Podcast appearances and mentions of Sonny Boy Williamson

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Will WildeWill Wilde is a force to be reckoned with—a phenomenal harmonica player with a voice to match.Will's intense harmonica style steals the spotlight from the traditional blues rock guitar, with a sound that owes as much to Gary Moore as it does to Sonny Boy Williamson. "I'm always looking to make new sounds with the harmonica, pushing its boundaries, trying to change people's perception of it.” In fact, Will has gone one step further and created his own signature "Wilde Tuned" harmonicas so he can play licks that weren't possible before. “They enable me to hold my own with any blues rock guitarist.” http://www.makingascene.org

Kevin Burt performs live at the 2024 Blues Music Awards in Memphis on Edition 683 of Blues Radio International, with Sonny Boy Williamson, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Frank Catalano and Lurrie Bell.Photograph by Laura Carbone.Find more at BluesRadioInternational.net

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Crooked Eyed Tommy on his new project with Tomislav GolubanIt's not very often that an old-school Croatian harmonica player hooks up with a West Coast guitarist. In fact, this collaboration is partially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. Tomislav Goluban, whose surname translates to Pigeon in English, has been inspired by harmonica masters Sonny Boy Williamson, Paul Butterfield, Kim Wilson, Gary Primich, Sonny Terry, and Joe Filisko. His twenty-year music career includes 15 studio albums. Tomislav began playing harp in 1997 and released his debut recording, “Pigeon's Flight,” in 2005. http://www.makingascene.org

 | Stefan Grossman  | Hambone Rag  | Yazoo Basin Boogie  |   |   | Duke Robillard  | Ukulele Swing  | The Acoustic Blues & Roots Of Duke Robillard  | Geiger von Muller (album)  | Blue Moon Frequency #5  | Geiger Von Muller- Slide Sonatas II  | Rev Gary Davis  | Yes Sir, That's My Baby Now  | See What The Lord Has Done For Me. The Ernie Hawkins Session CD  | Memphis Slim  | John Henry  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Memphis Slim  | Memphis Boogie  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Memphis Slim  | The Blues Is Everywhere  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Memphis Slim  | Wish Me Well  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Muddy Waters  | Blow Wind, Blow  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Muddy Waters  | Catfish Blues  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Muddy Waters  | Five Long Years  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Muddy Waters  | My Captain  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Muddy Waters  | My Home Is in the Delta  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Otis Spann  | Goin' Down Slow  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2| Sonny Boy Williamson  | Don't Misuse Me  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Sonny Boy Williamson  | I Don't Know  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2 | Sonny Boy Williamson  | Sonny Boy's Harmonica Blues  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2  | Sonny Boy Williamson  | That's All I Want, Baby  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD2

Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Will WildeWill Wilde is a force to be reckoned with - a phenomenal harmonica player with a voice to match.Will's intense harmonica style steals the spotlight from the traditional blues rock guitar, with a sound that owes as much to Gary Moore as it does to Sonny Boy Williamson.  "I'm always looking to make new sounds with the harmonica, pushing its boundaries, trying to change people's perception of it.”  In fact Will has gone one step further and created his own signature "Wilde Tuned" harmonicas so he can play licks that weren't possible before.  “They enable me to hold my own with any blues rock guitarist”. http://www.makingascene.org

Follow award-winning Aaron Millar on a road trip across the Tennessee Music Pathways from the graveside of Sonny Boy Williamson, the grandfather of The Blues harmonica, to Chattanooga, home of the Big 9, and one of the original breeding grounds of The Blues.    Along the way we will hear how The Blues became, perhaps, the most influential genre in all of music, inspiring everything from rock n' roll to hip hop, R&B, and everything in between.    But more than that, we'll discover how The Blues became the soundtrack to America itself. From the field hollers of slaves who gave birth to its signature structure and style, to Ninth Street on Chattanooga, where musicians were first given a voice and platform to express themselves.    We're going to be singing with a gospel choir, watching jazz on the streets, making a blues pilgrimage to the backwoods of Jackson, Tennessee, and listening to some of the finest blues musicians in the state … get ready for the story of the blues in Tennessee Follow @armchairexplorer podcast on Instagram and Facebook or head over to www.armchair-explorer.com to find out more information about this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Interview with Jim Basnight discussing his book about Sonny Boy Williamson and we also discussed blues guy Hound Dog Taylor. Jim Basnight is a musician and songwriter best known for his contributions to the power pop and rock genres. He has been active in the music scene since the late 1970s and has been involved in various bands and solo projects. Sonny Boy Williamson is a name associated with two influential American blues harmonica players, each of whom made significant contributions to the blues genre. Both Sonny Boy Williamson I and II are celebrated for their contributions to blues music, each leaving a lasting legacy through their recordings and performances. Hound Dog Taylor, born Theodore Roosevelt Taylor on April 12, 1915, in Natchez, Mississippi, was a distinctive and influential blues guitarist and singer known for his raw, energetic style. Hound Dog Taylor's contributions to the blues genre remain significant, with his raw style and powerful performances leaving a lasting mark on the music world. https://jimbasnightmusic.com/home https://www.facebook.com/share/CkreT2kas4PzUsLH/?mibextid=LQQJ4d https://x.com/jimbasnight?s=21&t=Mzw5de5zsR-SDDbhyzH0Lg https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G4C69DE/ref=cm_sw_r_as_gl_api_gl_i_2RB8WRE2ZNTNS44BPJKB?linkCode=ml2&tag=robertorossi-20 #JimBasnight #TheMoberlys #RockMusic #PowerPop #IndieRock #songwriter #LiveMusic #SonnyBoyWilliamson#BluesHarmonica #ChicagoBlues #BluesLegend #ClassicBlues #HarmonicaMaster #DeltaBlues #SlideGuitar #BluesRock #HouseRockers #AlligatorRecords #BluesMusic #ElectricBlues Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup

Marshall Chess has a long history in the blues.  His father, Leonard, was one of the co-founders of Chess Records, the influential record label responsible for exposing the music of artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson to larger audience.  Marshall produced the trailblazing Electric Mud from Muddy Waters, and the Howlin' Wolf Album, both were attempts to reinterpret the blues to then current psychedelic rock era.  He was the first president of Rolling Stones Records, and worked on several films, including Cadillac Records, which was based on his family's record label. Now comes New Moves - The Chess Project, several decades in the making.  Once again, Marshall is reinterpreting the music his family helped nurture, this time for the modern age.  With Keith LeBlanc producing, they've assembled a top-notch collection of musicians, reimagining songs by Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter and more. Marshall also has a YouTube Channel celebrating the Chess history, and a podcast, where he tells many of the great stories of his life. 

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright  |   | Lightnin' Hopkins  | The Trouble Blues  | Ligntnin' Hopkins In New York  | Candid  |   |   | Sonny Boy Williamson  | I'm Trying To Make London My Home  | American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1965  CD4  | Ida Cox  | Death Letter Blues  | Ida Cox Vol. 2 1924-1925  |   | Joe Bonamassa  | High Water Everywhere  | Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House  | Tampa Red  | Stormy Sea Blues  | Tampa Red Vol. 7 1935-1936  |   | John James  | One Long Happy Night  | Cafe Vienna  |   |   | Furry Lewis  | Old Dog Blue  | Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends Party! at Home - 1968  | Merle Travis  | Cannonball-Rag  | Merle-Travis: Ash Grove 12-9-66  | Josh White  | Ball and Chain Blues  | The Elektra Years  |   |   | Scott Low  | Roll On  | Appalachian Blues  |   |   | Charles -Cow Cow- Davenport  | State Street Jive [Take A]  | Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1  | Raphael Callaghan  | Can't Afford To Live  | Said And Done  |   |   | Scott Low  | Winter Spring  | Appalachian Blues  |   |   | Rev Gary Davis  | Improvisation Slow Blues In E  | The Sun Of Our Life - Solos Songs and Sermons 1955-57  | R.L. Burnside  | Shake 'em On Down  |   |   |   | Jo Ann Kelly  | I Looked Down the Line (And I Wondered)  | Blues And Gospel: Rare and Unreleased Recordings

En unas fiestas tan entrañables con todo el mundo de vacaciones, nada mejor que un desfile de personalidades tan poderosas como Big Joe Turner, Cab Calloway, Bob Skyles, Count Lasher, Jimmie Rodgers, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ben Selvin... A partir de las ocho horas de la mañana del sábado en la sintonía de Radio 3.Escuchar audio

Le documentaire "Rock'n'Roll Godverdomme" sur le chanteur Arno a été diffusé dimanche en avant-première au festival du film d'Ostende, film réalisé par Kristof Michiels, aussi DJ, avec le soutien de la famille du chanteur originaire d'Ostende. Pour la première fois en 60 ans de carrière, Joni Mitchell, l'emblématique musicienne folk canadienne, se produira aux Grammy Awards confirme la Recording Academy. On a appris que U2 ferait aussi un show spécial et remettra un prix lors de la cérémonie des Grammys en direct de Las Vegas, le groupe a partagé deux vidéos de ‘'Don't Dream It's Over'' (Crowded House) et "Even Better Than The Real Thing" extrait d ‘'Achtung Baby'' de 1991. Gary Clark Jr. est de retour avec quatre nouveaux titres, après quasi cinq ans d'absence et voici de quoi nous faire patienter jusqu'à l'arrivée de son prochain album ‘'JPEG RAW'', 4e album studio de l'auteur-compositeur-interprète qui sortira le 22 mars. Liam Gallagher et John Squire ont annoncé une série de dates de tournée, Barrie Cadogan se joindra à eux, en plus de la tracklist de leur premier album commun. Kacey Musgraves a publié une reprise de "Three Little Birds" de Bob Marley, qui devrait apparaître dans le prochain film biographique sur l'icône du reggae. Mots-Clés : Little Barrie, Paul Weller, Joey Waronker, R.E.M, Beck, Roger Waters, Jake Bugg, Brooklyn, New York, humour, son, engagement social, surréalisme, pureté", organisateurs, voyage, cérémonie, prix, U2, Sphère, Las Vegas, Burna Boy, Billy Joel, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Neil Finn, leader, groupe, australien, Tim Finn, influences, musique, africaine, traditionnel, jazz, rock, R'n'B, hip-hop, blues, samples, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Boy Williamson, collaborations, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, long métrage, biographie, Bob Marley : One Love, cinéma, britannique, version, acoustique, artistes, Leon Bridges, Daniel Caesar, Skip Marley, Wizkid. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be 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.

PLAYLIST: Pacific St Blues & AmericanaJanuary 14, 2024www.podomatic.com/podcasts/KIWRbluesNat Myers / Trixin' Little Walter / Boom, Boom, Out Go the Lights 3. Blind Willie McTell / Statesboro Blues Alison Krause / Come and Go Blues (Gregg Allman) Rhiannon Giddens / Wrong Kind of Right (You're the One) Emma Wilson / Watching You Leave Cat Deluca / Dear Nebraska Tom Petty / Let Yourself Go Sue Foley / Positively 4th Street Jon Dee Graham / Lost in the Flood Blue House & The Rent to Own Horns / I Go Crazy Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa / See Saw KoKo Taylor / Don't Let Me Catch You...Etta James / Ball & Chain Joyann Parker / Faintly Optimistic Rod Stewart / Jody Hadden Sayers / Tip of My TongueRoy Buchanan / Blues for Jimmy Nolan (Patrick) George Thorogood / Baby, Please set a DateFloyd McDaniel / Christopher Columbus 

Sonny Boy Williamson I 13. Yardbirds/ Good Morning, School Girl14. Jr Wells (w/ Buddy Guy)/ Hoodoo Man Blues 15. Led Zeppelin / Sugar Mama (BB King, Spirit)16. John Lee Hooker feat George Thorogood / Sally Mae17. Eric Clapton / Early in the MorningSonny Boy Williamson II  18. Sonny Boy Williamson II / Fattening Frogs for Snakes 19. Sonny Boy Williamson II / The Story of Sonny Boy Williamson 20. Elmore James / Dust My Broom (includes SBW2)21. Robert Junior Lockwood / Little Boy Blue 22. Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys / medley23. The Allman Brothers / One Way Out24. Led Zeppelin / Bring It On Home25. Eyesight to the Blind / The Who26. Bye Bye Birdy / The Moody Bluess 27. Jimmy Rodgers & His All Stars / Don't Start Me Talking28. BB King / From the Bottom 29. SBW II / Help Me (Green Onions)30. Booker T & the MGs / Green Onions 

Delta blues found its voice and audience on the airwaves of KFFA's King Biscuit Time, a daily broadcast out of Helena, Arkansas. Bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood Jr., who would go on to become legends, interspersed their own songs with advertising jingles. King Biscuit Time, which launched in 1941, gave unprecedented exposure to African American musicians while selling everyday grocery staples like flour and cornmeal. And it's still on the air. Reporter-producer Betsy Shepherd travels to Helena to tell the story for Gravy.

Happy New Year from The Hamlin Avenue Boyz. What a year it has been. No matter how you view it; the Boyz are just gonna stay present and keep moving and not spend too much time lamenting over any woulda, coulda, or shoulda moments. Personal or Universal. Here's hoping all of you reading this now are transitioning to the new year in a peaceful place. Thank you for pointing your ears in this direction now and then and for all your communications to the show. And we do mean 'all'. We encourage you (if the feeling arises) to send the Boyz your comments, questions, or hypotheticals. Send a shout-out to The Hamlin Avenue Boyz: JustRollTape@mail.com This episode offers highlights of some of the more 'interesting' communications The Hamlin Avenue Boyz have received. Vince Hamlin Edward Hamlin TRACKS: 1. Hamlin Avenue Boyz Mail Bag MUSIC COMPOSITION / PERFORMANCE CREDITS: 1a. "Shaman's Dream & Rara Avis" > Samadhi 2005 / Samadhi 2005 1b. "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" > Goffen, King, Wexler 1967 / Aretha Franklin 1967 1c. "One Way Out" > Dixon, Williamson 1951 / Sonny Boy Williamson 1965 RECORDING ENGINEERS / BOARD OPERATORS: Richard Goesinya D.E.B. Cooper Cravin' Evin Morehead B. MyKockinher PRODUCERS: T. Rosedale A. Hicky B. N. Dover RECORDING STUDIO CONSULTING: J. Herer DogWalker NON ALCOHOLIC CART ATTENDANTS: S. Peters Anita Hardon Sharon Sipsome CATERING: Wonder Burger The Cannibal Cafe High Fructose Corn Syrup TRANSPORTATION: Harley Davidson Jeep Ram --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edward-hamlin/message

Wanted. America. Dead or Alive. Glen Rockney of Rare Candy and The Back Wall joins me for a dance to the haunting tunes and portents of Martin Scorcese's THE LAST WALTZ (1978), a documentary classic about the historic final concert where The Band and friends staged several of the greatest rock performances of all time.   For the full 2.5 hour episode, subscribe to the show at patreon.com/filthyarmenian to get access to twice as many adventures and support this travel agency for the soul.   In memory of Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, Pops Staples, Neil Young, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Ray Charles. In thankfulness to Garth Hudson, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Mavis Staples, Joni Mitchell, Ringo, and all the other stars at Winterland.   Get your tickets to FAA presents WHITE CHRISTMAS at a hidden historic shrine to adventure in Los Angeles on January 6, a live show and festivity starring Amanda Milius, Richard Hanania, Santa and many other friends of the show.   Please rate, review, wherever you listen.    Follow us on X/insta @filthyarmenain

Hello everyone! Billy Amendola here, and my show today is one of my “Billy's Bubble” segments, featuring Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess. Chess, a Polish/Jewish immigrant, and his brother Phil created what many describe as “America's Greatest Blues label.”    You've heard of Willie Dixon, Howlin Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and other legendary blues musicians from The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles. They all were pioneers on the legendary label.    My guest, Marshal Chess, now 81 years young, grew up in the studio and became vice-president in 1969 before going on to become president of GRT, and then creating Rolling Stones Records, and becoming executive producer of The Rolling Stones albums “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street.    Also featured on the show is Marshal's long-time collaborator, producer/drummer/engineer Keith Leblanc. The two met at SugarHill Records and have worked together since.    They now have a new record, “The Chess Project,” featuring seasoned players and singers who reinterpret Chess gems from Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson. The album is titled “New Moves.”    Keith, both an acoustic drummer and a pioneer in programming and playing drum machines and electronic loops, became known with his band Tackhead, who were successful in Europe, where Keith lived for a few years. His solo record, “No Sell Out,” is one of the first sample-based releases.    Keith kick-started his career at SugarHill Records and later Tommy Boy Records, two of the most successful labels in hip-hop and dance music.    In the '90s, Keith worked in the studio with producer Trevor Horn in the UK, programming, and playing drums with Annie Lennox, Tina Turner, and Seal's first album, among others.    Let's dive into this historical career with two pioneers in our industry and welcome Marshal & Keith to Drum Channel. Enjoy! 

Jay Stulo isn't just one of the most talented blues guitarists you'll hear today, he's also a student of the genre. One of the reasons Jay is able to play with the passion and heart that he does goes back to learning the history of the blues and a plethora of its most storied players. It becomes an understanding of the foundations of blues music and its traditions (Delta, Chicago, Texas, British, etc.). Whether any number of guitarists (T-bone Walker to Jeff Beck to Derek Trucks) or other instrumentalists (harmonica players like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Paul Butterfield), the rich traditions of the blues continue to grow and flourish. Join us as we take a deep dive into the blues and even take in a couple tracks by Jay."Red Dress Boogie"  and "Watching You" written and performed by Jay Stulo℗ 2020 Jay Stulo. Used with permission of Jay Stulo.(Photo by Jennifer Stulo Photography)Support the showSupport the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.

This week's show, after a 1981 Damned denouement: brand new Scream, Golden Apples, Slowdive, Lovejoy, Guided By Voices, The Feelies, and Guitarmy of One, plus The Beatles, Sonny Boy Williamson, Hollies, I-Roy, Falcons/Wilson Pickett, Buckinghams, and L...

•He's played with Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Boy Williamson, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Billy Cobham, Spencer Davies, Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart, John McLaughlin, Tom Jones, Eric Burdon and many, many more. •With Julie Driscoll he had a huge hit with a masterful psychedelic rendition of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire”    •He's been hailed as the godfather of acid jazz, sampled by hip hop stars and nominated for a Grammy Award.   •At 82, BRIAN AUGER is still moving, grooving, sharp as a pin - and 'beginning again' as he says.   •We hear his extraordinary story and of the sign posts pointing the way on his musical journey - from the London Blitz - through the Soho jazz clubs of the 60s - to Venice Beach.   •Thanks to Greg Boroman and Karma Augur for making this happen.   *For More on Brian    * For more on the Auger Incorporated Archive release   *Let us know where you are at(a few questions about you) *Get Our Bulletin   #counterculture #music #hammondorgan #soho #sohoclubs #soho #sohohistory #londonhistory #juliedriscoll #brianauger #hendrix #6oslondon #acidjazz

Show 36 - Sonny Boy Williamson II Part 2 - We continue to pay homage to Alec Miller or Sonny Boy Williamson. Last week I talked about Sonny Boy's early years in the South, meeting and learning from bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf. His career took a leap forward in 1949 when he moved to West Memphis and scored a regular gig on Radio KWEM and lived wth Wolf. Sonny Boy brought some of his blues acquaintances to his radio show, names like Elmore James, Robert Nightyhawk and Arthur Big Boy Crudup. And he began his recording career with Trumpet Records. This in turn brought Sonny Boy to Chicago as the Chess Brothers bought the remnants of Trumpet's library when they went broke. Broadcast on Otago Access Radio www.oar.org.nz

Show 35 - Sonny Boy Williamson II Part 1 - This is Episode thirty five, the first of two programmes dedicated to the harp player who called himself Sonny Boy Williamson, although his given name was Alec Miller, and he borrowed the name from John Lee Williamson, who recorded prolifically in the early 1940's as Sonny Boy Williamson. Broadcast on Otago Access Radio www.oar.org.nz

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Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. 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 "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band 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. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor  and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether)  from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for  a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut.  Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who  had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of  carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things  at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time.  The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m

Tu garito subterráneo favorito abre puertas otro viernes de verano para ofrecerte una sesión quitapenas sin interrupciones. Cocinamos un menú de boppin’ rhythm and blues que te ayudará a desentumecer huesos y articulaciones. A disfrutar. (Foto del podcast; Slim Harpo) Playlist; (sintonía) IKE TURNER and THE KINGS OF RHYTHM “Potatoe mash” MEMPHIS SLIM “We’re gonna rock” FRANKIE LEE SIMS “Hey Little girl” COUSIN LEROY “I’m lonesome” HARMONICA FATS “Tore up” CHAMPION JACK DUPREE “Nasty boogie” JEANNIE BARNES “Can’t get you out of my mind” WILD JIMMY SPRUILL “Country boy” TOMMY LOUIS “I love you so” JAMES BROWN “Choonie-on-chon” EMMETT DAVIS “I’m talking about you baby” JOHN LEE HOOKER “No more doggin’” ETTA JAMES “Nobody loves you like me” LITTLE WALTER “Diggin’ my potatoes” JIMMY ANDERSON “I wanna boogie” WILLIE KING with IKE TURNER BAND “Peg leg woman” FRANKIE LEE SIMS “She likes to boogie real low” SLIM HARPO “Shake your hips” JAY SWAN “You don’t love me” ROSE MITCHELL “Baby please don’t go” BUNKER HILL “You can’t make me doubt my baby” LITTLE ESTHER “Hound dog” HAL PAGE and THE WHALERS “Thunderbird” SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON “Polly put your kettle” Escuchar audio

We're digging into the archives. Deep down into the wells…for a collection of rhythm & blues, country, gospel, and tradition with performances from Patsy Cline, Sonny Boy Williamson, Marty Stuart, Dinah Washington and nearly three dozen others. Friday morning inspiration from the courtroom bench, the gospel pew, and from the piano bench…as we bring you another episode of the very best of the past 100 years to the stream. There's trouble and some double entendre from Julia Lee, some rousing sanctified call and response from Eugene Smith and The Roberta Martin Singers, as well as a bootleg Dylan piece that we'll share with you. Join Dave Stroud this coming Friday morning for the very best of America's music from the past century.

La registrazione dell'incontro tenuto da Riccardo 'Tupa' Dini su Sonny Boy Williamson e il suo secondo album, nell'ambito del ciclo di incontri pomeridiani Wednesday Break My Heart allo Sky Stone & Songs

21. Dana Fuchs / Hard Road 22.Black Crowes / Rocks Off 23. Aerosmith / Eyesight to the Blind (The Who ala' Mose Allison ala' Sonny Boy Williamson) 24. Bullmoose Jackson / Big 10" Record 25. Buddy Guy / Let the Door Hit Ya 26. Freddie King / Have You Ever Loved a Woman27. Derek and the Dominoes / Why Does Love Have to Be so Sad28. Blue House & the Rent to Own Horns / I Go Crazy 29. Trombone Shorty / Buck Jump 30. Ally Venable /  Justifying 31. JoAnne Shaw Taylor / I Don't Know What You've Got 

Gordon Lightfoot "Mother of a Miner's Child"Big Mama Thornton "Ball and Chain"Lucinda Williams "Malted Milk Blues"Sonic Youth "Shadow of a Doubt"Eilen Jewell "Outsiders"Sonny Boy Williamson I "Sloppy Drunk Blues"The Replacements "Unsatisfied"Lucero "Sixteen"Harry Belafonte "Midnight Special"Ray Price "Heartaches By the Number"Kid Sheik's Storyville Ramblers "Sheik Of Araby"Aretha Franklin "Good to Me As I Am to You"Langhorne Slim & The Law "The Way We Move"Sam Doores + Riley Downing & the Tumbleweeds "Reuben's Train"Memphis Minnie "New Dirty Dozen"Jimmie Lunceford "Blues In the Night"The Allen Brothers "Chattanooga Mama"Ted Taylor "(Love Is Like a) Ramblin' Rose"Clifton Chenier "Black Snake Blues"Lightnin' Hopkins "Wine Drinking Woman"Steve Earle "Meet Me In The Alleyway"Duke Ellington "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo"Mance Lipscomb "Going Down Slow"Kiki Cavazos "Cold Love"Jake Xerxes Fussell "Pork and Beans"Shannon Wright "St. Pete"Billie Holiday "Billie's Blues"Johnny Cash "If You Could Read My Mind"John Moreland "Nobody Gives a Damn About Songs Anymore"Mississippi Fred McDowell "You Got To Move"Last Wolf In The Woods "Stay Close"The White Stripes "Rag and Bone"Enon "Daughter in the House of Fools"Lula Reed "Watch Dog"Tom Waits "Barber Shop"Sonny Boy Williamson "Eyesight to the Blind"The Lonesome Doves "When We Were Wild"Drag the River "Fleeting Porch of Tide"Loretta Lynn "Van Lear Rose"Louis Jordan "That Chick's Too Young To Fry"Napoleon Strickland "Shimmy She Wobble"Songs: Ohia "Steve Albini's Blues"Minutemen "Corona"Hank Williams "Why Don't You Love Me"Amos Milburn "Just One More Drink"John Coltrane "Everytime We Say Goodbye"

Show #994 Insanity 01. Sister Lucille - Devil In A Red Suit (3:53) (Tell The World, Blue Heart Records, 2023) 02. Rhythm Krewe - Time Of Day (6:50) (Unfinished Business, Rhombus Records, 2023) 03. Cash Box Kings - Nobody Called It The Blues (3:34) (Oscar's Motel, Alligator Records, 2023) 04. Will James - Q Blues (4:52) (Sundancer, self-release, 2022) 05. Tony Holiday - Trouble (4:11) (Motel Mississippi, Forty Below Records, 2023) 06. Ally Venable - Don't Lose Me (3:37 (Real Gone, Ruf Records, 2023) 07. Big Joe Shelton - Strong Addiction (3:29) (I'd Never Let Her Down, self-release, 2013) 08. Ana Popovic - Ride It (3:51) (Power, ArtisteXclusive Records, 2023) 09. Joe Krown - Something On Your Mind (4:25) (Tribute, Sledgehammer Records, 2023) 10. Muddy Waters - Just To Be With You [1956] (3:16) (Muddy Waters, Chess Records, 1976) 11. Larry Davis - Texas flood [1958] (2:42) (If It's Not A Hit I'll Eat My Hat, Ace Records, 1985) 12. Sonny Boy Williamson & the Yardbirds - 23 Hours Too Long (5:36) (Sonny Boy Williamson & the Yardbirds, Fontana, 1966) 13. Nalani Rothrock - Just Before I Go (3:22) (The Rock House Sessions (Extended Cut), self-release, 2022) 14. Dyer Davis - Cryin' Shame (4:47) (Dog Bites Back, WildRoots Records, 2023) 15. Nick Schnebelen - Pain Aside (4:33) (What Key Is Trouble In?, VizzTone Records, 2023) 16. Dean Zucchero - Mortal Man (5:08) (Electric Church For The Spiritually Misguided, Pugnacious Records, 2023) 17. Big Harp George - Prince Of Downward Mobility (4:46) (Cut My Spirit Loose, Blues Mountain Records, 2023) 18. Skylar Rogers - Among The Insanity (4:34) (Among The Insanity, Blue Heart Records, 2023) 19. Backtrack Blues Band - You'll Come Back Someday (7:23) (A Day By The Bay, Gulf Coast Records, 2023) 20. Misty Blues - On Of These Days (4:05) (Outside The Lines, Guitar One Records, 2023) 21. Bruce Katz Band - Gary's Jam (5:11) (Connections, Dancing Rooster Records, 2023) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Descripción breve del programa y playlist: Playlist: Snatch It Back and Hold It – Junior Wells; Merry Christmas – Lightnin' Hopkins; Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt; Christmas Date Boogie – Big Joe Turner with Pete Johnson & His Orchestra; Boogie Woogie Santa Claus – Mabel Scott with Les Welch & His Orchestra; Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree – Lou Ann Barton; Jesus's Coming Soon – Blind Willie Johnson; Jesus Is Here To Stay – Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Good Morning School Girl – Sonny Boy Williamson; Good Morning Schoolgirl – Junior Wells; Hard Time Killing Floor – Pura Fé with Danny Godinez; Son's House – The Guy Forsyth Band; Archetypal Blues No. 2 – Watermelon Slim; Love Again Blues – Leyla McCalla; If You Love Me – Johnny Hoy & The Bluefish; Crow Jane – Samantha Fish; Crow Jane – Skip James; St. Louis Blues – Eartha Kitt. Escuchar audio

Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. 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 so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use  of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it.  I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of  "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane

Pacific Street Blues & AmericanaNovember 6, 2022Eric Clapton Special 1. Eric Clapton & JJ Cale / Three Little Girls 2. J.J. Cale / Cocaine 3. BB King with Eric Clapton / Rock Me Baby 4. Robert Randolph & The Family Band (feat Eric Clapton) / Jesus is Just Alright5. Bo Diddley / Before You Accuse Me6. Bobby Blue Bland / Further On Up the Road7. Muddy Waters / Standing Around, Crying8. Elmore James / It Hurts Me Too 9. Yardbirds / (Charlie Parker) / Smokestack Lighting 10. Howling Wolf / Sitting on Top of the World 11. Yardbirds / For Your Love 12. Howlin' Wolf (feat Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman) / Build for Comfort 13. Sonny Boy Williamson & the Yardbirds (feat Eric Clapton)/ Bye Bye Birdie14. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers / All Your Love 15. Freddie King / Hideaway16. Blind Faith / Can't Find My Way Home 17. Gov't Mule / Presence of the Lord18. Buddy Guy / Strange Brew 19. Sheryl Crow (feat Eric Clapton) / White Room 20. Skip James / I'm So Glad21. Rotary Connection /Tales of the Brave Ulysses 

#charliemusselwhite #elvis #chicagoblues #memphisblues #harmonicaparty Charlie Musselwhite joins Mark Hummel's Harmonica Party for a conversation with the legendary Harp player. Charlie talks about growing up in Memphis and going to the Amusement Park and movies with Elvis Presley and the Memphis Mafia. Charlie remembers his unique childhood that brought him to music and to the blues. Charlie tells Mark about the move to Chicago and trying to find a place in the blues scene, First working in a record store and sharing the stage with Chicago Blues legends Lew Soloff, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Big Walter Horton. Charlie Musselwhite recent recordings include Grammy nominated releases with Elvin Bishop #elvinbishop Ben Harper #benharper . Please SUBSCRIBE to Mark Hummel's Harmonica Party YouTube Channel. Mark Hummel  Accidental Productions

Will Kallinderis aka Harpin' Will K joins Di Spillane this week to discuss his musical journey, a journey that has followed him from Ottawa, Edmonton Alberta, Vancouver, and since 2005 South Australia. Will Kallinderis aka 'Harpin' Will K' is a singer-songwriter who performs a lively mix of original roots, funk, and blues. Emerging in 2016 with his debut solo album Last Of The Singing Peace Chiefs, a collection of acoustic guitar-driven songs, full-throttled harmonica soloing, and backup harmony vocals. More recently he has been revisiting early influences to create a repertoire of raw ‘n' gritty stripped-back blues. Will's been performing on the local Adelaide scene as a soloist and in various projects since 2007. At 16, Will was inspired to pick up the harmonica after hearing the music of Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, John Mayall, Paul Butterfield, and Bob Dylan. The following year he took up the guitar and was influenced by Hubert Sumlin (Howlin' Wolf), John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters to name a few. Will's soulful roots sound is a result of many years honing his skills as a regular busker on the streets of Edmonton, Alberta followed by performances in the local blues and folk scene. Over the years his musical influences expanded to include the sounds of R&B, folk, rock as well as Latin, funk, and world music. Will moved to Adelaide in 2005 and in 2007 he formed a power trio called Star Step Evolution with Mike Palmer on bass and Benjamin Gallasch on drums. Featuring a funky, bluesy, reggae style with plenty of harmonica soloing. The members parted ways in late 2009. Will continued gigging around town as a solo performer honing and evolving his singer-songwriter roots originals as well as building a repertoire of blues. In 2017 Will joined local slide guitarist Cal Williams Jr for several festival shows. He stepped in at late notice when Adelaide's blues icon Chris Finnen had to pull out of the Fringe show ‘A History Of Early Blues'. The success of the show led to Will joining Cal Williams Jr and Kory Horwood on double bass for the next two seasons. Will also joined Cal and Kory in Cal's project The Ukulele Blues Explosion featuring stripped-back possibilities with ukulele, bass, and harmonica. In 2018 Will formed The Young Sequoias with Matt Colyer on drums featuring upbeat guitar and amplified harmonica together with Matt's catchy rhythms that introduced new interpretations of Will's debut album along with a vast range of new songs drawing on roots, rock, jazz, soul, funk and electric delta blues. One of the highlights for the duo was the successful sold-out 2020 Fringe show, ‘Electric Delta – Blues Hits Big Town' celebrating the Blues from raw and gritty Mississippi to the refined urban sounds of Chicago, featuring popular classics by such artists as Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi Fred McDowell and more. The Young Sequoias have taken a break and may remain dormant indefinitely. In the meantime, Will is focusing on recording his next solo album and considering teaching harmonica. Music: intro "Band It About", written and recorded by Catherine Lambert and Michael Bryant. Outro "Where Eagles Fly" by Will Kallinderis, from his debut album "Last Of The Singing Peace Chiefs" Links: BAND IT ABOUT - Podcast Series links can be found here: https://linktr.ee/banditaboutpodcastseries Will's Links: https://harpinwillk.com https://www.instagram.com/harpinwillk https://www.facebook.com/harpinwillk https://harpinwillk.bandcamp.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dianne-spillane/message

Billie Holiday "I Cover the Waterfront"James Booker "Classified"Ike Gordon "Don't Let The Devil Ride"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Freeway Church Of Christ"Howlin' Wolf "Drinkin' C.V. Wine"Cedric Burnside "I Be Trying"Bob Dylan "Romance In Durango"Superchunk "City of the Dead"Emmylou Harris "Sweet Old World"Merle Haggard "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink"Memphis Minnie "Night Watchman Blues (Take 2)"Wanda Jackson "Rip It Up"Fats Waller "Functionizin'"Sonny Boy Williamson "T.B. Blues"Jimmie Rodgers "Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes (Alternate Take)"Lucero "Sometimes"Hayes Carll "Another Like You"Gillian Welch "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor"Josh White "Strange Fruit"Jack Purvis and His Orchestra "Poor Richard"Slim Harpo "Rainin' in My Heart"Kathleen Edwards "Empty Threat"Valerie June "Colors"Hank Williams "Cold, Cold Heart"Billie Holiday and His Orchestra "Long Gone Blues"George Henry Bussey "When I'm Sober I'm Drunk Blues"Neil Young "No Wonder"Adia Victoria "Lonely Avenue"Adia Victoria "Dead Eyes"The Mountain Goats "New Monster Avenue"Arliss Nancy "Abacus"Lefty Frizzell "Long Black Veil"Blaze Foley "The Moonlight Song"Lucinda Williams "Drunken Angel"Buddy Guy "I Smell a Rat"Built to Spill "Conventional Wisdom"Guitar Junior "The Crawl"Dave Van Ronk "God Bless The Child"Big Joe Turner "Ice Man Blues"Willie Nelson "Railroad Lady"Robert Wilkins "Old Jim Canan's"Albert Ammons "Bass Goin' Crazy"Drag the River "Lucky's"Tom Waits "I Wish I Was In New Orleans [in The Ninth Ward]"Jimi Hendrix "Red house"Billie Holiday, Eddie Heywood's Orchestra "I'll Be Seeing You"

Still a few weeks away from returning to the Café at Artichoke Music so we have to put up with other means. Lucky for us I've got Blues harmonica player and writer Kim Field on the line. He was with us a few years ago and he's back now because he has a new book, “The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold" on the legendary Chicago Blues Harmonica player. It's in first person because he spent a long time in conversation with Billy Boy, who is now 86 years old with seemingly perfect recall. Tales of Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson and the whole panoply of Chicago Blues greats. Let's get started. Here's Kim Field.

Five decades after David Bowie's seminal tour, we reflect on the concerts that have left a mark.Billie HolidayCafé Society, New York City, early 1939The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. The birth of bebopMinton's Playhouse, New York City, 1941Rising young originals such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the guitarist Charlie Christian lived off commercial swing gigs in 1941, but they forged the revolutionary modern jazz style called bebop in tumultuous after-hours Harlem jam sessions, where Thelonious Monk and the drums innovator Kenny Clarke were in the house band. Buddy Holly and the CricketsUK tour, March 1958Britain had never seen a rock band before March 1958. Then, for 25 consecutive nights, came the first true rock band – guitar, bass and drums, a revolution in horn-rimmed specs. A schoolboy Keith Richards caught a London show, but many more future stars would see Buddy Holly on TV during his visit, when he appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Muddy WatersWhalley Range, Manchester, 7 May 1964It was the brilliant idea of the Granada TV producer Johnnie Hamp to film a selection of blues greats in south Manchester's derelict Wilbraham Road railway station, mocked up to looked like the deep south, with “wanted” posters, washtubs and even goats and chickens. About 200 people arrived by rail to see the Gospel and Blues Train: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann and the duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee giving intense performances on the platform. Waters was mobbed by blues-mad youngsters. Tharpe arrived in a pony and trap and seized the opportunity presented by a Mancunian downpour to strap on an electric guitar and launch spontaneously into Didn't It Rain? Countless musicians, including Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, subsequently told Hamp they were influenced by the show, which broadcast to millions and was instrumental in taking the blues explosion to the mainstream. Bob DylanNewport folk festival, Rhode Island, 25 July 1965 It was a Sunburst Fender Stratocaster that stole the show at Newport in 1965. Dylan's decision to play an electric guitar on a largely acoustic bill stunned the crowd, with many booing and jeering. Audiences for his world tour were similarly polarised, one disgruntled heckler in Manchester yelling: “Judas!” at the former folk hero. Essentially, it was the birth of folk rock – the real-time expansion of a genre. Frankie Valli and the Four SeasonsFranklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania, 1966A show in a college gym was the breakthrough that made arena rock possible. The PA system supplied by the Clair brothers so impressed Valli that he took them on tour as his personal sound engineers. Other artists noticed the quality and soon they were in demand. Their sound systems spurred rock's spread to the big halls. The Velvet UndergroundThe Dom, New York City, 7 April 1966A former Polish wedding hall hosted the birth of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Andy Warhol showed films and worked the lights, his “superstars” danced and the Velvet Underground played at a volume witnesses tended to describe in terms of violence: rock music as envelopment and sensory assault. The BeatlesCandlestick Park, San Francisco, 29 August 1966The Beatles' final real gig wasn't a great show. The stadium was half-empty, the band at the end of their tether, struggling to recreate the sound of their latest recordings. But it represented a shift in rock music: no more Beatles gigs meant more time in the studio – and albums that would change everything, again. The 14 Hour Technicolor DreamAlexandra Palace, London, 29 April 1967British counterculture's coming-out ball. Every one of the country's psychedelic luminaries played – Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Tomorrow and the Pretty Things among them. Performance art was provided by Yoko Ono, while the sense that the audience was as much part of the spectacle as the artists presaged 80s rave culture. Big Brother and the Holding CompanyJanis Joplin as part of Big Brother and the Holding CompanyJanis Joplin at Monterey as part of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Monterey pop festival, California, 17 June 1967Arriving at Monterey with a lesser-known San Francisco psychedelic bluesy rock band, 24-year-old Janis Joplin gleefully demolished every stereotype of the “demure” female singer. The hard-living, hard-rocking Texan's raucous, gut-wrenching performance attracted international attention and has been described as one of the greatest ever. Terry RileyPhiladelphia College of Art, 17 November 1967Not the birth of minimalism, but certainly its breakthrough. Riley's eight-hour set of tape manipulation and organ pulses, played to an audience seated on hammocks and cushions, generated an early recording of his classic Poppy Nogood and set the pace for electronic experimentalism in chill-out environments decades ahead. James Brown‘Are we together or we ain't?' James Brown calms stage invaders on 5 April 1968.Boston Garden, 5 April 1968The night after the assassination of Martin Luther King, violent protests spread across many US cities. In Boston, Brown's show was almost cancelled for fear it might become a hotspot for public outcry. Instead, the show was repurposed: broadcast live on TV and radio in an effort to ease the grief and tension. Fans climbed on stage as he sang I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me); police officers rallied. Brown paused the song. “I'll be fine,” he told the officers, then turned to the stage invaders: “You're not being fair to yourselves and me, or your race. Now, I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people … Are we together or we ain't?” The crowd cheered. The fans climbed down. Brown turned to the drummer: “Hit that thing, man.” Mahalia Jackson and Mavis StaplesHarlem cultural festival, New York City, 13 July 1969Effectively buried until the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul resurrected its memory, the 1969 Harlem cultural festival was possibly the greatest selection of black talent ever assembled, from Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone. If you had to pick a highlight, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples' charged performance of Take My Hand, Precious Lord might be it. Jimi HendrixJimi Hendrix at WoodstockWoodstock festival, New York, 18 August 1969Often cited as the gig that defined the 60s, the countercultural festival attracted half a million people to upstate New York. Hendrix's deconstruction of The Star-Spangled Banner was interpreted as a protest at the Vietnam war, while “three days of peace and love” showed that people power could change history. The WhoThe University of Leeds, 14 February 1970A Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque outside the university's refectory now honours the site of the incendiary live performance of the post-Tommy, Keith Moon-era Who captured on Live at Leeds, often cited as the greatest live rock album. Elton JohnThe Troubadour, Los Angeles, 25 August 1970Not quite overnight success, but close: Elton John walked on to the stage of a celebrity-packed Troubadour a largely unknown British singer-songwriter, and walked off it a star. Aside from the music, a backstage decision to wear an outrageous outfit and a burst of energetic showmanship midway through the gig helped: two lessons he has never forgotten. BB KingCook County jail, 10 September 1970Two years after Johnny Cash's turn at Folsom prison, the blues legend King performed in Chicago to an audience of 2,000 prisoners, mostly young and black. A subsequent live album highlighted the dire conditions at the jail, helping bring about prison reform, which became a lifelong cause for King. Aretha Franklin at Fillmore West5-7 March 1971Franklin's appearance at Fillmore West wasn't a star-making performance – she was already very much a star – but it featured the Queen of Soul at the peak of her powers, actively seeking to build a bridge to a post-hippy audience, covering Stephen Stills, Bread and the Beatles. Judging by the crowd's reaction, it worked. David BowieHammersmith Odeon, London, 3 July 1973The moment when David Bowie appears to announce his retirement during this show is astonishing: the crowd's screams become a vast howl of disappointment, peppered with yells of “No!” Did he mean it? Bob Marley & the WailersThe Lyceum, London, 17-18 July 1975Probably the most dynamic and exhilarating reggae concerts ever. Perhaps more importantly, the presentation was familiar enough to the rock establishment to allow them to feel comfortable with roots reggae. The Last WaltzWinterland Ballroom, San Francisco, 25 November 1976This Thanksgiving Day show was billed as the Band's “farewell concert appearance”. Sex PistolsRiver Thames, 7 June 1977Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118 E: mick.smith@wsiworld.com Commercials Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-1-commercials Narratives Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-2-narrativesDo you want a free competitive analysis? Let me know at:https://hubs.ly/Q0139TgJ0Website:https://www.wsiworld.com/mick-smithLinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/wsi-smith-consulting/Make an appointment:https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/mick-smithBe sure to subscribe, like, & review The Doctor of Digital™ Podcast:https://www.spreaker.com/show/g-mick-smith-phds-tracksSign up for the Doctor Up A Podcast course:https://doctor-up-a-podcast.thinkific.com/

Episode one hundred and forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble Every Day" by the Mothers of Invention, and the early career of Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Christmas Time is Here Again" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources I'm away from home as I upload this and haven't been able to do a Mixcloud, but will hopefully edit a link in in a week or so if I remember. The main biography I consulted for this was Electric Don Quixote by Neil Slaven. Zappa's autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, is essential reading if you're a fan of his work. Information about Jimmy Carl Black's early life came from Black's autobiography, For Mother's Sake. Zappa's letter to Varese is from this blog, which also contains a lot of other useful information on Zappa. For information on the Watts uprising, I recommend Johnny Otis' Listen to the Lambs. And the original mix of Freak Out is currently available not on the CD issue of Freak Out itself, which is an eighties remix, but on this "documentary" set. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before I begin -- there are a couple of passing references in this episode to rape and child abuse. I don't believe there's anything that should upset anyone, but if you're worried, you might want to read the transcript on the podcast website before or instead of listening. But also, this episode contains explicit, detailed, descriptions of racial violence carried out by the police against Black people, including against children. Some of it is so distressing that even reading the transcript might be a bit much for some people. Sometimes, in this podcast, we have to go back to another story we've already told. In most cases, that story is recent enough that I can just say, "remember last episode, when I said...", but to tell the story of the Mothers of Invention, I have to start with a story that I told sixty-nine episodes ago, in episode seventy-one, which came out nearly two years ago. In that episode, on "Willie and the Hand Jive", I briefly told the story of Little Julian Herrera at the start. I'm going to tell a slightly longer version of the story now. Some of the information at the start of this episode will be familiar from that and other episodes, but I'm not going to expect people to remember something from that long ago, given all that's happened since. The DJ Art Laboe is one of the few figures from the dawn of rock and roll who is still working. At ninety-six years old, he still promotes concerts, and hosts a syndicated radio show on which he plays "Oldies but Goodies", a phrase which could describe him as well as the music. It's a phrase he coined -- and trademarked -- back in the 1950s, when people in his audience would ask him to play records made a whole three or four years earlier, records they had listened to in their youth. Laboe pretty much single-handedly invented the rock and roll nostalgia market -- as well as being a DJ, he owned a record label, Original Sound, which put out a series of compilation albums, Oldies But Goodies, starting in 1959, which started to cement the first draft of the doo-wop canon. These were the first albums to compile together a set of older rock and roll hits and market them for nostalgia, and they were very much based on the tastes of his West Coast teenage listenership, featuring songs like "Earth Angel" by the Penguins: [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Earth Angel"] But also records that had a more limited geographic appeal, like "Heaven and Paradise" by Don Julian and the Meadowlarks: [Excerpt: Don Julian and the Meadowlarks, "Heaven and Paradise"] As well as being a DJ and record company owner, Laboe was the promoter and MC for regular teenage dances at El Monte Legion Stadium, at which Kip and the Flips, the band that featured Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston, would back local performers like the Penguins, Don and Dewey, or Ritchie Valens, as well as visiting headliners like Jerry Lee Lewis. El Monte stadium was originally chosen because it was outside the LA city limits -- at the time there were anti-rock-and-roll ordinances that meant that any teenage dance had to be approved by the LA Board of Education, but those didn't apply to that stadium -- but it also led to Laboe's audience becoming more racially diverse. The stadium was in East LA, which had a large Mexican-American population, and while Laboe's listenership had initially been very white, soon there were substantial numbers of Mexican-American and Black audience members. And it was at one of the El Monte shows that Johnny Otis discovered the person who everyone thought was going to become the first Chicano rock star, before even Ritchie Valens, in 1957, performing as one of the filler acts on Laboe's bill. He signed Little Julian Herrera, a performer who was considered a sensation in East LA at the time, though nobody really knew where he lived, or knew much about him other than that he was handsome, Chicano, and would often have a pint of whisky in his back pocket, even though he was under the legal drinking age. Otis signed Herrera to his label, Dig Records, and produced several records for him, including the record by which he's now best remembered, "Those Lonely Lonely Nights": [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera, "Those Lonely, Lonely, Nights"] After those didn't take off the way they were expected to, Herrera and his vocal group the Tigers moved to another label, one owned by Laboe, where they recorded "I Remember Linda": [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, "I Remember Linda"]  And then one day Johnny Otis got a knock on his door from the police. They were looking for Ron Gregory. Otis had never heard of Ron Gregory, and told them so. The police then showed him a picture. It turned out that Julian Herrera wasn't Mexican-American, and wasn't from East LA, but was from Massachusetts. He had run away from home a few years back, hitch-hiked across the country, and been taken in by a Mexican-American family, whose name he had adopted. And now he was wanted for rape. Herrera went to prison, and when he got out, he tried to make a comeback, but ended up sleeping rough in the basement of the stadium where he had once been discovered. He had to skip town because of some other legal problems, and headed to Tijuana, where he was last seen playing R&B gigs in 1963. Nobody knows what happened to him after that -- some say he was murdered, others that he's still alive, working in a petrol station under yet another name, but nobody has had a confirmed sighting of him since then. When he went to prison, the Tigers tried to continue for a while, but without their lead singer, they soon broke up. Ray Collins, who we heard singing the falsetto part in "I Remember Linda", went on to join many other doo-wop and R&B groups over the next few years, with little success. Then in summer 1963, he walked into a bar in Ponoma, and saw a bar band who were playing the old Hank Ballard and the Midnighters song "Work With Me Annie". As Collins later put it, “I figured that any band that played ‘Work With Me Annie' was all right,” and he asked if he could join them for a few songs. They agreed, and afterwards, Collins struck up a conversation with the guitarist, and told him about an idea he'd had for a song based on one of Steve Allen's catchphrases. The guitarist happened to be spending a lot of his time recording at an independent recording studio, and suggested that the two of them record the song together: [Excerpt: Baby Ray and the Ferns, "How's Your Bird?"] The guitarist in question was named Frank Zappa. Zappa was originally from Maryland, but had moved to California as a child with his conservative Italian-American family when his father, a defence contractor, had got a job in Monterey. The family had moved around California with his father's work, mostly living in various small towns in the Mojave desert seventy miles or so north of Los Angeles. Young Frank had an interest in science, especially chemistry, and especially things that exploded, but while he managed to figure out the ingredients for gunpowder, his family couldn't afford to buy him a chemistry set in his formative years -- they were so poor that his father regularly took part in medical experiments to get a bit of extra money to feed his kids -- and so the young man's interest was diverted away from science towards music. His first musical interest, and one that would show up in his music throughout his life, was the comedy music of Spike Jones, whose band combined virtuosic instrumental performances with sound effects: [Excerpt: Spike Jones and his City Slickers, "Cocktails for Two"] and parodies of popular classical music [Excerpt: Spike Jones and his City Slickers, "William Tell Overture"] Jones was a huge inspiration for almost every eccentric or bohemian of the 1940s and 50s -- Spike Milligan, for example, took the name Spike in tribute to him. And young Zappa wrote his first ever fan letter to Jones when he was five or six. As a child Zappa was also fascinated by the visual aesthetics of music -- he liked to draw musical notes on staves and see what they looked like. But his musical interests developed in two other ways once he entered his teens. The first was fairly typical for the musicians of his generation from LA we've looked at and will continue to look at, which is that he heard "Gee" by the Crows on the radio: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] He became an R&B obsessive at that moment, and would spend every moment he could listening to the Black radio stations, despite his parents' disapproval. He particularly enjoyed Huggy Boy's radio show broadcast from Dolphins of Hollywood, and also would religiously listen to Johnny Otis, and soon became a connoisseur of the kind of R&B and blues that Otis championed as a musician and DJ: [Excerpt: Zappa on the Late Show, “I hadn't been raised in an environment where there was a lot of music in the house. This couple that owned the chilli place, Opal and Chester, agreed to ask the man who serviced the jukebox to put in some of the song titles that I liked, because I promised that I would dutifully keep pumping quarters into this thing so that I could listen to them, and so I had the ability to eat good chilli and listen to 'Three Hours Past Midnight' by Johnny 'Guitar' Watson for most of my junior and senior year"] Johnny “Guitar” Watson, along with Guitar Slim, would become a formative influence on Zappa's guitar playing, and his playing on "Three Hours Past Midnight" is so similar to Zappa's later style that you could easily believe it *was* him: [Excerpt: Johnny "Guitar" Watson, "Three Hours Past Midnight"] But Zappa wasn't only listening to R&B. The way Zappa would always tell the story, he discovered the music that would set him apart from his contemporaries originally by reading an article in Look magazine. Now, because Zappa has obsessive fans who check every detail, people have done the research and found that there was no such article in that magazine, but he was telling the story close enough to the time period in which it happened that its broad strokes, at least, must be correct even if the details are wrong. What Zappa said was that the article was on Sam Goody, the record salesman, and talked about how Goody was so good at his job that he had even been able to sell a record of Ionisation by Edgard Varese, which just consisted of the worst and most horrible noises anyone had ever heard, just loud drumming noises and screeching sounds. He determined then that he needed to hear that album, but he had no idea how he would get hold of a copy. I'll now read an excerpt from Zappa's autobiography, because Zappa's phrasing makes the story much better: "Some time later, I was staying overnight with Dave Franken, a friend who lived in La Mesa, and we wound up going to the hi-fi place -- they were having a sale on R&B singles. After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange-looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up -- and there it was, the record with "Ionisation" on it. The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong -- the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I, including "Ionisation," among other pieces, on an obscure label called EMS (Elaine Music Store). The record number was 401.I returned the Joe Huston records and checked my pockets to see how much money I had -- I think it came to about $3.75. I'd never bought an album before, but I knew they must be expensive because mostly old people bought them. I asked the man at the cash register how much EMS 401 cost. "That gray one in the box?" he said. "$5.95." I'd been searching for that record for over a year and I wasn't about to give up. I told him I had $3.75. He thought about it for a minute, and said, "We've been using that record to demonstrate hi-fi's with -- but nobody ever buys one when we use it. I guess if you want it that bad you can have it for $3.75."" Zappa took the record home, and put it on on his mother's record player in the living room, the only one that could play LPs: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] His mother told him he could never play that record in the living room again, so he took the record player into his bedroom, and it became his record player from that point on. Varese was a French composer who had, in his early career, been very influenced by Debussy. Debussy is now, of course, part of the classical canon, but in the early twentieth century he was regarded as radical, almost revolutionary, for his complete rewriting of the rules of conventional classical music tonality into a new conception based on chordal melodies, pedal points, and use of non-diatonic scales. Almost all of Varese's early work was destroyed in a fire, so we don't have evidence of the transition from Debussy's romantic-influenced impressionism to Varese's later style, but after he had moved to the US in 1915 he had become wildly more experimental. "Ionisation" is often claimed to be the first piece of Western classical music written only for percussion instruments. Varese was part of a wider movement of modernist composers -- for example he was the best man at Nicolas Slonimsky's wedding -- and had also set up the International Composers' Guild, whose manifesto influenced Zappa, though his libertarian politics led him to adapt it to a more individualistic rather than collective framing. The original manifesto read in part "Dying is the privilege of the weary. The present day composers refuse to die. They have realized the necessity of banding together and fighting for the right of each individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work" In the twenties and thirties, Varese had written a large number of highly experimental pieces, including Ecuatorial, which was written for bass vocal, percussion, woodwind, and two Theremin cellos. These are not the same as the more familiar Theremin, created by the same inventor, and were, as their name suggests, Theremins that were played like a cello, with a fingerboard and bow. Only ten of these were ever made, specifically for performances of Varese's work, and he later rewrote the work to use ondes martenot instead of Theremin cellos, which is how the work is normally heard now: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] But Varese had spent much of the thirties, forties, and early fifties working on two pieces that were never finished, based on science fiction ideas -- L'Astronome, which was meant to be about communication with people from the star Sirius, and Espace, which was originally intended to be performed simultaneously by choirs in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and New York. Neither of these ideas came to fruition, and so Varese had not released any new work, other than one small piece, Étude pour espace, an excerpt from the  larger work, in Zappa's lifetime. Zappa followed up his interest in Varese's music with his music teacher, one of the few people in the young man's life who encouraged him in his unusual interests. That teacher, Mr Kavelman, introduced Zappa to the work of other composers, like Webern, but would also let him know why he liked particular R&B records. For example, Zappa played Mr. Kavelman "Angel in My Life" by the Jewels, and asked what it was that made him particularly like it: [Excerpt: The Jewels, "Angel in My Life"] The teacher's answer was that it was the parallel fourths that made the record particularly appealing. Young Frank was such a big fan of Varese that for his fifteenth birthday, he actually asked if he could make a long-distance phone call to speak to Varese. He didn't know where Varese lived, but figured that it must be in Greenwich Village because that was where composers lived, and he turned out to be right. He didn't get through on his birthday -- he got Varese's wife, who told him the composer was in Europe -- but he did eventually get to speak to him, and was incredibly excited when Varese told him that not only had he just written a new piece for the first time in years, but that it was called Deserts, and was about deserts -- just like the Mojave Desert where Zappa lived: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Deserts"] As he later wrote, “When you're 15 and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a song about your hometown (so to speak), you can get pretty excited.” A year later, Zappa actually wrote to Varese, a long letter which included him telling the story about how he'd found his work in the first place, hoping to meet up with him when Zappa travelled to the East Coast to see family. I'll read out a few extracts, but the whole thing is fascinating for what it says about Zappa the precocious adolescent, and I'll link to a blog post with it in the show notes. "Dear Sir: Perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January, if not, my name again is Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old… that might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. After I had struggled through Mr. Finklestein's notes on the back cover (I really did struggle too, for at the time I had had no training in music other than practice at drum rudiments) I became more and more interested in you and your music. I began to go to the library and take out books on modern composers and modern music, to learn all I could about Edgard Varese. It got to be my best subject (your life) and I began writing my reports and term papers on you at school. At one time when my history teacher asked us to write on an American that has really done something for the U.S.A. I wrote on you and the Pan American Composers League and the New Symphony. I failed. The teacher had never heard of you and said I made the whole thing up. Silly but true. That was my Sophomore year in high school. Throughout my life all the talents and abilities that God has left me with have been self developed, and when the time came for Frank to learn how to read and write music, Frank taught himself that too. I picked it all up from the library. I have been composing for two years now, utilizing a strict twelve-tone technique, producing effects that are reminiscent of Anton Webern. During those two years I have written two short woodwind quartets and a short symphony for winds, brass and percussion. I plan to go on and be a composer after college and I could really use the counsel of a veteran such as you. If you would allow me to visit with you for even a few hours it would be greatly appreciated. It may sound strange but I think I have something to offer you in the way of new ideas. One is an elaboration on the principle of Ruth Seeger's contrapuntal dynamics and the other is an extension of the twelve-tone technique which I call the inversion square. It enables one to compose harmonically constructed pantonal music in logical patterns and progressions while still abandoning tonality. Varese sent a brief reply, saying that he was going to be away for a few months, but would like to meet Zappa on his return. The two never met, but Zappa kept the letter from Varese framed on his wall for the rest of his life. Zappa soon bought a couple more albums, a version of "The Rite of Spring" by Stravinsky: [Excerpt: Igor Stravinsky, "The Rite of Spring"] And a record of pieces by Webern, including his Symphony opus 21: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Symphony op. 21"] (Incidentally, with the classical music here, I'm not seeking out the precise performances Zappa was listening to, just using whichever recordings I happen to have copies of). Zappa was also reading Slonimsky's works of musicology, like the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. As well as this "serious music" though, Zappa was also developing as an R&B musician.  He later said of the Webern album, "I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Varèse as you could get. I didn't know anything about twelve-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded. Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called "Angel in My Life"), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music." He had started as a drummer with a group called the Blackouts, an integrated group with white, Latino, and Black members, who played R&B tracks like "Directly From My Heart to You", the song Johnny Otis had produced for Little Richard: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] But after eighteen months or so, he quit the group and stopped playing drums. Instead, he switched to guitar, with a style influenced by Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Guitar Slim. His first guitar had action so bad that he didn't learn to play chords, and moved straight on to playing lead lines with his younger brother Bobby playing rhythm. He also started hanging around with two other teenage bohemians -- Euclid Sherwood, who was nicknamed Motorhead, and Don Vliet, who called himself Don Van Vliet. Vliet was a truly strange character, even more so than Zappa, but they shared a love for the blues, and Vliet was becoming a fairly good blues singer, though he hadn't yet perfected the Howlin' Wolf imitation that would become his stock-in-trade in later years. But the surviving recording of Vliet singing with the Zappa brothers on guitar, singing a silly parody blues about being flushed down the toilet of the kind that many teenage boys would write, shows the promise that the two men had: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, "Lost in a Whirlpool"] Zappa was also getting the chance to hear his more serious music performed. He'd had the high school band play a couple of his pieces, but he also got the chance to write film music -- his English teacher, Don Cerveris, had decided to go off and seek his fortune as a film scriptwriter, and got Zappa hired to write the music for a cheap Western he'd written, Run Home Slow. The film was beset with problems -- it started filming in 1959 but didn't get finished and released until 1965 -- but the music Zappa wrote for it did eventually get recorded and used on the soundtrack: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Run Home Slow Theme"] In 1962, he got to write the music for another film, The World's Greatest Sinner, and he also wrote a theme song for that, which got released as the B-side of "How's Your Bird?", the record he made with Ray Collins: [Excerpt: Baby Ray and the Ferns, "The World's Greatest Sinner"] Zappa was able to make these records because by the early sixties, as well as playing guitar in bar bands, he was working as an assistant for a man named Paul Buff. Paul Buff had worked as an engineer for a guided missile manufacturer, but had decided that he didn't want to do that any more, and instead had opened up the first independent multi-track recording studio on the West Coast, PAL Studios, using equipment he'd designed and built himself, including a five-track tape recorder. Buff engineered a huge number of surf instrumentals there, including "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Wipe Out"] Zappa had first got to know Buff when he had come to Buff's studio with some session musicians in 1961, to record some jazz pieces he'd written, including this piece which at the time was in the style of Dave Brubeck but would later become a staple of Zappa's repertoire reorchestrated in a  rock style. [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Never on Sunday"] Buff really just wanted to make records entirely by himself, so he'd taught himself to play the rudiments of guitar, bass, drums, piano, and alto saxophone, so he could create records alone. He would listen to every big hit record, figure out what the hooks were on the record, and write his own knock-off of those. An example is "Tijuana Surf" by the Hollywood Persuaders, which is actually Buff on all instruments, and which according to Zappa went to number one in Mexico (though I've not found an independent source to confirm that chart placing, so perhaps take it with a pinch of salt): [Excerpt: The Hollywood Persuaders, "Tijuana Surf"] The B-side to that, "Grunion Run", was written by Zappa, who also plays guitar on that side: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Persuaders, "Grunion Run"] Zappa, Buff, Ray Collins, and a couple of associates would record all sorts of material at PAL -- comedy material like "Hey Nelda", under the name "Ned and Nelda" -- a parody of "Hey Paula" by Paul and Paula: [Excerpt: Ned and Nelda, "Hey Nelda"] Doo-wop parodies like "Masked Grandma": [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Masked Grandma"] R&B: [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Why Don't You Do Me Right?"] and more. Then Buff or Zappa would visit one of the local independent label owners and try to sell them the master -- Art Laboe at Original Sound released several of the singles, as did Bob Keane at Donna Records and Del-Fi. The "How's Your Bird" single also got Zappa his first national media exposure, as he went on the Steve Allen show, where he demonstrated to Allen how to make music using a bicycle and a prerecorded electronic tape, in an appearance that Zappa would parody five years later on the Monkees' TV show: [Excerpt: Steve Allen and Frank Zappa, "Cyclophony"] But possibly the record that made the most impact at the time was "Memories of El Monte", a song that Zappa and Collins wrote together about Art Laboe's dances at El Monte Stadium, incorporating excerpts of several of the songs that would be played there, and named after a compilation Laboe had put out, which had included “I Remember Linda” by Little Julian and the Tigers. They got Cleve Duncan of the Penguins to sing lead, and the record came out as by the Penguins, on Original Sound: [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Memories of El Monte"] By this point, though, Pal studios was losing money, and Buff took up the offer of a job working for Laboe full time, as an engineer at Original Sound. He would later become best known for inventing the kepex, an early noise gate which engineer Alan Parsons used on a bass drum to create the "heartbeat" that opens Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Speak to Me"] That invention would possibly be Buff's most lasting contribution to music, as by the early eighties, the drum sound on every single pop record was recorded using a noise gate. Buff sold the studio to Zappa, who renamed it Studio Z and moved in -- he was going through a divorce and had nowhere else to live. The studio had no shower, and Zappa had to just use a sink to wash, and he was surviving mostly off food scrounged by his resourceful friend Motorhead Sherwood. By this point, Zappa had also joined a band called the Soots, consisting of Don Van Vliet, Alex St. Clair and Vic Mortenson, and they recorded several tracks at Studio Z, which they tried to get released on Dot Records, including a cover version of Little Richard's “Slippin' and Slidin'”, and a song called “Tiger Roach” whose lyrics were mostly random phrases culled from a Green Lantern comic: [Excerpt: The Soots, "Tiger Roach"] Zappa also started writing what was intended as the first ever rock opera, "I Was a Teenage Maltshop", and attempts were made to record parts of it with Vliet, Mortenson, and Motorhead Sherwood: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "I Was a Teenage Maltshop"] Zappa was also planning to turn Studio Z into a film studio. He obtained some used film equipment, and started planning a science fiction film to feature Vliet, titled "Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People". The title was inspired by an uncle of Vliet's, who lived with Vliet and his girlfriend, and used to urinate with the door open so he could expose himself to Vliet's girlfriend, saying as he did so "Look at that! Looks just like a big beef heart!" Unfortunately, the film would not get very far. Zappa was approached by a used-car salesman who said that he and his friends were having a stag party. As Zappa owned a film studio, could he make them a pornographic film to show at the party? Zappa told him that a film wouldn't be possible, but as he needed the money, would an audio tape be acceptable? The used-car salesman said that it would, and gave him a list of sex acts he and his friends would like to hear. Zappa and a friend, Lorraine Belcher, went into the studio and made a few grunting noises and sound effects. The used-car salesman turned out actually to be an undercover policeman, who was better known in the area for his entrapment of gay men, but had decided to branch out. Zappa and Belcher were arrested -- Zappa's father bailed him out, and Zappa got an advance from Art Laboe to pay Belcher's bail. Luckily "Grunion Run" and "Memories of El Monte" were doing well enough that Laboe could give Zappa a $1500 advance. When the case finally came to trial, the judge laughed at the tape and wanted to throw the whole case out, but the prosecutor insisted on fighting, and Zappa got ten days in prison, and most of his tapes were impounded, never to be returned. He fell behind with his rent, and Studio Z was demolished. And then Ray Collins called him, asking if he wanted to join a bar band: [Excerpt: The Mothers, "Hitch-Hike"] The Soul Giants were formed by a bass player named Roy Estrada. Now, Estrada is unfortunately someone who will come up in the story a fair bit over the next year or so, as he played on several of the most important records to come out of LA in the sixties and early seventies. He is also someone about whom there's fairly little biographical information -- he's not been interviewed much, compared to pretty much everyone else, and it's easy to understand why when you realise that he's currently half-way through a twenty-five year sentence for child molestation -- his third such conviction. He won't get out of prison until he's ninety-three. He's one of the most despicable people who will turn up in this podcast, and frankly I'm quite glad I don't know more about him as a person. He was, though, a good bass player and falsetto singer, and he had released a single on King Records, an instrumental titled "Jungle Dreams": [Excerpt, Roy Estrada and the Rocketeers, "Jungle Dreams"] The other member of the rhythm section, Jimmy Carl Black, was an American Indian (that's the term he always used about himself until his death, and so that's the term I'll use about him too) from Texas. Black had grown up in El Paso as a fan of Western Swing music, especially Bob Wills, but had become an R&B fan after discovering Wolfman Jack's radio show and hearing the music of Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Like every young man from El Paso, he would travel to Juarez as a teenager to get drunk, see sex shows, and raise hell. It was also there that he saw his first live blues music, watching Long John Hunter, the same man who inspired the Bobby Fuller Four, and he would always claim Hunter as the man whose shows taught him how to play the blues. Black had decided he wanted to become a musician when he'd seen Elvis perform live. In Black's memory, this was a gig where Elvis was an unknown support act for Faron Young and Wanda Jackson, but he was almost certainly slightly misremembering -- it's most likely that what he saw was Elvis' show in El Paso on the eleventh of April 1956, where Young and Jackson were also on the bill, but supporting Elvis who was headlining. Either way, Black had decided that he wanted to make girls react to him the same way they reacted to Elvis, and he started playing in various country and R&B bands. His first record was with a group called the Keys, and unfortunately I haven't been able to track down a copy (it was reissued on a CD in the nineties, but the CD itself is now out of print and sells for sixty pounds) but he did rerecord the song with a later group he led, the Mannish Boys: [Excerpt: Jimmy Carl Black and the Mannish Boys, "Stretch Pants"] He spent a couple of years in the Air Force, but continued playing music during that time, including in a band called The Exceptions which featured Peter Cetera later of the band Chicago, on bass. After a brief time working as lineman in Wichita, he moved his family to California, where he got a job teaching drums at a music shop in Anaheim, where the bass teacher was Jim Fielder, who would later play bass in Blood, Sweat, and Tears. One of Fielder's friends, Tim Buckley, used to hang around in the shop as well, and Black was at first irritated by him coming in and playing the guitars and not buying anything, but eventually became impressed by his music. Black would later introduce Buckley to Herb Cohen, who would become Buckley's manager, starting his professional career. When Roy Estrada came into the shop, he and Black struck up a friendship, and Estrada asked Black to join his band The Soul Giants, whose lineup became Estrada, Black, a sax player named Davey Coronado, a guitarist called Larry and a singer called Dave. The group got a residency at the Broadside club in Ponoma, playing "Woolly Bully" and "Louie Louie" and other garage-band staples. But then Larry and Dave got drafted, and the group got in two men called Ray -- Ray Collins on vocals, and Ray Hunt on guitar. This worked for a little while, but Ray Hunt was, by all accounts, not a great guitar player -- he would play wrong chords, and also he was fundamentally a surf player while the Soul Giants were an R&B group. Eventually, Collins and Hunt got into a fistfight, and Collins suggested that they get in his friend Frank instead. For a while, the Soul Giants continued playing "Midnight Hour" and "Louie Louie", but then Zappa suggested that they start playing some of his original material as well. Davy Coronado refused to play original material, because he thought, correctly, that it would lose the band gigs, but the rest of the band sided with the man who had quickly become their new leader. Coronado moved back to Texas, and on Mother's Day 1965 the Soul Giants changed their name to the Mothers. They got in Henry Vestine on second guitar, and started playing Zappa's originals, as well as changing the lyrics to some of the hits they were playing: [Excerpt: The Mothers, "Plastic People"] Zappa had started associating with the freak crowd in Hollywood centred around Vito and Franzoni, after being introduced by Don Cerveris, his old teacher turned screenwriter, to an artist called Mark Cheka, who Zappa invited to manage the group. Cheka in turn brought in his friend Herb Cohen, who managed several folk acts including the Modern Folk Quartet and Judy Henske, and who like Zappa had once been arrested on obscenity charges, in Cohen's case for promoting gigs by the comedian Lenny Bruce. Cohen first saw the Mothers when they were recording their appearance in an exploitation film called Mondo Hollywood. They were playing in a party scene, using equipment borrowed from Jim Guercio, a session musician who would briefly join the Mothers, but who is now best known for having been Chicago's manager and producing hit records for them and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. In the crowd were Vito and Franzoni, Bryan Maclean, Ram Dass, the Harvard psychologist who had collaborated with Timothy Leary in controversial LSD experiments that had led to both losing their jobs, and other stalwarts of the Sunset Strip scene. Cohen got the group bookings at the Whisky A-Go-Go and The Trip, two of the premier LA nightclubs, and Zappa would also sit in with other bands playing at those venues, like the Grass Roots, a band featuring Bryan Maclean and Arthur Lee which would soon change its name to Love. At this time Zappa and Henry Vestine lived together, next door to a singer named Victoria Winston, who at the time was in a duo called Summer's Children with Curt Boettcher: [Excerpt: Summer's Children, "Milk and Honey"] Winston, like Zappa, was a fan of Edgard Varese, and actually asked Zappa to write songs for Summer's Children, but one of the partners involved in their production company disliked Zappa's material and the collaboration went no further. Zappa at this point was trying to incorporate more ideas from modal jazz into his music. He was particularly impressed by Eric Dolphy's 1964 album "Out to Lunch": [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] But he was also writing more about social issues, and in particular he had written a song called "The Watts Riots Song", which would later be renamed "Trouble Every Day": [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] Now, the Watts Uprising was one of the most important events in Black American history, and it feels quite wrong that I'm covering it in an episode about a band made up of white, Latino, and American Indian people rather than a record made by Black people, but I couldn't find any way to fit it in anywhere else. As you will remember me saying in the episode on "I Fought the Law", the LA police under Chief William Parker were essentially a criminal gang by any other name -- they were incompetent, violent, and institutionally racist, and terrorised Black people. The Black people of LA were also feeling particularly aggrieved in the summer of 1965, as a law banning segregation in housing had been overturned by a ballot proposition in November 1964, sponsored by the real estate industry and passed by an overwhelming majority of white voters in what Martin Luther King called "one of the most shameful developments in our nation's history", and which Edmund Brown, the Democratic governor said was like "another hate binge which began more than 30 years ago in a Munich beer hall". Then on Wednesday, August 11, 1965, the police pulled over a Black man, Marquette Frye, for drunk driving. He had been driving his mother's car, and she lived nearby, and she came out to shout at him about drinking and driving. The mother, Rena Price, was hit by one of the policemen; Frye then physically attacked one of the police for hitting his mother, one of the police pulled out a gun, a crowd gathered, the police became violent against the crowd, a rumour spread that they had kicked a pregnant woman, and the resulting protests were exacerbated by the police carrying out what Chief Parker described as a "paramiltary" response. The National Guard were called in, huge swathes of south central LA were cordoned off by the police with signs saying things like "turn left or get shot". Black residents started setting fire to and looting local white-owned businesses that had been exploiting Black workers and customers, though this looting was very much confined to individuals who were known to have made the situation worse. Eventually it took six days for the uprising to be put down, at a cost of thirty-four deaths, 1032 injuries, and 3438 arrests. Of the deaths, twenty-three were Black civilians murdered by the police, and zero were police murdered by Black civilians (two police were killed by other police, in accidental shootings). The civil rights activist Bayard Rustin said of the uprising, "The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life." Frank Zappa's musical hero Johnny Otis would later publish the book Listen to the Lambs about the Watts rebellion, and in it he devotes more than thirty pages to eyewitness accounts from Black people. It's an absolutely invaluable resource. One of the people Otis interviews is Lily Ford, who is described by my copy of the book as being the "lead singer of the famous Roulettes". This is presumably an error made by the publishers, rather than Otis, because Ford was actually a singer with the Raelettes, as in Ray Charles' vocal group. She also recorded with Otis under the name "Lily of the Valley": [Excerpt: Lily of the Valley, "I Had a Sweet Dream"] Now, Ford's account deserves a large excerpt, but be warned, this is very, very difficult to hear. I gave a content warning at the beginning, but I'm going to give another one here. "A lot of our people were in the street, seeing if they could get free food and clothes and furniture, and some of them taking liquor too. But the white man was out for blood. Then three boys came down the street, laughing and talking. They were teenagers, about fifteen or sixteen years old. As they got right at the store they seemed to debate whether they would go inside. One boy started a couple of times to go. Finally he did. Now a cop car finally stops to investigate. Police got out of the car. Meanwhile, the other two boys had seen them coming and they ran. My brother-in-law and I were screaming and yelling for the boy to get out. He didn't hear us, or was too scared to move. He never had a chance. This young cop walked up to the broken window and looked in as the other one went round the back and fired some shots and I just knew he'd killed the other two boys, but I guess he missed. He came around front again. By now other police cars had come. The cop at the window aimed his gun. He stopped and looked back at a policeman sitting in a car. He aimed again. No shot. I tried to scream, but I was so horrified that nothing would come out of my throat. The third time he aimed he yelled, "Halt", and fired before the word was out of his mouth. Then he turned around and made a bull's-eye sign with his fingers to his partner. Just as though he had shot a tin can off a fence, not a human being. The cops stood around for ten or fifteen minutes without going inside to see if the kid was alive or dead. When the ambulance came, then they went in. They dragged him out like he was a sack of potatoes. Cops were everywhere now. So many cops for just one murder." [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] There's a lot more of this sort of account in Otis' book, and it's all worth reading -- indeed, I would argue that it is *necessary* reading. And Otis keeps making a point which I quoted back in the episode on "Willie and the Hand Jive" but which I will quote again here -- “A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference”. (Just a reminder, the word “Negro” which Otis uses there was, in the mid-sixties, the term of choice used by Black people.) And it's this which inspired "The Watts Riot Song", which the Mothers were playing when Tom Wilson was brought into The Trip by Herb Cohen: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] Wilson had just moved from Columbia, where he'd been producing Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, to Verve, a subsidiary of MGM which was known for jazz records but was moving into rock and roll. Wilson was looking for a white blues band, and thought he'd found one. He signed the group without hearing any other songs. Henry Vestine quit the group between the signing and the first recording, to go and join an *actual* white blues band, Canned Heat, and over the next year the group's lineup would fluctuate quite a bit around the core of Zappa, Collins, Estrada, and Black, with members like Steve Mann, Jim Guercio, Jim Fielder, and Van Dyke Parks coming and going, often without any recordings being made of their performances. The lineup on what became the group's first album, Freak Out! was Zappa, Collins, Estrada, Black, and Elliot Ingber, the former guitarist with the Gamblers, who had joined the group shortly before the session and would leave within a few months. The first track the group recorded, "Any Way the Wind Blows", was straightforward enough: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Any Way the Wind Blows"] The second song, a "Satisfaction" knock-off called "Hungry Freaks Daddy", was also fine. But it was when the group performed their third song of the session, "Who Are The Brain Police?", that Tom Wilson realised that he didn't have a standard band on his hands: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Are the Brain Police?"] Luckily for everyone concerned, Tom Wilson was probably the single best producer in America to have discovered the Mothers. While he was at the time primarily known for his folk-rock productions, he had built his early career on Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra records, some of the freakiest jazz of the fifties and early sixties. He knew what needed to be done -- he needed a bigger budget. Far from being annoyed that he didn't have the white blues band he wanted, Wilson actively encouraged the group to go much, much further. He brought in Wrecking Crew members to augment the band (though one of them. Mac Rebennack, found the music so irritating he pretended he needed to go to the toilet, walked out, and never came back). He got orchestral musicians to play Zappa's scores, and allowed the group to rent hundreds of dollars of percussion instruments for the side-long track "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", which features many Hollywood scenesters of the time, including Van Dyke Parks, Kim Fowley, future Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil, record executive David Anderle, songwriter P.F. Sloan, and cartoonist Terry Gilliam, all recording percussion parts and vocal noises: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet"] Such was Wilson's belief in the group that Freak Out! became only the second rock double album ever released -- exactly a week after the first, Blonde on Blonde, by Wilson's former associate Bob Dylan. The inner sleeve included a huge list of people who had influenced the record in one way or another, including people Zappa knew like Don Cerveris, Don Vliet, Paul Buff, Bob Keane, Nik Venet, and Art Laboe,  musicians who had influenced the group like Don & Dewey, Johnny Otis, Otis' sax players Preston Love and Big Jay McNeely, Eric Dolphy, Edgard Varese, Richard Berry, Johnny Guitar Watson, and Ravi Shankar, eccentric performers like Tiny Tim, DJs like Hunter Hancock and Huggy Boy, science fiction writers like Cordwainer Smith and Robert Sheckley, and scenesters like David Crosby, Vito, and Franzoni. The list of 179 people would provide a sort of guide for many listeners, who would seek out those names and find their ways into the realms of non-mainstream music, writing, and art over the next few decades. Zappa would always remain grateful to Wilson for taking his side in the record's production, saying "Wilson was sticking his neck out. He laid his job on the line by producing the album. MGM felt that they had spent too much money on the album". The one thing Wilson couldn't do, though, was persuade the label that the group's name could stay as it was. "The Mothers" was a euphemism, for a word I can't say if I want this podcast to keep its clean rating, a word that is often replaced in TV clean edits of films with "melon farmers", and MGM were convinced that the radio would never play any music by a band with that name -- not realising that that wouldn't be the reason this music wouldn't get played on the radio. The group needed to change their name. And so, out of necessity, they became the Mothers of Invention.

Nic Clark had a fairly unconventional childhood, which is perhaps one reason why his first album, Love Your Life / Songs for the Whole Family, came out youth-centric. It wasn't that he wasn't supported— in fact, his mom got him the certificate that allowed him to play in bars at the tender age of twelve. It was the school thing. His school system in the Denver area had a truancy court, and he set up semi-permanent residency there around the 7th grade.You see, he had found the blues. Visiting a bookstore with his brother, he found a book about harmonica playing which included pictures of Sonny Boy Williamson and Stevie Wonder and a harmonica….and he never came down. The harp was his school, and he never missed a class there. Soon he was playing live and then, after the shattering loss of both a young cousin and his grandfather, he found the healing power of music, too.We talk with Nic about growing up in a multi-generational household and how that has affected the way he creates music, how he found the harmonica, why school took a backseat to playing, creating the new album ‘Love your life', why he wanted to make an album for all ages to enjoy, and a whole lot more!For more info head over to: www.littlevillagefoundation.com/nic-clarkSONG BEFORE THE EPISODE 'Love Your Life' off the album 'Love Your Life: Music For The Whole Family'SONG AFTER THE EPISODE 'Dance Party' off the album 'Love Your Life: Music For The Whole Family'For FREESHIPPING from Shop Tour Bus Use The PROMO CODE: nosimpleroadFor 20% off Sunset Lake CBD PROMO CODE: NSR20 For 10% off Electric Fish Lights PROMO CODE: NSR INTRO MUSIC BY AND USED WITH OUR GRATITUDE AND THE PERMISSION OF:AMENDOLA VS. BLADESOUTRO MUSIC BY AND USED WITH OUR GRATITUDE AND THE PERMISSION OF:CHILLDREN OF INDIGONo Simple Road is part of OSIRIS MEDIA. Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you with podcasts and live experiences about artists and topics you love. To stay up to date on what we're up to, visit our site and sign up for our newsletter. Osiris works in partnership with JamBase, which connects music fans with the music they love and empowers them to go see live music!Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/nosimpleroad. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr Downhome's Blues Podcast #7 – Otis Rush, Rubin Lacey, Sleepy John Estes, Kid Bailey, Blind Joe Reynolds, Bo Weavil Jackson, Sonny Boy Williamson 1, Sonny Boy Williamson 2, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ramblin' Thomas, Peg Leg Howell, Memphis Willie B Borum, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Freddie Spruell, Tommy McClennan

This week's episode looks at "Ticket to Ride", the making of the Beatles' second film, and the influence of Bob Dylan on the Beatles' work and lives. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "The Game of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For material on the making of the film, I referred to Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh, a book which is in part a lengthy set of conversations between Soderbergh and Richard Lester. Sadly the only way to legally get the original mix of "Ticket to Ride" is this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the 1987 remix is widely available on the CD issue of the Help! soundtrack. The film is available on DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we last looked at the Beatles, they had just achieved their American success, and had appeared in their first film, A Hard Day's Night. Today, we're going to look at the massive artistic growth that happened to them between late 1964 and mid 1965, the making of their second film, Help!, the influence, both artistic and personal, of Bob Dylan on the group, and their introduction both to studio experimentation and to cannabis. We're going to look at "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] 1964 was a tremendously busy year for the Beatles. After they'd finished making A Hard Day's Night, but even before it was released, they had gone on yet another tour, playing Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, though without Ringo for much of the tour -- Ringo had to have his tonsils removed, and so for the first eight shows of the tour he was replaced by session drummer Jimmy Nicol, the former drummer with Colin Hicks and his Cabin Boys, who had played on several cheap soundalike records of Beatles songs. Nicol was a competent drummer, though very different in style from Ringo, and he found his temporary moment of celebrity hugely upsetting -- he later described it as the worst thing to ever happen to him, and ended up declaring bankruptcy only nine months after touring with the group. Nicol is now a recluse, and hasn't spoken to anyone about his time with the Beatles in more than thirty years. After Ringo returned to the group and the film came out they went back into the studio, only two months after the release of their third album, to start work on their fourth. They recorded four songs in two sessions before departing on their first full US tour. Those songs included two cover versions -- a version of "Mr. Moonlight" by Doctor Feelgood and the Interns that appeared on the album, and a version of Little Willie John's "Leave My Kitten Alone" that didn't see release until 1995 -- and two originals written mostly or entirely by John Lennon, "Baby's In Black", and "I'm a Loser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] "I'm a Loser" was an early sign of an influence that had particularly changed Lennon's attitude to songwriting -- that of Bob Dylan. Dylan had been on the group's radar for some time -- Paul McCartney in the Anthology book seems to have a confused memory of seeing Madhouse on Castle Street, the TV play Dylan had appeared in in January 1963 -- but early 1964 had seen him rise in prominence to the point that he was a major star, not just an obscure folk singer. And Lennon had paid particular attention to what he was doing with his lyrics. We've already seen that Lennon had been writing surreal poetry for years, but at this point in his life he still thought of his songwriting and his poetry as separate. As he would later put it "I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs; we would turn out a certain style of song for a single, and we would do a certain style of thing for this and the other thing. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market, and I didn't consider them (the lyrics or anything) to have any depth at all." This shouldn't be taken as Lennon saying that the early Beatles songs were lacking in quality, or that he didn't take the work seriously, but that it wasn't about self-expression. He was trying to do the best work he could as a craftsman. Listening to Dylan had showed him that it was possible instead to treat pop songwriting as art, in the sense Lennon understood the term -- as a means of personal expression that could also allow for experimentation and playing games. "I'm a Loser" is a first tentative step towards that, with Lennon for one of the first times consciously writing about his own emotions -- though careful to wrap those feelings both in a conventional love song structure and in a thick layer of distancing irony, to avoid making himself vulnerable -- and the stylistic influence of Dylan is very noticeable, as much in the instrumentation as in the lyrics. While several early Beatles singles had featured Lennon playing harmonica, he had been playing a chromatic harmonica, a type of harmonica that's mostly used for playing single-note melodies, because it allows the player to access every single note, but which is not very good for bending notes or playing chords. If you've heard someone playing the harmonica as a single-note melody instrument with few or no chords, whether Stevie Wonder, Larry Adler, or Max Geldray, the chances are they were playing a chromatic harmonica. On "I'm a Loser", though, Lennon plays a diatonic harmonica -- an instrument that he would refer to as a "harp" rather than a harmonica, because he associated it with the blues, where it's often referred to as a harp. Diatonic harmonicas are the instrument of choice for blues players because they allow more note-bending, and it's easier to play a full chord on them -- the downside, that you have a smaller selection of notes available, is less important in the blues, which tends towards harmonic minimalism. Diatonic harmonicas are the ones you're likely to hear on country, blues, and folk recordings -- they're the instrument played by people like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie McCoy, and Bob Dylan. Lennon had played a diatonic before, on "I Should Have Known Better", another song which shows Dylan's influence in the performance, though not in the lyrics. In both cases he is imitating Dylan's style, which tends to be full of chordal phrases rather than single-note melody. What's interesting about “I'm a Loser” though is contrasting John's harmonica solo with George's guitar solo which follows immediately after: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] That's a pure Carl Perkins solo, and the group would, in their choices of cover versions for the next few months, move away somewhat from the soul and girl-group influences that dominated the covers on their first two albums, and towards country and rockabilly -- they would still cover Larry Williams, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, but there were no more covers of contemporary Black artists, and instead there were cover versions of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, and Buck Owens, and Harrison switched from the Rickenbacker that had been his main instrument on A Hard Day's Night to playing a Gretsch -- the brand of guitar that Chet Atkins and Eddie Cochrane played.  The consensus among commentators -- with which, for once, I agree -- seems to be that this was also because of the influence of Dylan. The argument is that the Beatles heard Dylan's music as a form of country music, and it inspired them to go back to their other country-oriented influences. And this makes a lot of sense -- it was only fifteen years earlier, at the same time as they replaced "race" with "rhythm and blues", that Billboard magazine chose to rename their folk chart to the country and western chart -- as Tyler Mahan Coe puts it, "after years of trying to figure out what to call their “poor Black people music” and “poor white people music” charts". And Dylan had been as influenced by Hank Williams as by Woody Guthrie. In short what the Beatles, especially Lennon, heard in Dylan seems to have been three things -- a reminder of the rockabilly and skiffle influences that had been their first love before they'd discovered R&B and soul, permission to write honestly about one's own experiences, and an acknowledgement that such writing could include surrealistic wordplay. Fundamentally, Dylan, as much as being a direct influence, seems to have given the group a kind of permission -- to have shown them that there was room in the commercial sphere in which they were now operating for them to venture into musical and lyrical areas that had always appealed to them. But of course, that was not the only influence that Dylan had on the group, as anyone who has ever read anything at all about their first full US tour knows. That tour saw them playing huge venues like the Hollywood Bowl -- a show which later made up a big part of their only official live album, which was finally released in 1977: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Things We Said Today (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1964)"] It was nine days into the tour, on the twenty-eighth of August 1964, that they met Bob Dylan for the first time. The meeting with Dylan is usually called the first time the Beatles ever smoked cannabis -- and that's true, at least if you're talking about them as a group. Lennon had tried it around 1960, and both Lennon and Harrison had tried it at a show at the Southport Floral Hall in early 1962, but neither had properly understood what they were smoking, and had both already been drunk before smoking it. According to a later interview with Harrison, that had led to the two of them madly dancing the Twist in their dressing room, shouting "This stuff isn't doing anything!" But it was at this meeting that Paul and Ringo first smoked it, and it also seems to have been taken by Lennon and Harrison as their "real" first time, possibly partly because being introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in a New York hotel sounds a lot cooler than being introduced to it by your support band's drummer in Southport, possibly because it was the first time that they had all smoked it together as a group, but mostly because this was the time when it became a regular part of the group's life. Oddly, it happened because of a misheard lyric. Dylan had loved "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and had misheard "I can't hide" as "I get high", and thus just assumed that the British band were already familiar with cannabis. The drug had a profound effect on them -- McCartney later recalled being convinced he had discovered the meaning of life, writing it down on a bit of paper, and getting their roadie Mal Evans to hold the paper for safekeeping. The next morning, when he looked at the paper, he found it merely said "there are seven levels". Lennon, on the other hand, mostly remembered Dylan playing them his latest demos and telling them to listen to the words, but Lennon characteristically being unable to concentrate on the lyrics because in his stoned state he was overwhelmed by the rhythm and general sound of the music. From this point on, the use of cannabis became a major part of the group's life, and it would soon have a profound effect on their lifestyles, their songwriting, the production on their records, and every other aspect of their career. The Beatle on whom it seems to have had the strongest and most immediate effect was Lennon, possibly because he was the one who was coping least well with success and most needed something to take his mind off things. Lennon had always been susceptible to extremes of mood -- it's likely that he would these days be diagnosed as bipolar, and we've already seen how as soon as he'd started writing personally, he'd written "I'm a Loser". He was feeling trapped in suburbia, unsuited for his role as a husband and father, unhappy about his weight, and just generally miserable. Cannabis seemed, at least at first, to offer a temporary escape from that. All the group spent much of the next couple of years stoned, but Lennon probably more than any of them, and he was the one whose writing it seemed to affect most profoundly. On the group's return from the US, they carried on working on the next album, and on a non-album single designed to be released simultaneously with it. "I Feel Fine" is a major milestone in the group's career in a number of ways. The most obvious is the opening -- a brief bit of feedback which Lennon would always later claim to be the first deliberate use of the technique on a record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Feedback had, up until this point, been something that musicians generally tried to avoid -- an unwanted sound that could wreck a performance. But among guitarists in London, especially, it was becoming the fashionable sound to incorporate, in a carefully controlled manner, in order to make sounds that nobody had heard before. Jeff Beck, Dave Davies, and Pete Townshend would all argue about which of them was the first to use the technique, but all were using it on stage by the time the Beatles recorded "I Feel Fine". But the Beatles were, if not the first to deliberately use feedback on a record (as I've said in the past, there is no such thing as a first anything, and there are debatable examples where feedback may be deliberate going back to the 1930s and some records by Bob Wills), certainly the most prominent artists to do so up to that point, and also the first to make it a major, prominent feature of a hit record in this manner. If they hadn't done it, someone else undoubtedly would, but they were the first to capture the sound that was becoming so popular in the London clubs, and as so often in their career they were able to capture something that was at the cutting edge of the underground culture and turn it into something that would be accepted by millions. "I Feel Fine" was important to the Beatles in another way, though, in that it was the first Beatles original to be based entirely around a guitar riff, and this was if anything a more important departure from their earlier records than the feedback was. Up to this point, while the Beatles had used riffs in covers like "Twist and Shout", their originals had avoided them -- the rhythm guitar had tended to go for strummed chords, while the lead guitar was usually reserved for solos and interjections. Rather than sustaining a riff through the whole record, George Harrison would tend to play answer phrases to the vocal melody, somewhat in the same manner as a backing vocalist. This time, though, Lennon wrote an entire song around a riff -- one he had based on an R&B record from a few years earlier that he particularly loved, "Watch Your Step" by Bobby Parker: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Parker's record had, in turn, been inspired by two others -- the influence of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" is very obvious, but Parker had based the riff on one that Dizzy Gillespie had used in "Manteca", a classic early Afro-Cuban jazz record from 1947: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "Manteca"] Parker had played that riff on his guitar, varied it, and come up with what may be the most influential guitar riff of all time, one lifted not only by the Beatles (on both "I Feel Fine" and, in a modified form, "Day Tripper") but Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Allman Brothers Band, and many, many others: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Lennon took that riff and based a new song around it -- and it's important to note here that "I Feel Fine" *is* a new song. Both songs share the same riff and twelve-bar blues structure, but Lennon's lyric and melody are totally different, and the record has a different feel. There's a blurry line between plagiarism and homage, and to my mind "I Feel Fine" stays on the right side of that line, although it's a difficult issue because the Beatles were so much more successful than the unknown Parker. Part of the reason "I Feel Fine" could be the Beatles' first single based around a riff was it was recorded on a four-track machine, EMI having finally upgraded their equipment, which meant that the Beatles could record the instrumental and vocal tracks separately. This allowed Lennon and Harrison to hold down the tricky riff in unison, something Lennon couldn't do while also singing the melody -- it's noticeable that when they performed this song live, Lennon usually strummed the chords on a semi-acoustic guitar rather than doubling the riff as he does on the record. It's also worth listening to what Ringo's doing on the drums on the track. One of the more annoying myths about the Beatles is the claim made by a lot of people that Starr was in some way not a good drummer. While there has been some pushback on this, even to the extent that there is now a contrarian counterconsensus that says he was the best drummer in the world at the time, the general public still thinks of him as having been not particularly good. One listen to the part Starr played on "I Feel Fine" -- or indeed a close listen to any of his drum parts -- should get rid of that idea. While George and John are basically duplicating Parker's riff, Ringo picks up on the Parker record's similarity to "What'd I Say" and plays essentially the same part that Ray Charles' drummer had: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine (isolated drum part)"] There are copies of that posted on YouTube, and almost all of them have comments from people claiming that the drumming in question must be a session drummer, because Starr couldn't play that well.  Several of the Beatles' singles for the next two years would feature a heavy guitar riff as their main instrumental hook. Indeed, it seems like late 1964 is a point where things start to change a little for the Beatles in how they conceptualise singles and albums. Up to this point, they seem to have just written every song as a potential single, then chosen the ones they thought of as the most commercial as singles and stuck the rest out as album tracks. But from autumn 1964 through early 1966 there seems, at least on Lennon's part, to be a divide in how he looked at songs. The songs he brought in that became singles were almost uniformly guitar-driven heavy rockers with a strong riff. Meanwhile, the songs recorded for albums were almost all based on strummed acoustic guitars, usually ballads or at most mid-tempo, and often with meditative lyrics. He clearly seems to have been thinking in terms of commercial singles and less commercial album tracks, even if he didn't quite articulate it that way.  I specify Lennon here, because there doesn't seem to be a comparable split in McCartney's writing -- partly because McCartney didn't really start writing riff-based songs until Lennon dropped the idea in late 1966. McCartney instead seems to start expanding his palette of genres -- while Lennon seems to be in two modes for about an eighteen-month period, and not really to venture out of either the bluesy riff-rocker or the country-flavoured folk rock mode, McCartney starts becoming the stylistic magpie he would become in the later period of the group's career. The B-side to the single, "She's a Woman" is, like the A-side, blues-based, but here it's McCartney in Little Richard mode. The most interesting aspect to it, though, is the rhythm guitar part -- off-beat stabs which sound very much like the group continuing to try to incorporate ska into their work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She's a Woman"] The single went to number one, of course, as all the group's singles in this period did. Beatles For Sale, the album that came out of these sessions, is generally regarded as one of the group's weaker efforts, possibly because of the relatively large number of cover versions, but also because of its air of bleakness. From the autumnal cover photo to the laid-back acoustic feel of much of the album, to the depressing nature of Lennon's contributions to the songwriting -- "No Reply", "I'm a Loser", "Baby's in Black", and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" all being a far cry from "I Feel Fine" – it's not a fun album by any means. I've always had a soft spot for the album myself, but it's clearly the work of people who were very tired, depressed, and overworked. And they were working hard -- in the four months after the end of their American tour on the twentieth of September, they recorded most of Beatles For Sale and the accompanying single, played forty-eight gigs, made TV appearances on Shindig, Scene at 6:30, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Ready Steady Go, and Top of the Pops, radio appearances on Top Gear and Saturday Club, and sundry interviews. On top of that John also made an appearance on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's show "Not Only... But Also", performing versions of some of his poetry with Moore and Norman Rossington, who had co-starred in A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: John Lennon, Dudley Moore and Norman Rossington, "All Abord Speeching"] They did get a month off from mid-January 1965 through mid-February, but then it was back to work on a new film and accompanying soundtrack album. The group's second film, Help!, is generally regarded with rather less fondness than A Hard Day's Night, and it's certainly the case that some aspects of the film have not dated at all well -- in particular the way that several characters are played by white actors in brownface doing very unconvincing Indian accents, and the less than respectful attitude to Hindu religious beliefs, are things which will make any modern viewer with the slightest sensitivity to such issues cringe terribly.  But those aren't the aspects of the film which most of its critics pick up on -- rather they tend to focus only on the things that the Beatles themselves criticise about the film, mostly that the group spent most of the filming stoned out of their minds, and the performances are thus a lot less focused than those in A Hard Day's Night, and also that the script -- written this time by Richard Lester's regular collaborator Charles Wood, from a story by Marc Behm, rather than by Alun Owen -- is also a little unfocused. All these are fair criticisms as far as they go, but it's also the case that Help! is not a film that is best done justice by being viewed on a small screen on one's own, as most of its critics have viewed it most of the time. Help! is part of a whole subgenre of films which were popular in the 1960s but largely aren't made today -- the loose, chaotic, adventure comedy in which a nominal plot is just an excuse for a series of comedy sketches strung together with spectacular visuals. The genre encompasses everything from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World to Casino Royale to The Pink Panther, and all of these films are meant to be seen on a big screen which allows the audience to appreciate their visual inventiveness, and in a communal audience which is laughing along with them. And when seen in that light, Help! is actually a remarkably entertaining example of the type. Yes, it doesn't hold together as well as A Hard Day's Night, and it doesn't resolve so much as just stop, but structurally it's remarkably close to the films of the Marx Brothers, especially their Paramount films, and it's odd that the Marx comparisons get made about A Hard Day's Night, a slice-of-life film inspired by the French New Wave, and not about the screwball comedy that ends in a confused chase sequence. There is one thing that is worth noting about Help! that is often obscured -- part of the reason for its globetrotting nature was because of the levels of taxation in Britain at the time. For top earners, like the Beatles were, the marginal rate of income tax was as high as ninety-five percent in the mid-sixties. Many of us would think this was a reasonable rate for people who were earning many, many times in a year what most people would earn in a lifetime, but it's also worth noting that the Beatles'  success had so far lasted only two years, and that a pop act who was successful for five years was remarkably long-lived -- in the British pop industry only Cliff Richard and the Shadows had had a successful career as chart artists for longer than that, and even they were doing much less well in 1965 than they had been in 1963. In retrospect, of course, we know that the Beatles would continue to sell millions of records a year for more than sixty years, but that was not something any of them could possibly have imagined at the time, and we're still in a period where Paul McCartney could talk about going into writing musicals once the Beatles fad passed, and Ringo could still imagine himself as the owner of a hairdresser's. So it's not completely unreasonable of them to want to keep as much of their money as they could, while they could, and so while McCartney will always talk in interviews about how many of the scenes in the film were inspired by a wishlist from the group -- "We've never been skiing", "We've never been to the Bahamas" -- and there might even be some truth to that, it's also the case that the Bahamas were as known for their lax tax regime as for their undoubted charm as a tourist destination, and these journeys were not solely about giving the group a chance to have fun. But of course, before making the film itself, the group had to record songs for its soundtrack, and so on February the sixteenth they went into the studio to record four songs, including the next single, "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] While "Ticket to Ride" is mostly -- or possibly solely -- John's song, the record is very much Paul's record. For most of 1964, McCartney hadn't really been pulling his weight in the songwriting department when compared to John -- the handful of songs he had written had included some exceptional ones, but for the most part he hadn't written much, and John had been the more productive member of their partnership, writing almost all of the A Hard Day's Night album, most of the better tracks on Beatles For Sale, and the non-album single "I Feel Fine".  But now, John was sinking into one of his periodic bouts of depression -- he was still writing strong material, and would produce some of the best songs of his career in 1965, but he was unfocused and unhappy, and it was showing in his slowed productivity -- while McCartney was energised by living in London, the cultural capital of the world at that point in time, and having a famous girlfriend who was exposing him to vast areas of culture he had never been aware of before.  I say that "Ticket to Ride" is written by John, but there is some slight dispute about who contributed what to the writing. John's statement was that the song was all him, and that Paul's main contribution was the drum pattern that Ringo plays. Paul, on the other hand, claims that the song is about a sixty-forty split, with John being the sixty. McCartney's evidence for that is the strong vocal harmony he sings -- usually, if there's a two-part harmony like that on a Beatles song, it came about because Lennon and McCartney were in the same room together while writing it, and singing the part together as they were writing. He also talks about how when writing it they were discussing Ryde in the Isle of Wight, where McCartney's cousin ran a pub. I can certainly see it being the case that McCartney co-wrote the song, but I can also easily see the musicianly McCartney feeling the need to harmonise what would otherwise have been a monotonous melody, and adding the harmonies during the recording stage.  Either way, though, the song is primarily John's in the writing, but the arrangement is primarily McCartney's work -- and while Lennon would later claim that McCartney would always pay less attention to Lennon's songs than to McCartney's own, in this middle period of the group's career most of their truly astounding work comes when  Lennon brings in the song but McCartney experiments with the arrangement and production. Over and over again we see McCartney taking control of a Lennon song in the studio and bringing out aspects of it that its composer either had not considered or had not had the musical vocabulary or patience to realise on his own. Indeed one can see this as part of the dynamic that eventually led to the group breaking up. Lennon would bring in a half-formed idea and have the whole group work on it, especially McCartney, and turn it into the best version of itself it could be, but this would then seem like McCartney trying to take over. McCartney, meanwhile, with his greater musical facility, would increasingly not bother asking for the input of the group's other members, even when that input would have turned a mediocre song into a good one or a good one into a great one.  But at this point in their careers, at least, the collaboration brought out the best in both Lennon and McCartney -- though one must wonder what Harrison and Starr felt about having their parts dictated to them or simply replaced. In the case of "Ticket to Ride", one can trace the evolution of McCartney's drum pattern idea over a period of a few months. He was clearly fascinated by Hal Blaine's drum intro to "Be My Baby": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] and came up with a variation of it for his own song "What You're Doing", possibly the most interesting song on Beatles For Sale on a pure production level, the guitar part for which, owing a lot to the Searchers, is also clearly a pointer to the sound on “Ticket to Ride”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "What You're Doing"] "Ticket to Ride"s drum part is a more complex variation on that slightly broken pattern, as you can hear if you listen to the isolated drum part: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] Interestingly, Ringo doesn't keep that precise pattern up all the way through in the studio recording of the song, though he does in subsequent live versions. Instead, from the third verse onwards he shifts to a more straightforward backbeat of the kind he would more normally play: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] The mono mix of "Ticket to Ride", which is how most listeners of the time encountered it, shows much more than the stereo mix just what the group, and particularly Paul, were trying to do.  It's a bass-heavy track, sluggish and thundering. It's also a song that sounds *obsessed*. For the first six bars of the verse, and the whole intro, the song stays on a single chord, A, only changing on the word "away", right before the chorus: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] This obsession with one chord was possibly inspired by soul music, and in particular by "Dancing in the Street", which similarly stays on one chord for a long time: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"] We'll be looking more at how soul music was increasingly doing away with chord progressions in favour of keeping to an extended groove on a single chord when we next look at James Brown in a few weeks' time. But in its single-chord focus and its broken drum beat, "Ticket to Ride" is very much a precursor of what the group would do a little over a year later, when they recorded "Tomorrow Never Knows". Of course, it was also around this time that the group discovered Indian music for the first time. There are scenes in the film Help! which feature musicians playing Indian instruments, and George Harrison became fascinated by the sound of the sitar and bought one, and we'll be seeing the repercussions of that for much of the next year. But it's interesting to note that a lot of the elements that make Indian classical music so distinctive to ears used to Western popular music -- the lack of harmonic movement, the modal melodies, the use of percussion not to keep a steady beat but in melodic interplay with the string instruments -- were all already present in songs like "Ticket to Ride", albeit far less obviously and in a way that still fit very much into pop song conventions. The Beatles grew immensely as musicians from their exposure to Indian music, but it's also the case that Indian music appealed to them precisely because it was an extension of the tastes they already had. Unlike when recording Beatles For Sale, the group clearly had enough original material to fill out an album, even if they ended up not doing so and including two mediocre cover versions on the album -- the last time that would happen during the group's time together. The B-sides of the two singles, John's "Yes It Is" and Paul's "I'm Down", both remained only available on the singles, even though the previous film soundtrack had included the B-sides of both its singles. Not only that, but they recorded two Lennon/McCartney songs that would remain unreleased until more than thirty years later. "If You've Got Troubles" was left unreleased for good reason -- a song written for Ringo to sing, it's probably the single worst Lennon/McCartney song ever attempted by the group, with little or nothing to redeem it. McCartney's "That Means a Lot" is more interesting. It's clearly an attempt by McCartney to write a "Ticket to Ride" part two, with a similar riff and feel: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] It even has a sped-up repurposing of the hook line at the end, just as "Ticket to Ride" does, with "Can't you see?" taking the place of "My baby don't care": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] The group spent a couple of sessions on that track, but seem to have given up on it. While it's far from the best thing they did, it's not worthless or unreleasable, and one suspects that they ended up thinking that the track couldn't go on the same album as "Ticket to Ride" because the two songs were just too close. Instead, they ended up giving the song to P.J. Proby, the American singer who had been brought over by Jack Good for the About The Beatles show, and who had built something of a career for himself in the UK with a string of minor hits. Lennon said "we found we just couldn't sing it. In fact, we made a hash of it, so we thought we'd better give it to someone who could do it well". And Proby *could* have done it well -- but whether he did or not is something you can judge for yourself: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "That Means a Lot"] Somehow, Proby's version of the song made the top thirty. When the group started filming "Help!", the film was still going under the working title "Eight Arms to Hold You", which absolutely nobody involved liked -- the title was even included on the label of some copies of "Ticket to Ride", but Lennon and McCartney particularly disliked the idea of writing a song to that title. Some have suggested that the plan was to use McCartney's "Eight Days a Week", an album track from Beatles For Sale that had been released as an American single, as a title track, but it seems unlikely that anyone would have considered that -- United Artists wanted something they could put out on a soundtrack album, and the song had already been out for many months. Instead, at almost the last minute, it was decided to name the film "Help!". This was actually close to the very first working title for the film, which had been "Help, Help". According to Lester, "the lawyer said it had already been registered and you mustn't use it so we had Beatles Two and then Eight Arms to Hold You". The only film I've been able to discover with the title "Help, Help", though, is a silent film from 1912, which I don't imagine would have caused much problem in this case.  However, after the group insisted that they couldn't possibly write a song called "Eight Arms to Hold You", Lester realised that if he put an exclamation mark after the word "help", that turned it into a different title. After getting legal approval he announced that the title of the new film was going to be "Help!", and that same day John came up with a song to that title: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Help!"] Lennon later said that the song had started out as a slow, intense, ballad, and he had been persuaded to speed it up in the studio somewhat against his will. The song being performed as an upbeat pop song possibly made it harder for the public to see what was obvious to Lennon himself, that the song itself was a cry for help from someone going through a mental health crisis. Despite the title not being his, the sentiments certainly were, and for the first time there was barely even the fig-leaf of romantic love to disguise this. The song's lyrics certainly could be interpreted as being the singer wanting help from a romantic partner, but they don't actually specify this, which is not something that could be said about any of the group's other originals up to this point. The soundtrack album for Help! is also notable in other ways. George Harrison writes two songs on the album, when he'd only written one in total for the first four albums. From this point on he would be a major songwriting presence in the group. It also contains the most obvious Dylan homage yet, with Lennon impersonating Dylan's vocal style on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", recorded three days after "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"]  "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" was notable in another way as well -- it was the first time that a musician other than the Beatles or George Martin was called in to work on a Beatles record (other than Andy White on the "Love Me Do" session, which was not something the Beatles chose or approved of). The flute player Johnny Scott overdubbed two tracks of flute at the end of the recording: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"] That was a sign of things to come, because in June, once filming had completed, the group went into the studio to continue recording for the non-soundtrack side of the soundtrack album. This was the height of the group's success and embrace by the establishment -- two days earlier it had been announced that they were all to be awarded MBEs -- and it's also the point at which McCartney's new creative growth as a songwriter really became apparent. They recorded three songs on the same day -- his Little Richard soundalike "I'm Down", which ended up being used as the B-side for "Help!", an acoustic country song called "I've Just Seen a Face", and finally a song whose melody had come to him in a dream many months earlier. McCartney had been so impressed by the melody he'd dreamed that he'd been unable to believe it was original to him, and had spent a long time playing it to other people to see if they recognised it. When they didn't, he eventually changed the lyrics from his original jokey "Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs" to something more appropriate, and titled it "Yesterday": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday (Anthology 2 early take)"] "Yesterday" was released as a Beatles track, on a Beatles album, but it had absolutely no involvement from John, George, and Ringo -- nobody could figure out how to adapt the song to a guitars/bass/drums format. Instead George Martin scored it for a string quartet, with some assistance from McCartney who, worried that strings would end up meaning something Mantovani-like, insisted that the score be kept as simple as possible, and played with almost no vibrato. The result was a Beatles track that featured five people, but only one Beatle: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday"] The group's next album would see all the band members appearing on every track, and no musicians brought in from outside the group and their organisation, but the genie was now out of the bottle -- the label "The Beatles" on a record no longer meant that it featured John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but just that at least one of them was on the track and the others had agreed it could go out under their name. This would lead to immense changes in the way the group worked, and we'll be seeing how that played out throughout the rest of the 1960s.

Episode 126 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For Your Love", the Yardbirds, and the beginnings of heavy rock and the guitar hero.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "A Lover's Concerto" by the Toys. 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 playlist, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. The Yardbirds have one of the most mishandled catalogues of all the sixties groups, possibly the most mishandled. Their recordings with Giorgio Gomelsky, Simon Napier-Bell and Mickie Most are all owned by different people, and all get compiled separately, usually with poor-quality live recordings, demos, and other odds and sods to fill up a CD's running time. The only actual authoritative compilation is the long out-of-print Ultimate! . Information came from a variety of sources. Most of the general Yardbirds information came from The Yardbirds by Alan Clayson and Heart Full of Soul: Keith Relf of the Yardbirds by David French. Simon Napier-Bell's You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is one of the most entertaining books about the sixties music scene, and contains several anecdotes about his time working with the Yardbirds, some of which may even be true. Some information about Immediate Records came from Immediate Records by Simon Spence, which I'll be using more in future episodes. Information about Clapton came from Motherless Child by Paul Scott, while information on Jeff Beck came from Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck by Martin Power. 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 take a look at the early career of the band that, more than any other band, was responsible for the position of lead guitarist becoming as prestigious as that of lead singer. We're going to look at how a blues band launched the careers of several of the most successful guitarists of all time, and also one of the most successful pop songwriters of the sixties and seventies. We're going to look at "For Your Love" by the Yardbirds: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] The roots of the Yardbirds lie in a group of schoolfriends in Richmond, a leafy suburb of London. Keith Relf, Laurie Gane, Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty were art-school kids who were obsessed with Sonny Terry and Jimmy Reed, and who would hang around the burgeoning London R&B scene, going to see the Rolling Stones and Alexis Korner in Twickenham and at Eel Pie Island, and starting up their own blues band, the Metropolis Blues Quartet. However, Gane soon left the group to go off to university, and he was replaced by two younger guitarists, Top Topham and Chris Dreja, with Samwell-Smith moving from guitar to bass. As they were no longer a quartet, they renamed themselves the Yardbirds, after a term Relf had found on the back of an album cover, meaning a tramp or hobo. The newly-named Yardbirds quickly developed their own unique style -- their repertoire was the same mix of Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry as every other band on the London scene, but they included long extended improvisatory  instrumental sequences with Relf's harmonica playing off Topham's lead guitar. The group developed a way of extending songs, which they described as a “rave-up” and would become the signature of their live act – in the middle of a song they would go into a long instrumental solo in double-time, taking the song twice as fast and improvising heavily, before dropping back to the original tempo to finish the song off. These “rave-up” sections would often be much longer than the main song, and were a chance for everyone to show off their instrumental skills, with Topham and Relf trading phrases on guitar and harmonica. They were mentored by Cyril Davies, who gave them the interval spots at some of his shows -- and then one day asked them to fill in for him in a gig he couldn't make -- a residency at a club in Harrow, where the Yardbirds went down so well that they were asked to permanently take over the residency from Davies, much to his disgust. But the group's big break came when the Rolling Stones signed with Andrew Oldham, leaving Giorgio Gomelsky with no band to play the Crawdaddy Club every Sunday. Gomelsky was out of the country at his father's funeral when the Stones quit on him, and so it was up to Gomelsky's assistant Hamish Grimes to find a replacement. Grimes looked at the R&B scene and the choice came down to two bands -- the Yardbirds and Them. Grimes said it was a toss-up, but he eventually went for the Yardbirds, who eagerly agreed. When Gomelsky got back, the group were packing audiences in at the Crawdaddy and doing even better than the Stones had been. Soon Gomelsky wanted to become the Yardbirds' manager and turn the group into full-time musicians, but there was a problem -- the new school term was starting, Top Topham was only fifteen, and his parents didn't want him to quit school. Topham had to leave the group. Luckily, there was someone waiting in the wings. Eric Clapton was well known on the local scene as someone who was quite good on guitar, and he and Topham had played together for a long time as an informal duo, so he knew the parts -- and he was also acquainted with Dreja. Everyone on the London blues scene knew everyone else, although the thing that stuck in most of the Yardbirds' minds about Clapton was the time he'd seen the Metropolis Blues Quartet play and gone up to Samwell-Smith and said "Could you do me a favour?" When Samwell-Smith had nodded his assent, Clapton had said "Don't play any more guitar solos". Clapton was someone who worshipped the romantic image of the Delta bluesman, solitary and rootless, without friends or companions, surviving only on his wits and weighed down by troubles, and he would imagine himself that way as he took guitar lessons from Dave Brock, later of Hawkwind, or as he hung out with Top Topham and Chris Dreja in Richmond on weekends, complaining about the burdens he had to bear, such as the expensive electric guitar his grandmother had bought him not being as good as he'd hoped. Clapton had hung around with Topham and Dreja, but they'd never been really close, and he hadn't been considered for a spot in the Yardbirds when the group had formed. Instead he had joined the Roosters with Tom McGuinness, who had introduced Clapton to the music of Freddie King, especially a B-side called "I Love the Woman", which showed Clapton for the first time how the guitar could be more than just an accompaniment to vocals, but a featured instrument in its own right: [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I Love the Woman"] The Roosters had been blues purists, dedicated to a scholarly attitude to American Black music and contemptuous of pop music -- when Clapton met the Beatles for the first time, when they came along to an early Rolling Stones gig Clapton was also at, he had thought of them as "a bunch of wankers" and despised them as sellouts. After the Roosters had broken up, Clapton and McGuinness had joined the gimmicky Merseybeat group Casey Jones and his Engineers, who had a band uniform of black suits and cardboard Confederate army caps, before leaving that as well. McGuinness had gone on to join Manfred Mann, and Clapton was left without a group, until the Yardbirds called on him. The new lineup quickly gelled as musicians -- though the band did become frustrated with one quirk of Clapton's. He liked to bend strings, and so he used very light gauge strings on his guitar, which often broke, meaning that a big chunk of time would be taken up each show with Clapton restringing his guitar, while the audience gave a slow hand clap -- leading to his nickname, "Slowhand" Clap-ton. Two months after Clapton joined the group, Gomelsky got them to back Sonny Boy Williamson II on a UK tour, recording a show at the Crawdaddy Club which was released as a live album three years later: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds and Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Twenty-three Hours Too Long"] Williamson and the Yardbirds didn't get along though, either as people or as musicians. Williamson's birth name was Rice Miller, and he'd originally taken the name "Sonny Boy Williamson" to cash in on the fame of another musician who used that name, though he'd gone on to much greater success than the original, who'd died not long after the former Miller started using the name. Clapton, wanting to show off, had gone up to Williamson when they were introduced and said "Isn't your real name Rice Miller?" Williamson had pulled a knife on Clapton, and his relationship with the group didn't get much better from that point on. The group were annoyed that Williamson was drunk on stage and would call out songs they hadn't rehearsed, while Williamson later summed up his view of the Yardbirds to Robbie Robertson, saying "Those English boys want to play the blues so bad -- and they play the blues *so bad*!" Shortly after this, the group cut some demos on their own, which were used to get them a deal with Columbia, a subsidiary of EMI. Their first single was a version of Billy Boy Arnold's "I Wish You Would": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "I Wish You Would"] This was as pure R&B as a British group would get at this point, but Clapton was unhappy with the record -- partly because hearing the group in the studio made him realise how comparatively thin they sounded as players, and partly just because he was worried that even going into a recording studio at all was selling out and not something that any of the Delta bluesmen whose records he loved would do. He was happier with the group's first album, a live recording called Five Live Yardbirds that captured the sound of the group at the Marquee Club. The repertoire on that album was precisely the same as any of the other British R&B bands of the time -- songs by Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Slim Harpo, Sonny Boy Williamson and the Isley Brothers -- but they were often heavily extended versions, with a lot of interplay between Samwell-Smith's bass, Clapton's guitar, and Relf's harmonica, like their five-and-a-half-minute version of Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Smokestack Lightning"] "I Wish You Would" made number twenty-six on the NME chart, but it didn't make the Record Retailer chart which is the basis of modern chart compilations. The group were just about to go into the studio to cut their second single, a version of "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", when Keith Relf collapsed. Relf had severe asthma and was also a heavy smoker, and his lung collapsed and he had to be hospitalised for several weeks, and it looked for a while as if he might never be able to sing or play harmonica again. In his absence, various friends and hangers-on from the R&B scene deputised for him -- Ronnie Wood has recalled being at a gig and the audience being asked "Can anyone play harmonica?", leading to Wood getting on stage with them, and other people who played a gig or two, or sometimes just a song or two, with them include Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Rod Stewart. Stewart was apparently a big fan, and would keep trying to get on stage with them -- according to Keith Relf's wife, "Rod Stewart would be sitting in the backroom begging to go on—‘Oh give us a turn, give us a turn.'” Luckily, Relf's lung was successfully reinflated, and he returned to singing, harmonica playing... and smoking. In the early months back with the group, he would sometimes have to pull out his inhaler in the middle of a word to be able to continue singing, and he would start seeing stars on stage. Relf's health would never be good, but he was able to carry on performing, and the future of the group was secured. What wasn't secure was the group's relationship with their guitarist. While Relf and Dreja had for a time shared a flat with Eric Clapton, he was becoming increasingly distant from the other members. Partly this was because Relf felt somewhat jealous of the fact that the audiences seemed more impressed with the group's guitarist than with him, the lead singer; partly it was because Giorgio Gomelsky had made Paul Samwell-Smith the group's musical director, and Clapton had never got on with Samwell-Smith and distrusted his musical instincts; but mostly it was just that the rest of the group found Clapton rather petty, cold, and humourless, and never felt any real connection to him. Their records still weren't selling, but they were popular enough on the local scene that they were invited to be one of the support acts for the Beatles' run of Christmas shows at the end of 1964, and hung out with the group backstage. Paul McCartney played them a new song he was working on, which didn't have lyrics yet, but which would soon become "Yesterday", but it was another song they heard that would change the group's career. A music publisher named Ronnie Beck turned up backstage with a demo he wanted the Beatles to hear. Obviously, the Beatles weren't interested in hearing any demos -- they were writing so many hits they were giving half of them away to other artists, why would they need someone else's song? But the Yardbirds were looking for a hit, and after listening to the demo, Samwell-Smith was convinced that a hit was what this demo was. The demo was by a Manchester-based songwriter named Graham Gouldman. Gouldman had started his career in a group called the Whirlwinds, who had released one single -- a version of Buddy Holly's "Look at Me" backed with a song called "Baby Not Like You", written by Gouldman's friend Lol Creme: [Excerpt: The Whirlwinds, "Baby Not Like You"] The Whirlwinds had split up by this point, and Gouldman was in the process of forming a new band, the Mockingbirds, which included drummer Kevin Godley. The song on the demo had been intended as the Mockingbirds' first single, but their label had decided instead to go with "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)": [Excerpt: The Mockingbirds, "That's How (It's Gonna Stay)"] So the song, "For Your Love", was free, and Samwell-Smith was insistent -- this was going to be the group's first big hit. The record was a total departure from their blues sound. Gouldman's version had been backed by bongos and acoustic guitar, and Samwell-Smith decided that he would keep the bongo part, and add, not the normal rock band instruments, but harpsichord and bowed double bass: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] The only part of the song where the group's normal electric instrumentation is used is the brief middle-eight, which feels nothing like the rest of the record: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "For Your Love"] But on the rest of the record, none of the Yardbirds other than Jim McCarty play -- the verses have Relf on vocals, McCarty on drums, Brian Auger on harpsichord, Ron Prentice on double bass and Denny Piercy on bongos, with Samwell-Smith in the control room producing. Clapton and Dreja only played on the middle eight. The record went to number three, and became the group's first real hit, and it led to an odd experience for Gouldman, as the Mockingbirds were by this time employed as the warm-up act on the BBC's Top of the Pops, which was recorded in Manchester, so Gouldman got to see mobs of excited fans applauding the Yardbirds for performing a song he'd written, while he was completely ignored. Most of the group were excited about their newfound success, but Clapton was not happy. He hadn't signed up to be a member of a pop group -- he wanted to be in a blues band. He made his displeasure about playing on material like "For Your Love"  very clear, and right after the recording session he resigned from the group. He was convinced that they would be nothing without him -- after all, wasn't he the undisputed star of the group? -- and he immediately found work with a group that was more suited to his talents, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The Bluesbreakers at this point consisted of Mayall on keyboards and vocals, Clapton on guitar, John McVie on bass, and Hughie Flint on drums. For their first single with this lineup, they signed a one-record deal with Immediate Records, a new independent label started by the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham. That single was produced by Immediate's young staff producer, the session guitarist Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "I'm Your Witch Doctor"] The Bluesbreakers had something of a fluid lineup -- shortly after that recording, Clapton left the group to join another group, and was replaced by a guitarist named Peter Green. Then Clapton came back, for the recording of what became known as the "Beano album", because Clapton was in a mood when they took the cover photo, and so read the children's comic the Beano rather than looking at the camera: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Bernard Jenkins"] Shortly after that, Mayall fired John McVie, who was replaced by Jack Bruce, formerly of the Graham Bond Organisation, but then Bruce left to join Manfred Mann and McVie was rehired. While Clapton was in the Bluesbreakers, he gained a reputation for being the best guitarist in London -- a popular graffito at the time was "Clapton is God" -- and he was at first convinced that without him the Yardbirds would soon collapse. But Clapton had enough self-awareness to know that even though he was very good, there were a handful of guitarists in London who were better than him. One he always acknowledged was Albert Lee, who at the time was playing in Chris Farlowe's backing band but would later become known as arguably the greatest country guitarist of his generation. But another was the man that the Yardbirds got in to replace him. The Yardbirds had originally asked Jimmy Page if he wanted to join the group, and he'd briefly been tempted, but he'd decided that his talents were better used in the studio, especially since he'd just been given the staff job at Immediate. Instead he recommended his friend Jeff Beck. The two had known each other since their teens, and had grown up playing guitar together, and sharing influences as they delved deeper into music. While both men admired the same blues musicians that Clapton did, people like Hubert Sumlin and Buddy Guy, they both had much more eclectic tastes than Clapton -- both loved rockabilly, and admired Scotty Moore and James Burton, and Beck was a huge devotee of Cliff Gallup, the original guitarist from Gene Vincent's Blue Caps. Beck also loved Les Paul and the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, while Page was trying to incorporate some of the musical ideas of the sitar player Ravi Shankar into his playing. While Page was primarily a session player, Beck was a gigging musician, playing with a group called the Tridents, but as Page rapidly became one of the two first-call session guitarists along with Big Jim Sullivan, he would often recommend his friend for sessions he couldn't make, leading to Beck playing on records like "Dracula's Daughter", which Joe Meek produced for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages: [Excerpt: Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Dracula's Daughter"] While Clapton had a very straightforward tone, Beck was already experimenting with the few effects that were available at the time, like echoes and fuzztone. While there would always be arguments about who was the first to use feedback as a controlled musical sound, Beck is one of those who often gets the credit, and Keith Relf would describe Beck's guitar playing as being almost musique concrete. You can hear the difference on the group's next single. "Heart Full of Soul" was again written by Gouldman, and was originally recorded with a sitar, which would have made it one of the first pop singles to use the instrument. However, they decided to replace the sitar part with Beck playing the same Indian-sounding riff on a heavily-distorted guitar: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul"] That made number two in the UK and the top ten in the US, and suddenly the world had a new guitar god, one who was doing things on records that nobody else had been doing. The group's next single was a double A-side, a third song written by Gouldman, "Evil Hearted You", coupled with an original by the group, "Still I'm Sad". Neither track was quite up to the standard of their previous couple of singles, but it still went to number three on the charts. From this point on, the group stopped using Gouldman's songs as singles, preferring to write their own material, but Gouldman had already started providing hits for other groups like the Hollies, for whom he wrote songs like “Bus Stop”: [Excerpt: The Hollies, “Bus Stop”] His group The Mockingbirds had also signed to Immediate Records, who put out their classic pop-psych single “You Stole My Love”: [Excerpt: The Mockingbirds, “You Stole My Love”] We will hear more of Gouldman later. In the Yardbirds, meanwhile, the pressure was starting to tell on Keith. He was a deeply introverted person who didn't have the temperament for stardom, and he was uncomfortable with being recognised on the street. It also didn't help that his dad was also the band's driver and tour manager, which meant he always ended up feeling somewhat inhibited, and he started drinking heavily to try to lose some of those inhibitions. Shortly after the recording of "Evil Hearted You", the group went on their first American tour, though on some dates they were unable to play as Gomelsky had messed up their work permits -- one of several things about Gomelsky's management of the group that irritated them. But they were surprised to find that they were much bigger in the US than in the UK. While the group had only released singles, EPs, and the one live album in the UK, and would only ever put out one UK studio album, they'd recorded enough that they'd already had an album out in the US, a compilation of singles, B-sides, and even a couple of demos, and that had been picked up on by almost every garage band in the country. On one of the US gigs, their opening act, a teenage group called the Spiders, were in trouble. They'd learned every song on that Yardbirds album, and their entire set was made up of covers of that material. They'd gone down well supporting every other major band that came to town, but they had a problem when it came to the Yardbirds. Their singer described what happened next: "We thought about it and we said, 'Look, we're paying tribute to them—let's just do our set.' And so, we opened for the Yardbirds and did all of their songs. We could see them in the back and they were smiling and giving us the thumbs up. And then they got up and just blew us off the stage—because they were the Yardbirds! And we just stood there going, 'Oh…. That's how it's done.' The Yardbirds were one of the best live bands I ever heard and we learned a lot that night." That band, and later that lead singer, both later changed their name to Alice Cooper. The trip to the US also saw a couple of recording sessions. Gomelsky had been annoyed at the bad drum sound the group had got in UK studios, and had loved Sam Phillips' drum sound on the old Sun records, so had decided to get in touch with Phillips and ask him to produce the group. He hadn't had a reply, but the group turned up at Phillips' new studio anyway, knowing that he lived in a flat above the studio. Phillips wasn't in, but eventually turned up at midnight, after a fishing trip, drunk. He wasn't interested in producing some group of British kids, but Gomelsky waved six hundred dollars at him, and he agreed. He produced two tracks for the group. One of those, "Mr. You're a Better Man Than I", was written by Mike Hugg of Manfred Mann and his brother: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Mister, You're a Better Man Than I"] The backing track there was produced by Phillips, but the lead vocal was redone in New York, as Relf was also drunk and wasn't singing well -- something Phillips pointed out, and which devastated Relf, who had grown up on records Phillips produced. Phillips' dismissal of Relf also grated on Beck -- even though Beck wasn't close to Relf, as the two competed for prominence on stage while the rest of the band kept to the backline, Beck had enormous respect for Relf's talents as a frontman, and thought Phillips horribly unprofessional for his dismissive attitude, though the other Yardbirds had happier memories of the session, not least because Phillips caught their live sound better than anyone had. You can hear Relf's drunken incompetence on the other track they recorded at the session, their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'", the song we covered way back in episode forty-four. Rearranged by Samwell-Smith and Beck, the Yardbirds' version built on the Johnny Burnette recording and turned it into one of the hardest rock tracks ever recorded to that point -- but Relf's drunk, sloppy, vocal was caught on the backing track. He later recut the vocal more competently, with Roy Halee engineering in New York, but the combination of the two vocals gives the track an unusual feel which inspired many future garage bands: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] On that first US tour, they also recorded a version of Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man" at Chess Studios, where Diddley had recorded his original. Only a few weeks after the end of that tour they were back for a second tour, in support of their second US album, and they returned to Chess to record what many consider their finest original. "Shapes of Things" had been inspired by the bass part on Dave Brubeck's "Pick Up Sticks": [Excerpt: Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Pick Up Sticks"] Samwell-Smith and McCarty had written the music for the song, Relf and Samwell-Smith added lyrics, and Beck experimented with feedback, leading to one of the first psychedelic records to become a big hit, making number three in the UK and number eleven in the US: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Shapes of Things"] That would be the group's last record with Giorgio Gomelsky as credited producer -- although Samwell-Smith had been doing all the actual production work -- as the group were becoming increasingly annoyed at Gomelsky's ideas for promoting them, which included things like making them record songs in Italian so they could take part in an Italian song contest. Gomelsky was also working them so hard that Beck ended up being hospitalised with what has been variously described as meningitis and exhaustion. By the time he was out of the hospital, Gomelsky was fired. His replacement as manager and co-producer was Simon Napier-Bell, a young dilettante and scenester who was best known for co-writing the English language lyrics for Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me": [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me"] The way Napier-Bell tells the story -- and Napier-Bell is an amusing raconteur, and his volumes of autobiography are enjoyable reads, but one gets the feeling that he will not tell the truth if a lie seems more entertaining -- is that the group chose him because of his promotion of a record he'd produced for a duo called Diane Ferraz and Nicky Scott: [Excerpt: Diane Ferraz and Nicky Scott, "Me and You"] According to Napier-Bell, both Ferraz and Scott were lovers of his, who were causing him problems, and he decided to get rid of the problem by making them both pop stars. As Ferraz was Black and Scott white, Napier-Bell sent photos of them to every DJ and producer in the country, and then when they weren't booked on TV shows or playlisted on the radio, he would accuse the DJs and producers of racism and threaten to go to the newspapers about it. As a result, they ended up on almost every TV show and getting regular radio exposure, though it wasn't enough to make the record a hit. The Yardbirds had been impressed by how much publicity Ferraz and Scott had got, and asked Napier-Bell to manage them. He immediately set about renegotiating their record contract and getting them a twenty-thousand-pound advance -- a fortune in the sixties. He also moved forward with a plan Gomelsky had had of the group putting out solo records, though only Relf ended up doing so. Relf's first solo single was a baroque pop song, "Mr. Zero", written by Bob Lind, who had been a one-hit wonder with "Elusive Butterfly", and produced by Samwell-Smith: [Excerpt: Keith Relf, "Mr. Zero"] Beck, meanwhile, recorded a solo instrumental, intended for his first solo single but not released until nearly a year later.  "Beck's Bolero" has Jimmy Page as its credited writer, though Beck claims to be a co-writer, and features Beck and Page on guitars, session pianist Nicky Hopkins, and Keith Moon of the Who on drums. John Entwistle of the Who was meant to play bass, but when he didn't show to the session, Page's friend, session bass player John Paul Jones, was called up: [Excerpt: Jeff Beck, "Beck's Bolero"] The five players were so happy with that recording that they briefly discussed forming a group together, with Moon saying of the idea "That will go down like a lead zeppelin". They all agreed that it wouldn't work and carried on with their respective careers. The group's next single was their first to come from a studio album -- their only UK studio album, variously known as Yardbirds or Roger the Engineer. "Over Under Sideways Down" was largely written in the studio and is credited to all five group members, though Napier-Bell has suggested he came up with the chorus lyrics: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Over Under Sideways Down"] That became the group's fifth top ten single in a row, but it would be their last, because they were about to lose the man who, more than anyone else, had been responsible for their musical direction. The group had been booked to play an upper-class black-tie event, and Relf had turned up drunk. They played three sets, and for the first, Relf started to get freaked out by the fact that the audience were just standing there, not dancing, and started blowing raspberries at them. He got more drunk in the interval, and in the second set he spent an entire song just screaming at the audience that they could copulate with themselves, using a word I'm not allowed to use without this podcast losing its clean rating. They got him offstage and played the rest of the set just doing instrumentals. For the third set, Relf was even more drunk. He came onstage and immediately fell backwards into the drum kit. Only one person in the audience was at all impressed -- Beck's friend Jimmy Page had come along to see the show, and had thought it great anarchic fun. He went backstage to tell them so, and found Samwell-Smith in the middle of quitting the group, having finally had enough. Page, who had turned down the offer to join the group two years earlier, was getting bored of just being a session player and decided that being a pop star seemed more fun. He immediately volunteered himself as the group's new bass player, and we'll see how that played out in a future episode...

Show 133 – Recorded 6-5-21 – This podcast features 12 outstanding blues artists and 12 great performances to enjoy. These songs were recorded in 1963 and 1964. Our featured artists are: Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson 2, Lightnin Hopkins, Sleepy John Estes, John Henry Barbee, Howlin Wolf, Big Joe Williams, Victoria Spivey, Lonnie Johnson, Otis […]

Hey, y'all. I am Shay. This is the on air indie show. Welcome & enjoy. Episode 46 First, music history facts for May 25th. In 1965 Blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter Sonny Boy Williamson died in his sleep. The Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods said during a 60s UK tour Sonny Boy had once set his hotel room on fire. He was trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator. Darren McCarthy from alt-rock band Plastic Cowboys joins me today. We present three tracks from the released Splinter EP. The talented trio hails from Westmeath, Ireland. The Splinter EP deals with issues such as mental health, escapism and hangovers. Splinter is one of 3 EPs planned for release this year by the band. The band is one of thebuzzr's most need to watch bands for 2021. Enjoy! Tracks: "Storehouse" 19:16:21 "Molly" 26:21:34 "Those Damn Lights" 39:27:31 Artist Bio Provided by Youngblood Music. SPLINTER is the new EP from Plastic Cowboys, scheduled for release on 12.03.2021. ​Kicking off what promises to be a busy 2021, Plastic Cowboys return with the release of their debut EP Splinter. Harnassing the plethora of feelings which will be familiar to most following a year spent largely in lockdown, the Westmeath indie-rock trio have tapped into the rollercoaster of emotions that are experienced through living in your own head. Managing to navigate the Covid-19 restrictions by splitting their time between studio and self-recorded sessions, this allowed the trio more freedom to explore and develop their sound. "With both Darren and Joseph having experience in production, the restrictions actually forced us to become more self-sufficient when it came to the recording. So we decided to take the positives from the situation and push on with our plans." The sense of introspection that a lot of people would have felt over the last year is captured perfectly in lead single None Like You which was released in December as a teaser to the EP. As Ciaran explains: "The walls were feeling tighter than I had ever felt before, which brought about a lot of soul-searching. It's easy for us as people, especially Irish people, to ignore our problems or try to mend them with the minimum of care, and expect everything to be solved. None Like You is about trying to grow and improve as a person by riding those highs and lows rather then getting swept awy by them." ​Splinter is the first of 3 EPs planned by Plastic Cowboys in 2021, culminating in a debut album from one of Irelands most rousing new bands. Ciaran McGann - Vocals, Guitar Darren McCarthy - Bass Joe Monaghan - Drums https://youtu.be/dF-W88LD424 Animated by Michaela Monaghan. Her Instagram is @kayla.doodle Facebook Twitter Youtube Link Spotify Soundcloud Bandcamp Instagram Previous Next

Episode 2, AJ talks to James Montgomery. The Boston based blues icon, has been a touring musician for over 5 decades. The chat covers James entire career including his time with The Allman Brothers, Johnny Winter and the James Montgomery Band. We also get an amazing blues lesson with personal stories about James Cotton, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson 1.

Lee Sankey continues his deep dive into the fundamentals of playing the harmonica with Joe Filisko. In this episode Joe and Lee discuss fundamental number four - Single Notes and Tongue Blocking. This is a monster, 1 hour and 15 minute unashamed, geek out on topics such as bending tongue blocked, how Sonny Boy Williamson used full tongue blocks to get his attack, how to feather notes, accessing genre's like cajun music and just how long it takes to learn some of these techniques. SPECIAL LIVE EVENT - Look out for details of a special live online event about this series where you can ask Joe and I questions about the themes we've been exploring. To hear about the date and how to get tickets subscribe to my newsletter at leeesankey.com or follow my Facebook page. Get in touch with your suggestion, ideas and comments - info@leesankey.comSHOW LINK: Joe Filisko websiteLee Sankey Links:WebsiteYouTubeFacebookTwitterInstagram

Tea for One/孤品兆赫-251, 布鲁斯/Help Me订阅:【孤品兆赫】本期继续一期布鲁斯的专题，介绍黑人口琴大师Sonny Boy Williamson在1963年的录音，欢迎收听。Trackllist 1. < Moving Out > -- Sonny Boy Williamson, 1963 2. < Getting Together > -- Sonny Boy Williamson, 19633. < Same Girl > -- Sonny Boy Williamson & Memphis Slim, 1963 4. < Trouble Everywhere I Go > -- Memphis Slim & Canned Heat, 1973 5. < Help Me > -- Canned Heat, 1967 6. < Help Me > -- Sonny Boy Williamson, 1963

Une Vie de lutte contre la segregation raciale - Editions Libertalia -Traduction Julien Bordier - Musique de l'épisode : Bye Bye Bird de Sonny Boy Williamson (1963) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ubuntuu/message

Few performers in American music have toiled for so many years before earning widespread acclaim and respect as Bobby Rush. Rolling Stone dubbed Rush King of the Chitlin' Circuit. Martin Scorsese featured him in his 2003 documentary The Blues. In 2006 he was named to the Blues Hall of Fame, and in 2015, he was named BB King Entertainer of the Year, one week before King himself, a close friend of Rush, passed away. But Bobby Rush is not coasting. He's plays between 100 and 200 dates a year with a big band, and he's recently signed the most significant record deal of his life. Rounder Records, a label with a long history of backing authentic folk and blues artists, has released Porcupine Meat. As the title implies, it's as rural and down-home and true to himself as anything he's ever done. In this hour, Bobby Rush speaks about his passion for performing, his farewell to BB King and about the long, arduous journey from his youth in Pine Bluff AR to Chicago and to his years touring the Deep South as a regional favorite. Then toward the end of the show, our time machine audio segment steps back another generation in the blues, with tape of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson telling Alan Lomax what it was REALLY like to launch a music career in the 1920s and 30s in the segregated south.