phantom 309"

The Grammy-winning guitarist, singer, and producer with the New Orleans Suspects is also a Dirty Dozen Brass Band alum and owner/engineer of Rhythm Shack Studio where he’s recorded blues legend Bobby Rush and hoodoo slide guitar master John Mooney. Jake spent years playing the mountain music of Doc Watson and making L.A. sessions with studio giants like Larry Carlton before landing in the Crescent City. Tonight he submits to an interrogation as the Troubled Men play a little good cop/bad cop. Topics include a hearing date, early invitations, self help, the mayor’s debt, NOPD incentives, lawlessness, the royal family, a stalker update, a long hospital stay, a Covid honeymoon, a musical family, vaudeville, Appalachian State University, Eric Clapton, the Music Institute, Kirk Joseph, a post-Katrina relocation, Terrence Higgins, an extended tour, Roger Lewis, Liberace and Fats Domino, Sammy Davis, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Son House, Trina Shoemaker, Sheryl Crow, porno merchandise, Cedric Burnside, health issues, a new record, a final question, and much more. Intro music: "Just Keeps Raining" by Styler/Coman Break and Outro Music: "Criminal" and "Good Intentions" by the New Orleans Suspects Support the podcast: Paypal or Venmo Join the Patreon page here. Shop for Troubled Men’s Shirts here. Subscribe, review, and rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts or any podcast source. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Troubled Men Podcast Facebook Troubled Men Podcast Instagram Iguanas Tour Dates René Coman Facebook Jake Eckert Facebook New Orleans Suspects Facebook New Orleans Suspects Homepage

Medley of Blues Classics. This podcast presents an uninterrupted medley of various Blues classics including Blind Willie Johnson's "Nobody's Fault but Mine", the traditional African American spiritual "You Gotta Move", Son House's "Grinnin in Your Face" and also the traditional folk ballad of "John Henry". PLAYLIST. Nobody's Fault but Mine. - Abigail Washburn. - Bill Frisell - Becky Barksdale - Othman Wahabi - Blind Willie Johnson. You Got To Move. - The Blues Preachers. - Paul Thorn. - The Blind Boys of Alabama - Janne Fjellström. Grinnin' in your Face - Gov' Mule. - Little Axe. - Julie Rhodes. - Son House. John Henry - Eddie One String Jones - Etta Baker. - Tangle Eye. - J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers - Joe Bonamassa - Songs Ohia. I'm So Glad - Starlight Gospel Singers. - Blind Willie McTell. - The Cream. The Very Thing that makes you rich makes me poor. - Ry Cooder On Your Way Down - Little Axe - Little Feat Size: 136 MB (142,892,260 bytes) Duration: 0:59:30

There's a story behind this week's show. The Blues Society of Omaha asked me and Glenn, who fills in from time to time, to go on the main stage of our annual, In the Market for the Blues, and discuss the history of the blues. So we did. Sorta. The blues is a pretty big topic - especially to pack into 45 minutes. Instead, I put together A History of the Blues (rather than The History...). I decided to discuss some of the events that made the blues the artform it is today including The Great Migrations of Blacks from the American South to the north and west, some of the sources for blues music including field recordings, Chess Records, and John Hammond. I also told some stories like how John Lomax's efforts to get a recording label for Leadbelly tied together with the sit-com Friends, or how John Hammond's search for Robert Johnson created, in large part, the sound that was Classic Rock, or how a Memphis kid's love of a jug band player lead, indirectly, to several hit recording acts in the 60s and 70s. Or how Reg Dwight played the blues and became Elton John.  We are ecclectricity and, ideally, you find that entertaining and informative. At the very least, but perhaps the most important, the show is not predictable or driven by cliches. Thanks for giving this a lesson.It was an act of love putting this together. I hope you enjoy the effort. Pacific Street BluesAugust 7, 2022Link to Visuals1. Blue House and the Rent to Own Horns / I Put a Spell on You2. Dave Alvin / Highway 663. W.C. Handy /Beale Street Blues 4. Louis Armstrong / What Did I Do (to be so Black and Blue)? 5. Alan Lomax / Spoken Word6. Rev. Gary Davis / Candy Man 7. Bessie Jones and the Group8. Blind Willie Johnson / John the Revelator (Rex Granite Band, Mellencamp, Son House) 9. Tedeschi Trucks Band / Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning 10. Leadbelly / New Orleans11. Lonnie Donegan / Rock Island Line12. The Animals / House of the Rising Sun13. Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits) / Donegan's Gone 14. Bruce Springsteen / spoken15. Woody Guthrie / This Land is Your Land 6. The Carter Family / When the World's on Fire 17. Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash / Jackson18. Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash / North Country Girl 19. Memphis Jug Band / KC Moan20. Charlie Musselwhite / Blues Gave Me a Ride (Elvin Bishop [Paul Butterfield Blues Band], Ben Harper)21. Lovin' Spoonful / What a Day for a Daydream (Even Dozen Jug Band; Jonathan Sebastian, David Grisom (Grateful Dead), Steve Katz (Blood Sweat & Tears), 22. Maria Muldaur/ Midnight at the Oasis

「The Blues is the roots and everything else is the fruits.」蓝调音乐作为几乎最有影响力的及种音乐风格的「母亲」，存在已经有超过 100 年的时间。但鲜少有人知道蓝调的起源究竟是什么样的？它如何出现？为何出现？有什么特点？这期节目，将会从历史的角度来和你聊聊，蓝调音乐的起源是什么，因此，你将会听到一些原始的录音，以及最古老的蓝调。欢迎你的收听 :)

Pacific St Blues & AmericanaMay 29, 2022Over the years acoustic slide blues player Aurora "Rory" Block has explored the music of the great delta players including Skip James, Rev. Son House, Rev. Gary Davis, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bukka White, Bessie Smith, and Leadbelly.Join me this week as we explore the various musical paths trodden by Rory Block. Block appeared at the Indigenous Jam back in the day. PLUS we focus on new tunes by old favorites! 1. Corey Harris / Insurrection Blues2. Charlie Musselwhite / Crawling King Snake3. Rory Block / Death Letter Blues (Reverend Son House) 4. John Mellencamp / John the Revelator(Reverend Son House)5. Rex Granite Band / Man in Chapter Two 6. Bonnie Raitt / Waiting for You to Blow 7. Rory Block / Death Don't Have No Mercy (Rev. Gary Davis)8. Jackson Browne / Cocaine (Rev. Gary Davis)9. Kenny Neal / Blues Keeps Chasing Me 10. Marcus King Band / Hard Working Man 11. Rory Block / Avalon (Mississippi John Hurt) 12. Dave Alvin & Peter Case (dBs) / Monday Morning Blues (Mississippi John Hurt)13. Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials / Giving Up on Your Love (Soaring Wings Vineyard Blues Festival)14. Eric Clapton / Alabama Woman Blues 15. Rory Block / Good Morning Little School Girl (Mississippi Fred McDowell)16. The Rolling Stones / You Gotta Move (Mississippi Fred McDowell)17. Lyle Lovett / 12th of June18. Lucinda Williams / Wildflower19. Rory Block / Cross Roads Blues (Robert Johnson)20. Led Zeppelin / Traveling Riverside Blues (Robert Johnson)

This week on the program we'll hear some great acoustic blues. We have classics from Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Frank Hovington and new releases from Grammy winner Cedric Burnside, and Bonnie Raitt. We'll feature three selections and a review of the new CD Get On Board from old friends Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, focused on the music of Sonny & Brownie. Acoustic blues, old and new … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysWoody Mann / “The Rev's Music” / Road Trip / Acoustic SessionsGrant Dermody & Frank Fotusky / “Peach Tree Blues” / Digging in John's Backyard / Self ProducedFrank Hovington / “Mean Old Frisco” / Lonesome Road Blues / RounderMaria Muldaur w/ Tuba Skinny / “I Like You Best of All” / Let's Get Happy Together / Stony PlainWillie Dixon / “88 Boogie” / The Big Three Trio / ColumbiaSon House / “Preachin' Blues” / Forever on My Mind / Easy Eye SoundBonnie Raitt / “Down the Hall” / Just Like That... / RedwingBlind Willie Johnson / “Dark Was the Night-Cold Was the Ground” / Praise God I'm Satisfied / YazooWoody Mann / “Aflenz” / Road Trip/ Acoustic SessionsTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder / “Hooray Hooray” / Get on Board / NonesuchTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder / “What a Beautiful City” / Get on Board / NonesuchTaj Mahal & Ry Cooder / “I Shall Not Be Moved” / Get on Board / NonesuchCedric Burnside / “The World Can Be So Cold” / I Be Trying / Single LockSonny Terry & Brownie McGhee / “Walk On” / Blues Cafe / PutumayoPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

We talk COVID-19 next steps with the President of the state Medical Association. And, the story behind a newly released sixty-year-old album from a Mississippi blues legend. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

durée : 00:08:00 - La chronique de Djubaka - Aujourd'hui, Djubaka nous cause de Son House, chanteur et guitariste de blues.

Episode 129 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and how they went from being a moderately successful beat group to being the only serious rivals to the Beatles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eleven-minute bonus episode available, on "I'll Never Find Another You" by the Seekers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Two resources that I've used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. When in doubt, the version of the narrative I've chosen to use is the one from Davis' book. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards' Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. Sympathy for the Devil: The Birth of the Rolling Stones and the Death of Brian Jones by Paul Trynka is, as the title might suggest, essentially special pleading for Jones. It's as well-researched and well-written as a pro-Jones book can be, and is worth reading for balance, though I find it unconvincing. This web page seems to have the most accurate details of the precise dates of sessions and gigs. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones' singles up to 1971, including every Stones track I excerpt in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at one of the most important riffs in rock and roll history -- the record that turned the distorted guitar riff into the defining feature of the genre, even though the man who played that riff never liked it. We're going to look at a record that took the social protest of the folk-rock movement, aligned it with the misogyny its singer had found in many blues songs, and turned it into the most powerful expression of male adolescent frustration ever recorded to that point. We're going to look at "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction"] A note before we start this -- this episode deals with violence against women, and with rape. If you're likely to be upset hearing about those things, you might want to either skip this episode, or read the transcript on the website first. The relevant section comes right at the end of the episode, so you can also listen through to the point where I give another warning, without missing any of the rest of the episode. Another point I should make here -- most of the great sixties groups have very accurate biographies written about them. The Stones, even more than the Beatles, have kept a surprising amount of control over their public image, with the result that the only sources about them are either rather sanitised things made with their co-operation, or rather tabloidy things whose information mostly comes from people who are holding a grudge or have a particular agenda. I believe that everything in this episode is the most likely of the various competing narratives, but if you check out the books I used, which are listed on the blog post associated with this episode, you'll see that there are several different tellings of almost every bit of this story. So bear that in mind as you're listening. I've done my best. Anyway, on with the episode.  When we left the Rolling Stones, they were at the very start of their recording career, having just released their first big hit single, a version of "I Wanna Be Your Man", which had been written for them by Lennon and McCartney.  The day after they first appeared on Top of the Pops, they were back in the recording studio, but not to record for themselves. The five Stones, plus Ian Stewart, were being paid two pounds a head by their manager/producer Andrew Oldham to be someone else's backing group. Oldham was producing a version of "To Know Him is to Love Him", the first hit by his idol Phil Spector, for a new singer he was managing named Cleo Sylvester: [Excerpt: Cleo, "To Know Him is to Love Him"] In a further emulation of Spector, the B-side was a throwaway instrumental. Credited to "the Andrew Oldham Orchestra", and with Mike Leander supervising, the song's title, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones", gave away who the performers actually were: [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones"] At this point, the Stones were still not writing their own material, but Oldham had already seen the writing on the wall -- there was going to be no place in the new world opened up by the Beatles for bands that couldn't generate their own hits, and he had already decided who was going to be doing that for his group.  It would have been natural for him to turn to Brian Jones, still at this point the undisputed leader of the group, and someone who had a marvellous musical mind. But possibly in order to strengthen the group's identity as a group rather than a leader and his followers -- Oldham has made different statements about this at different points -- or possibly just because they were living in the same flat as him at the time, while Jones was living elsewhere, he decided that the Rolling Stones' equivalent of Lennon and McCartney was going to be Jagger and Richards. There are several inconsistencies in the stories of how Jagger and Richards started writing together -- and things like what the actual first song they wrote together was, or when they wrote it, will probably always be lost to the combination of self-aggrandisement and drug-fuelled memory loss that makes it difficult to say anything definitive about much of their career. But we do know that one of the earliest songs they wrote together was "As Tears Go By", a song that wasn't considered suitable for the group -- though they did later record a version of it -- and was given instead to Marianne Faithfull, a young singer with whom Jagger was about to enter into a relationship: [Excerpt: Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"] It's not entirely clear who wrote what on that song -- it's usually referred to as a Jagger/Richards collaboration, but it's credited to Jagger, Richards, and Oldham, and at least one source claims it was actually written by Jagger and the session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan -- and if so, this would be the first time of many that a song written by Jagger or Richards in collaboration with someone else would be credited to Jagger and Richards without any credit going to their co-writer. But the consensus story, as far as there is a consensus, seems to be that Oldham locked Jagger and Richards into a kitchen, and told them they weren't coming out until they had a song written. And it had to be a proper song, not a pastiche of something else, and it had to be the kind of song you could release as a single, not a blues song. After spending all night in the kitchen, Richards eventually got bored of being stuck in there, and started strumming his guitar and singing "it is the evening of the day", and the two of them quickly came up with the rest of the song. After "As Tears Go By", they wrote a lot of songs that they didn't feel were right for the group, but gave them away to other people, like Gene Pitney, who recorded "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday": [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday"] Pitney, and his former record producer Phil Spector, had visited the Stones during the sessions for their first album, which started the day after that Cleo session, and had added a little piano and percussion to a blues jam called "Little by Little", which also featured Allan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals. The songwriting on that track was credited to Spector and Nanker Phelge, a group pseudonym that was used for jam sessions and instrumentals. It was one of two Nanker Phelge songs on the album, and there was also an early Jagger and Richards song, "Tell Me", an unoriginal Merseybeat pastiche: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Tell Me"] But the bulk of the album was made up of cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and other Black American musicians. The album went to number one in the UK album charts, which is a much more impressive achievement than it might sound. At this point, albums sold primarily to adults with spending money, and the album charts changed very slowly. Between May 1963 and February 1968, the *only* artists to have number one albums in the UK were the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Monkees, the cast of The Sound of Music, and Val Doonican. And between May 63 and April 65 it was *only* the Beatles and the Stones. But while they'd had a number one album, they'd still not had a number one single, or even a top ten one. "I Wanna Be Your Man" had been written for them and had hit number twelve, but they were still not writing songs that they thought were suited for release as singles, and they couldn't keep asking the Beatles to help them out, so while Jagger and Richards kept improving as songwriters, for their next single they chose a Buddy Holly B-side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away"] The group had latched on to the Bo Diddley rhythm in that song, along with its machismo -- many of the cover versions they chose in this period seem to have not just a sexual subtext but to be overtly bragging, and if Little Richard is to be believed on the subject, Holly's line "My love is bigger than a Cadillac" isn't that much of an exaggeration. It's often claimed that the Stones exaggerated and emphasised the Bo Diddley sound, and made their version more of an R&B number than Holly's, but if anything their version owes more to someone else.  The Stones' first real UK tour had been on a bill with Mickie Most, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, and Keith Richards in particular had been amazed by the Everlys. He said later "The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect". Don Everly, of course, was himself very influenced by Bo Diddley, and learned to play in open-G tuning from Diddley -- and several years later, Keith Richards would make that tuning his own, after being inspired by Everly and Ry Cooder.  The Stones' version of "Not Fade Away" owes at least as much to Don Everly's rhythm guitar style as to that of Holly or Diddley. Compare, say, the opening of "Wake Up Little Suzie": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] The rhythm guitar on the Stones version of "Not Fade Away" is definitely Keith Richards doing Don Everly doing Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] That was recorded during the sessions for their first album, and was, depending on whose story you believe, another track that featured Phil Spector and Gene Pitney on percussion, recorded at the same session as "Little by Little", which became its B-side. Bill Wyman, who kept copious notes of the group's activities, has always said that the idea that it was recorded at that session was nonsense, and that it was recorded weeks later, and Oldham merely claimed Spector was on the record for publicity purposes. On the other hand, Gene Pitney had a very strong memory of being at that session. Spector had been in the country because the Ronettes had been touring the UK with the Stones as one of their support acts, along with the Swinging Blue Jeans and Marty Wilde, and Spector was worried that Ronnie might end up with one of the British musicians. He wasn't wrong to worry -- according to Ronnie's autobiography, there were several occasions when she came very close to sleeping with John Lennon, though they never ended up doing anything and remained just friends, while according to Keith Richards' autobiography he and Ronnie had a chaste affair on that tour which became less chaste when the Stones later hit America. But Spector had flown over to the UK to make sure that he remained in control of the young woman who he considered his property. Pitney, meanwhile, according to his recollection, turned up to the session at the request of Oldham, as the group were fighting in the studio and not getting the track recorded. Pitney arrived with cognac, telling the group that it was his birthday and that they all needed to get drunk with him. They did, they stopped fighting, and they recorded the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] "Not Fade Away" made number three on the UK charts, and also became the first Stones record to chart in the US at all, though it only scraped its way to number forty-eight, not any higher. But in itself that was a lot -- it meant that the Stones had a record doing well enough to justify them going to the US for their first American tour.  But before that, they had to go through yet another UK tour -- though this isn't counted as an official tour in the listings of their tours, it's just a bunch of shows, in different places, that happened to be almost every night for a couple of months. By this time, the audience response was getting overwhelming, and shows often had to be cut short to keep the group safe. At one show, in Birkenhead, the show had to be stopped after the band played *three bars*, with the group running off stage after that as the audience invaded the stage. And then it was off to the US, where they were nowhere near as big, though while they were over there, "Tell Me" was also released as a single to tie in with the tour, and that did surprisingly well, making number twenty-four. The group's first experience of the US wasn't an entirely positive one -- there was a disastrous appearance on the Dean Martin Show on TV, with Martin mocking the group both before and after their performance, to the extent that Bob Dylan felt moved to write in the liner notes to his next album “Dean Martin should apologise t'the Rolling Stones”. But on the other hand, there were some good experiences. They got to see James Brown at the Apollo, and Jagger started taking notes -- though Richards also noted *what* Jagger was noting, saying "James wanted to show off to these English folk. He's got the Famous Flames, and he's sending one out for a hamburger, he's ordering another to polish his shoes and he's humiliating his own band. To me, it was the Famous Flames, and James Brown happened to be the lead singer. But the way he lorded it over his minions, his minders and the actual band, to Mick was fascinating" They also met up with Murray the K, the DJ who had started the career of the Ronettes among others. Murray had unilaterally declared himself "the fifth Beatle", and was making much of his supposed connections with British pop stars, most of whom either had no idea who he was or actively disliked him (Richards, when talking about him, would often replace the K with a four-letter word usually spelled with a "c"). The Stones didn't like him any more than any of the other groups did, but Murray played them a record he thought they'd be interested in -- "It's All Over Now" by the Valentinos, the song that Bobby Womack had written and which was on Sam Cooke's record label: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] They decided that they were going to record that, and handily Oldham had already arranged some studio time for them. As Giorgio Gomelsky would soon find with the Yardbirds, Oldham was convinced that British studios were simply unsuitable for recording loud blues-based rock and roll music, and Phil Spector had suggested to him that if the Stones loved Chess records so much, they might as well record at Chess studios.  So while the group were in Chicago, they were booked in for a couple of days in the studio at Chess, where they were horrified to discover that their musical idol Muddy Waters was earning a little extra cash painting the studio ceiling and acting as a roadie, helping them in with their equipment.  (It should be noted here that Marshall Chess, Leonard Chess' son who worked with the Stones in the seventies, has denied this happened. Keith Richards insists it did.) But after that shock, they found working at Chess a great experience. Not only did various of their musical idols, like Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry, as well as Waters, pop in to encourage them, and not only were they working with the same engineer who had recorded many of those people's records, but they were working in a recording studio with an actual multi-track system rather than a shoddy two-track tape recorder. From this point on, while they would still record in the UK on occasion, they increasingly chose to use American studios.  The version of "It's All Over Now" they recorded there was released as their next single. It only made the top thirty in the US -- they had still not properly broken through there -- but it became their first British number one: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "It's All Over Now"] Bobby Womack was furious that the Stones had recorded his song while his version was still new, but Sam Cooke talked him down, explaining that if Womack played his cards right he could have a lot of success through his connection with these British musicians. Once the first royalty cheques came in, Womack wasn't too upset any more. When they returned to the UK, they had another busy schedule of touring and recording -- and not all of it just for Rolling Stones work. There was, for example, an Andrew Oldham Orchestra session, featuring many people from the British session world who we've noted before -- Joe Moretti from Vince Taylor's band, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Andy White, Mike Leander, and more. Mick Jagger added vocals to their version of "I Get Around": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "I Get Around"] It's possible that Oldham had multiple motives for recording that -- Oldham was always a fan of Beach Boys style pop music more than he was of R&B, but he also was in the process of setting up his own publishing company, and knew that the Beach Boys' publishers didn't operate in the UK. In 1965, Oldham's company would become the Beach Boys' UK publishers, and he would get a chunk of every cover version of their songs, including his own. There were also a lot of demo sessions for Jagger/Richards songs intended for other artists, with Mick and Keith working with those same session musicians -- like this song that they wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, demoed by Jagger and Richards with Moretti, Page, Jones, John McLaughlin, Big Jim Sullivan, and Andy White: [Excerpt: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "We're Wastin' Time"] But of course there were also sessions for Rolling Stones records, like their next UK number one single, "Little Red Rooster": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] "Little Red Rooster" is a song that is credited to Willie Dixon, but which actually combines several elements from earlier blues songs, including a riff inspired by the one from Son House's "Death Letter Blues": [Excerpt: Son House, "Death Letter Blues"] A melody line and some lines of lyric from Memphis Minnie's "If You See My Rooster": [Excerpt: Memphis Minnie, "If You See My Rooster"] And some lines from Charley Patton's "Banty Rooster Blues": [Excerpt: Charley Patton, "Banty Rooster Blues"] Dixon's resulting song had been recorded by Howlin' Wolf in 1961: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] That hadn't been a hit, but Sam Cooke had recorded a cover version, in a very different style, that made the US top twenty and proved the song had chart potential: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] The Rolling Stones version followed Howlin' Wolf's version very closely, except that Jagger states that he *is* a cock -- I'm sorry, a rooster -- rather than that he merely has one. And this would normally be something that would please Brian Jones immensely -- that the group he had formed to promote Delta and Chicago blues had managed to get a song like that to number one in the UK charts, especially as it was dominated by his slide playing. But in fact the record just symbolised the growing estrangement between Jones and the rest of his band. When he turned up at the session to record "Little Red Rooster", he was dismayed to find out that the rest of the group had deliberately told him the wrong date. They'd recorded the track the day before, without him, and just left a note from Jagger to tell him where to put his slide fills. They spent the next few months ping-ponging between the UK and the US. In late 1964 they made another US tour, during which at one point Brian Jones collapsed with what has been variously reported as stress and alcohol poisoning, and had to miss several shows, leaving the group to carry on without him. There was much discussion at this point of just kicking him out of the band, but they decided against it -- he was still perceived as the group's leader and most popular member. They also appeared on the TAMI show, which we've mentioned before, and which we'll look at in more detail when we next look at James Brown, but which is notable here for two things. The first is that they once again saw how good James Brown was, and at this point Jagger decided that he was going to do his best to emulate Brown's performance -- to the extent that he asked a choreographer to figure out what Brown was doing and teach it to him, but the choreographer told Jagger that Brown moved too fast to figure out all his steps. The other is that the musical director for the TAMI Show was Jack Nitzsche, and this would be the start of a professional relationship that would last for many years. We've seen Nitzsche before in various roles -- he was the co-writer of "Needles and Pins", and he was also the arranger on almost all of Phil Spector's hits. He was so important to Spector's sound that Keith Richards has said “Jack was the Genius, not Phil. Rather, Phil took on Jack's eccentric persona and sucked his insides out.” Nitzsche guested on piano when the Stones went into the studio in LA to record a chunk of their next album, including the ballad "Heart of Stone", which would become a single in the US. From that point on, whenever the Stones recorded in LA, Nitzsche would be there, adding keyboards and percussion and acting as an uncredited co-producer and arranger. He was apparently unpaid for this work, which he did just because he enjoyed being around the band. Nitzsche would also play on the group's next UK single, recorded a couple of months later. This would be their third UK number one, and the first one credited to Jagger and Richards as songwriters, though the credit is a rather misleading one in this case, as the chorus is taken directly from a gospel song by Pops Staples, recorded by the Staple Singers: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "This May Be The Last Time"] Jagger and Richards took that chorus and reworked it into a snarling song whose lyrics were based around Jagger's then favourite theme -- how annoying it is when women want to do things other than whatever their man wants them to do: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "The Last Time"] There is a deep, deep misogyny in the Stones' lyrics in the mid sixties, partly inspired by the personas taken on by some blues men (though there are very few blues singers who stuck so unrelentingly to a single theme), and partly inspired by Jagger's own relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton, who he regarded as his inferior, even though she was his superior in terms of the British class system. That's even more noticeable on "Play With Fire", the B-side to "The Last Time". "The Last Time" had been recorded in such a long session that Jones, Watts, and Wyman went off to bed, exhausted. But Jagger and Richards wanted to record a demo of another song, which definitely seems to have been inspired by Shrimpton, so they got Jack Nitzsche to play harpsichord and Phil Spector to play (depending on which source you believe) either a bass or a detuned electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Play With Fire"] The demo was considered good enough to release, and put out as the B-side without any contribution from the other three Stones. Other songs Chrissie Shrimpton would inspire over the next couple of years would include "Under My Thumb", "19th Nervous Breakdown", and "Stupid Girl". It's safe to say that Mick Jagger wasn't going to win any boyfriend of the year awards. "The Last Time" was a big hit, but the follow-up was the song that turned the Stones from being one of several British bands who were very successful to being the only real challengers to the Beatles for commercial success. And it was a song whose main riff came to Keith Richards in a dream: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)"] Richards apparently had a tape recorder by the side of his bed, and when the riff came to him he woke up enough to quickly record it before falling back to sleep with the tape running. When he woke up, he'd forgotten the riff, but found it at the beginning of a recording that was otherwise just snoring. For a while Richards was worried he'd ripped the riff off from something else, and he's later said that he thinks that it was inspired by "Dancing in the Street". In fact, it's much closer to the horn line from another Vandellas record, "Nowhere to Run", which also has a similar stomping rhythm: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] You can see how similar the two songs are by overlaying the riff from “Satisfaction” on the chorus to “Nowhere to Run”: [Excerpt “Nowhere to Run”/”Satisfaction”] "Nowhere to Run" also has a similar breakdown. Compare the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] to the Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So it's fairly clear where the song's inspiration came from, but it's also clear that unlike a song like "The Last Time" this *was* just inspiration, rather than plagiarism.  The recorded version of "Satisfaction" was never one that its main composer was happy with. The group, apart from Brian Jones, who may have added a harmonica part that was later wiped, depending on what sources you read, but is otherwise absent from the track, recorded the basic track at Chess studios, and at this point it was mostly acoustic. Richards thought it had come out sounding too folk-rock, and didn't work at all. At this point Richards was still thinking of the track as a demo -- though by this point he was already aware of Andrew Oldham's tendency to take things that Richards thought were demos and release them. When Richards had come up with the riff, he had imagined it as a horn line, something like the version that Otis Redding eventually recorded: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So when they went into the studio in LA with Jack Nitzsche to work on some tracks there including some more work on the demo for “Satisfaction”, as well as Nitzsche adding some piano, Richards also wanted to do something to sketch out what the horn part would be. He tried playing it on his guitar, and it didn't sound right, and so Ian Stewart had an idea, went to a music shop, and got one of the first ever fuzz pedals, to see if Richards' guitar could sound like a horn. Now, people have, over the years, said that "Satisfaction" was the first record ever to use a fuzz tone. This is nonsense. We saw *way* back in the episode on “Rocket '88” a use of a damaged amp as an inspired accident, getting a fuzzy tone, though nobody picked up on that and it was just a one-off thing. Paul Burlison, the guitarist with the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, had a similar accident a few years later, as we also saw, and went with it, deliberately loosening tubes in his amp to get the sound audible on their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'": [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] A few years later, Grady Martin, the Nashville session player who was the other guitarist on that track, got a similar effect on his six-string bass solo on Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry", possibly partly inspired by Burlison's sound: [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"] That tends to be considered the real birth of fuzz, because that time it was picked up by the whole industry. Martin recorded an instrumental showing off the technique: [Excerpt: Grady Martin, "The Fuzz"] And more or less simultaneously, Wrecking Crew guitarist Al Casey used an early fuzz tone on a country record by Sanford Clark: [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "Go On Home"] And the pedal steel player Red Rhodes had invented his own fuzz box, which he gave to another Wrecking Crew player, Billy Strange, who used it on records like Ann-Margret's "I Just Don't Understand": [Excerpt: Ann-Margret, "I Just Don't Understand"] All those last four tracks, and many more, were from 1960 or 1961. So far from being something unprecedented in recording history, as all too many rock histories will tell you, fuzz guitar was somewhat passe by 1965 -- it had been the big thing on records made by the Nashville A-Team and the Wrecking Crew four or five years earlier, and everyone had moved on to the next gimmick long ago. But it was good enough to use to impersonate a horn to sketch out a line for a demo. Except, of course, that while Jagger and Richards disliked the track as recorded, the other members of the band, and Ian Stewart (who still had a vote even though he was no longer a full member) and Andrew Oldham all thought it was a hit single as it was. They overruled Jagger and Richards and released it complete with fuzz guitar riff, which became one of the most well-known examples of the sound in rock history. To this day, though, when Richards plays the song live, he plays it without the fuzztone effect. Lyrically, the song sees Mick Jagger reaching for the influence of Bob Dylan and trying to write a piece of social commentary. The title line seems, appropriately for a song partly recorded at Chess studios, to have come from a line in a Chuck Berry record, "Thirty Days": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Thirty Days"] But the sentiment also owes more than a little to another record by a Chess star, one recorded so early that it was originally released when Chess was still called Aristocrat Records -- Muddy Waters'  "I Can't Be Satisfied": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] “Satisfaction” is the ultimate exercise in adolescent male frustration. I once read something, and I can't for the life of me remember where or who the author was, that struck me as the most insightful critique of the sixties British blues bands I've ever heard. That person said that by taking the blues out of the context in which the music had been created, they fundamentally changed the meaning of it -- that when Bo Diddley sang "I'm a Man", the subtext was "so don't call me 'boy', cracker". Meanwhile, when some British white teenagers from Essex sang the same words, in complete ignorance of the world in which Diddley lived, what they were singing was "I'm a man now, mummy, so you can't make me tidy my room if I don't want to". But the thing is, there are a lot of teenagers out there who don't want to tidy their rooms, and that kind of message does resonate. And here, Jagger is expressing the kind of aggressive sulk that pretty much every teenager, especially every frustrated male teenager will relate to. The protagonist is dissatisfied with everything in his life, so criticism of the vapidity of advertising is mixed in with sexual frustration because women won't sleep with the protagonist when they're menstruating: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] It is the most adolescent lyric imaginable, but pop music is an adolescent medium. The song went to number one in the UK, and also became the group's first American number one. But Brian Jones resented it, so much so that when they performed the song live, he'd often start playing “I'm Popeye the Sailor Man”. This was partly because it wasn't the blues he loved, but also because it was the first Stones single he wasn't on (again, at least according to most sources. Some say he played acoustic rhythm guitar, but most say he's not on it and that Richards plays all the guitar parts). And to explain why, I have to get into the unpleasant details I talked about at the start. If you're likely to be upset by discussion of rape or domestic violence, stop the episode now. Now, there are a number of different versions of this story. This is the one that seems most plausible to me, based on what else I know about the Stones, and the different accounts, but some of the details might be wrong, so I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that this is absolutely exactly what happened. But if it isn't, it's the *kind* of thing that happened many times, and something very like it definitely happened. You see, Brian Jones was a sadist, and not in a good way. There are people who engage in consensual BDSM, in which everyone involved is having a good time, and those people include some of my closest friends. This will never be a podcast that engages in kink-shaming of consensual kinks, and I want to make clear that what I have to say about Jones has nothing to do with that. Because Jones was not into consent. He was into physically injuring non-consenting young women, and he got his sexual kicks from things like beating them with chains. Again, if everyone is involved is consenting, this is perfectly fine, but Jones didn't care about anyone other than himself. At a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, on the sixth of May 1965, the same day that Jagger and Richards finished writing "Satisfaction", a girl that Bill Wyman had slept with the night before came to him in tears. She'd been with a friend the day before, and the friend had gone off with Jones while she'd gone off with Wyman. Jones had raped her friend, and had beaten her up -- he'd blackened both her eyes and done other damage. Jones had hurt this girl so badly that even the other Stones, who as we have seen were very far from winning any awards for being feminists of the year, were horrified. There was some discussion of calling the police on him, but eventually they decided to take matters into their own hands, or at least into one of their employees' hands. They got their roadie Mike Dorsey to teach him a lesson, though Oldham was insistent that Dorsey not mess up Jones' face. Dorsey dangled Jones by his collar and belt out of an upstairs window and told Jones that if he ever did anything like that again, he'd drop him. He also beat him up, cracking two of Jones' ribs. And so Jones was not in any state to play on the group's first US number one, or to play much at all at the session, because of the painkillers he was on for the cracked ribs.  Jones would remain in the band for the next few years, but he had gone from being the group's leader to someone they disliked and were disgusted by. And as we'll see the next couple of times we look at the Stones, he would only get worse.