Podcast appearances and mentions of Sonny Liston

This Sunday, May 25th marks the 60th anniversary of the Muhammed Ali vs Sonny Liston fight, that ended in the iconic image of Ali standing over Liston. C&R highlight some of the most iconic images in sports, from Jordan to "The catch." And details are here for the Covino & Rich 20th anniversary celebration in Vegas. RSVP now and hope to see you there! #FSR #CRSHOW #OverpromisedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Sunday, May 25th marks the 60th anniversary of the Muhammed Ali vs Sonny Liston fight, that ended in the iconic image of Ali standing over Liston. C&R highlight some of the most iconic images in sports, from Jordan to "The catch." And details are here for the Covino & Rich 20th anniversary celebration in Vegas. RSVP now and hope to see you there! #FSR #CRSHOW #OverpromisedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join hosts Tony and Rick for an exclusive interview with boxing legend Chuck Wepner. Known as “The Bayonne Bleeder,” Chuck shares incredible stories from his storied career, including his iconic 1975 fight against Muhammad Ali, where he knocked down the champ, inspiring Rocky. From his gritty bouts with Sonny Liston and George Foreman to his wild wrestling match with Victor the Bear, Wepner's tales are packed with heart and humor. Perfect for boxing fans, Rocky enthusiasts, and anyone who loves a true underdog story! Tune in for an unforgettable chat about resilience, courage, and a life in the ring.

Muhammad Ali is widely recognized as one of the greatest athletes of all-time and one of the most important figures of the 20th century. In addition to his long and celebrated career as a boxer and three-time heavyweight champion of the world, Ali changed the conversation about race, religion, and politics in America. Ali's refusal to be inducted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War on religious grounds—a profound act of resistance that resulted not only in Ali's three-plus-year exile from professional boxing, but also a criminal conviction and five year-prison sentence that Ali almost had to serve until it was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court—represented a pivotal moment of the 1960s. Ali has been the subject of numerous books and documentary films, including the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings (1996) and The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013). He is also the subject of the 2001 Hollywood biopic, Ali (co-written and directed by Michael Mann and starring Will Smith as Ali), which focuses on the ten-year period from Ali's capture of the heavyweight crown from Sonny Liston in 1964 to Ali's fight against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 (the famed “Rumble in the Jungle”). Once a sharply polarizing figure, Ali became one of the most celebrated and eulogized individuals in America, whose rich, if not incomparable, legacy reverberates around the world today.  Timestamps:0:00    Introduction2:22      Formative experiences5:00     From Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali10:26    Opposition to the Vietnam draft13:16     Ali's loss of his prime years15:42     The broader significance of Ali's opposition to induction 18:08    Ali's legal challenges and the U.S. Supreme Court22:48:   The Fight of the Century24:06    From a symbol of resistance to reconciliation27:50     Becoming a global icon: The Rumble in the Jungle35:30    Ali and Howard Cosell 36:57    Ali and Malcolm X41:08    Some problems of the Ali biopic44:12     Ali's post-boxing career47:53    Sports and resistance: Ali's legacy      Further reading:Hauser, Thomas, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (1991)Kindred, Dave, Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship (2006)Lederman, Marty, “The story of Cassius Clay v. United States,” SCOTUSBlog (June 8, 2016)Lipsyte, Robert, Free to Be Muhammad Ali (1978)Marqusee, Mike, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (2017)Remnick, David, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1998)Zirin, Dave, Muhammad Ali Handbook (2007)Zirin, Dave, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World (2022)Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/profiles/hafetzjo.htmlYou can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.comYou can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilmYou can follow the podcast on Instagram @lawonfilmpodcast

After beating Joe Frazier and George Foreman in two of the biggest fights in boxing history, Muhammad Ali was looking for an easy win over somebody. Enter Chuck Wepner... This would be a walk in the park for the champ before he could move on to bigger things. Chuck had other plans. After knocking Ali down in the 9th round Wepner told his trainer Al Braverman to start the car... "We're going to the bank, " he said. "We're millionaires." To which Braverman told his fighter, "You better turn around. He's getting up and he looks pissed off." For the remainder of the fight, Ali battered the challenger, opening up cuts above both of Wepner's eyes. But Wepner kept coming, and kept coming, and never stopped until 19 seconds left in the 15th round when Ali sent him to the canvas... and even then, Wepner got back up, but the fight was stopped. He had given everything he had and then some and his courageous fight caught the attention of everyone... most notably a young Sylvester Stallone who would use this Wepner fight against Ali to write a screenplay about a fighter getting the opportunity of a lifetime, and coming this close to becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. We know him as Rocky Balboa. But another filmmaker also was interested in the story of Chuck Wepner. Enter Jeff Feuerzeig, who wasn't as interested in Rocky Balboa, but rather... The Bayonne Bleeder, Wepner. So Feuerzeig set out to tell the story of Wepner in an ESPN 30-for-30 documentary called 'The Real Rocky" and then followed that up by writing the screenplay for a feature film titled, "Chuck" starring Liev Schreiber. Nobody knows the story of Chuck Wepner better than Feuerzeig and he joins us this week on the 50-year anniversary of when this unheralded fighter got into the ring with the most famous boxer of all-time, and stood toe-to-toe with the great Ali for 15 rounds. Feuerzeig tells how he first heard of Chuck as an 11-year old kid and the fight Wepner had against Sonny Liston that was the bloodiest battle one could imagine. The Sundance Award winning director for The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Feuerzeig tells the story of how over 30 years after the Ali fight, he was able to tell the story of the Real Rocky on ESPN's signature 30-for-30 series and how the ensuing court battle of the former marine Wepner, vs the Hollywood icon, Stallone was more a matter of honor and recognition than anything else. March 24, 1975 had Chuck Wepner on the cover of Sports Illustrated... the day he and Ali battled in Cleveland, Ohio for all the world to see... Wepner's 15 minutes of fame, turned into 15 rounds of theatre... and Jeff Feuerzeig tells the story better than anyone and shares it with us on the Past Our Prime podcast. Listen, download, review... all that good stuff... wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sonny Liston

February 25, 1964. A young Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston to become Heavyweight champion of the world. This episode originally aired in 2022.Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more.History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Are you ever going to text me?This episode is MUCH kinder to Chewbacca than Han Solo ever was.Jason, Jim and Joseph have an enlightened discussion about the best modern black-and-white movies made in the past fifty years.Live on the podcast, Jason discovers he is color blind!!!A young Cousin Eddie looks more inbred in black and white.Joseph makes a pitch to P--- Hub for sponsorship.The Big Knockers come through better in black and white.Just as wrong as seeing Herman Munster in color.Jason accuses Joseph of being an anti-Dentite.Jim likes to keep his hands warm.George "The Animal" Steele.Jim makes an unsolicited plea to reconsider the value of the 1979 "Makin' It" sitcom. (Seriously, does anyone remember "Makin' It"?)Why can't a photograph like the iconic Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston shot be taken today?

Informativo de primera hora de la mañana, en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital Radio. El sacerdote gran canario Eloy Alberto Santiago, nuevo obispo de Tenerife. Hoy hace 3 años: Ya han pasado las primeras 24 horas del ataque de Rusia a Ucrania y ya hay centenares de muertos y heridos. Hoy hace 3 años: Los barones permiten a Casado continuar como líder hasta el congreso del PP, al que no se presentará. Casado acepta la vía Feijóo y se suma a los barones con una petición unánime para que opte a la presidencia del partido. Y hoy hace 3 años: Más de 4.600 rusos y 1.378 ucranianos viven en Canarias, según el INE. Los datos determinan que los residentes de ambas comunidades tienen perfiles muy similares, con mayoría de mujeres y menores de 45 años. Hoy se cumplen 1.095 días del cruel ataque e invasión de Rusia a Ucrania. Hoy se cumples 3 años y 1 día. Hoy es martes 25 de febrero de 2025. Día Internacional del Implante Coclear. El 25 de febrero se celebra el Día Internacional del Implante Coclear, una técnica con la que se consigue que una persona con sordera profunda pueda oír a través de la estimulación eléctrica de las células acústicas dentro del oído interno. 25 de febrero de 1848: En Francia los revolucionarios proclaman la república. 1932: Las cortes republicanas aprueban la Ley de Divorcio, primera en la historia del país. Tal día como hoy, 25 febrero de 1964, Cassius Clay quien luego cambiaría su nombre al de Muhammad Ali, derrotó a Sonny Liston cuando Liston se retiró al final de la sexta ronda en Miami y Clay se convirtió en Campeón del Mundo de los pesos pesados. 1981.- Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo es elegido presidente del Gobierno español en el Parlamento tras la dimisión de su antecesor, Adolfo Suárez, y el fracaso del golpe de Estado de Tejero. 2016.- El Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña anula el uso exclusivo del catalán en el sector público. Santos del día de hoy, Cesáreo, Donato, Victorino, Nicéforo, Serapión, Papías y Sebastián. Negociar una gran coalición, el gran reto de Merz tras los comicios: "Formar Gobierno en dos meses sería todo un logro" Democristianos y socialdemócratas, tan cerca, tan lejos para formar Gobierno en Alemania. Desde febrero de 2022, Ucrania ha recibido casi 270.000 millones de euros de sus aliados, de los cuales Estados Unidos ha aportado el 43%, según los últimos datos del Instituto de Economía Mundial de Kiel. Europa 48.950 millones de euros, Alemania a 17.260 m, Reino Unid0 14.810, Japón 10.530 y Canada 8.280, España ocupa la posición 16 con 1.460 millones de 38 países que han puesto dinero en esta guerra. Sánchez anuncia un nuevo paquete de 1.000 millones de euros en ayudas militares a Ucrania en 2025. El Gobierno propone condonar 83.252 millones de deuda de "todas" las comunidades autónomas. Junts retira la cuestión de confianza a Sánchez como pidió el mediador: "Es un último esfuerzo para evitar la ruptura". El Estado condonará 3.259 millones de deuda a Canarias. La vicepresidenta primera, María Jesús Montero, ha destacado que esta medida es “coherente” con la política de apoyo del Gobierno progresista a las Comunidades, que han recibido en este período los mayores recursos de su historia. Andalucía (18.791 millones), por delante de Cataluña (17.104), Comunidad Valenciana (11.210), Comunidad de Madrid (8.644), Castilla-La Mancha (4.927), Galicia (4.010), Castilla y León (3.643). En octava posición figura Canarias con 3.259. Los centros para menores migrantes en Canarias, al 123% de ocupación. El Gobierno regional amplía la emergencia. La Mesa del Parlamento de Canarias no acepta volver a hacer públicas las dietas de los diputados. Los ingresos mensuales eran públicos desde enero de 2017, cuando presidía la Cámara Carolina Darias (PSOE), y se mantuvo con su sucesor, Gustavo Matos (PSOE), así como en el primer año de esta legislatura, pero se eliminaron en el segundo año de mandato de Astrid Pérez (PP). 68,7 millones para derivar a la concertada a pacientes de la sanidad pública canaria. La partida es para la derivación a centros privados de Gran Canaria y Tenerife este año. El objetivo, «reducir las listas de espera» Por otro lado, el 25 de febrero de 2014 nos deja una efeméride más triste con la muerte de Paco de Lucía, músico y compositor español y considerado como un genio de la guitarra y el mejor guitarrista de flamenco, además de ser uno de los más hábiles con la guitarra a nivel mundial. Entre sus mayores éxitos destacan 'Entre dos aguas' de 1976.

Bienvenidos a La Diez Capital Radio! Están a punto de comenzar un nuevo episodio de nuestro Programa de Actualidad, donde la información, la formación y el entretenimiento se encuentran para ofrecerles lo mejor de las noticias y temas relevantes. Este programa, dirigido y presentado por Miguel Ángel González Suárez, es su ventana directa a los acontecimientos más importantes, así como a las historias que capturan la esencia de nuestro tiempo. A través de un enfoque dinámico y cercano, Miguel Ángel conecta con ustedes para proporcionar una experiencia informativa y envolvente. Desde análisis profundos hasta entrevistas exclusivas, cada emisión está diseñada para mantenerles al tanto, ofrecerles nuevos conocimientos y, por supuesto, entretenerles. Para más detalles sobre el programa, visiten nuestra web en www.ladiez.es - Informativo de primera hora de la mañana, en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital Radio. El sacerdote gran canario Eloy Alberto Santiago, nuevo obispo de Tenerife. Hoy hace 3 años: Ya han pasado las primeras 24 horas del ataque de Rusia a Ucrania y ya hay centenares de muertos y heridos. Hoy hace 3 años: Los barones permiten a Casado continuar como líder hasta el congreso del PP, al que no se presentará. Casado acepta la vía Feijóo y se suma a los barones con una petición unánime para que opte a la presidencia del partido. Y hoy hace 3 años: Más de 4.600 rusos y 1.378 ucranianos viven en Canarias, según el INE. Los datos determinan que los residentes de ambas comunidades tienen perfiles muy similares, con mayoría de mujeres y menores de 45 años. Hoy se cumplen 1.095 días del cruel ataque e invasión de Rusia a Ucrania. Hoy se cumples 3 años y 1 día. Hoy es martes 25 de febrero de 2025. Día Internacional del Implante Coclear. El 25 de febrero se celebra el Día Internacional del Implante Coclear, una técnica con la que se consigue que una persona con sordera profunda pueda oír a través de la estimulación eléctrica de las células acústicas dentro del oído interno. 25 de febrero de 1848: En Francia los revolucionarios proclaman la república. 1932: Las cortes republicanas aprueban la Ley de Divorcio, primera en la historia del país. Tal día como hoy, 25 febrero de 1964, Cassius Clay quien luego cambiaría su nombre al de Muhammad Ali, derrotó a Sonny Liston cuando Liston se retiró al final de la sexta ronda en Miami y Clay se convirtió en Campeón del Mundo de los pesos pesados. 1981.- Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo es elegido presidente del Gobierno español en el Parlamento tras la dimisión de su antecesor, Adolfo Suárez, y el fracaso del golpe de Estado de Tejero. 2016.- El Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña anula el uso exclusivo del catalán en el sector público. Santos del día de hoy, Cesáreo, Donato, Victorino, Nicéforo, Serapión, Papías y Sebastián. Negociar una gran coalición, el gran reto de Merz tras los comicios: "Formar Gobierno en dos meses sería todo un logro" Democristianos y socialdemócratas, tan cerca, tan lejos para formar Gobierno en Alemania. Desde febrero de 2022, Ucrania ha recibido casi 270.000 millones de euros de sus aliados, de los cuales Estados Unidos ha aportado el 43%, según los últimos datos del Instituto de Economía Mundial de Kiel. Europa 48.950 millones de euros, Alemania a 17.260 m, Reino Unid0 14.810, Japón 10.530 y Canada 8.280, España ocupa la posición 16 con 1.460 millones de 38 países que han puesto dinero en esta guerra. Sánchez anuncia un nuevo paquete de 1.000 millones de euros en ayudas militares a Ucrania en 2025. El Gobierno propone condonar 83.252 millones de deuda de "todas" las comunidades autónomas. Junts retira la cuestión de confianza a Sánchez como pidió el mediador: "Es un último esfuerzo para evitar la ruptura". El Estado condonará 3.259 millones de deuda a Canarias. La vicepresidenta primera, María Jesús Montero, ha destacado que esta medida es “coherente” con la política de apoyo del Gobierno progresista a las Comunidades, que han recibido en este período los mayores recursos de su historia. Andalucía (18.791 millones), por delante de Cataluña (17.104), Comunidad Valenciana (11.210), Comunidad de Madrid (8.644), Castilla-La Mancha (4.927), Galicia (4.010), Castilla y León (3.643). En octava posición figura Canarias con 3.259. Los centros para menores migrantes en Canarias, al 123% de ocupación. El Gobierno regional amplía la emergencia. La Mesa del Parlamento de Canarias no acepta volver a hacer públicas las dietas de los diputados. Los ingresos mensuales eran públicos desde enero de 2017, cuando presidía la Cámara Carolina Darias (PSOE), y se mantuvo con su sucesor, Gustavo Matos (PSOE), así como en el primer año de esta legislatura, pero se eliminaron en el segundo año de mandato de Astrid Pérez (PP). 68,7 millones para derivar a la concertada a pacientes de la sanidad pública canaria. La partida es para la derivación a centros privados de Gran Canaria y Tenerife este año. El objetivo, «reducir las listas de espera» Por otro lado, el 25 de febrero de 2014 nos deja una efeméride más triste con la muerte de Paco de Lucía, músico y compositor español y considerado como un genio de la guitarra y el mejor guitarrista de flamenco, además de ser uno de los más hábiles con la guitarra a nivel mundial. Entre sus mayores éxitos destacan 'Entre dos aguas' de 1976. - Sección de actualidad con mucho sentido de Humor inteligente en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital radio con el periodista socarrón y palmero, José Juan Pérez Capote, El Nº 1. - En la sección de La Diez Capital radio con el portavoz de la Alianza de Vecinos de Canarias Abel Román, entrevistamos a la analista política, Odalys Padrón. Analizamos la ocupación de viviendas. - Sección en el programa El Remate con analista político, Manolo Fernández. Democristianos y socialdemócratas, tan cerca, tan lejos para formar Gobierno en Alemania. Desde febrero de 2022, Ucrania ha recibido casi 270.000 millones de euros de sus aliados, de los cuales Estados Unidos ha aportado el 43%, según los últimos datos del Instituto de Economía Mundial de Kiel. Sánchez anuncia un nuevo paquete de 1.000 millones de euros en ayudas militares a Ucrania en 2025. El Gobierno propone condonar 83.252 millones de deuda de "todas" las comunidades autónomas. - En el episodio de hoy, titulado "Dormir bien, vivir mejor: El sueño como factor protector de nuestra salud mental", exploraremos cómo un buen descanso puede convertirse en uno de nuestros principales aliados para cuidar nuestra salud emocional y psicológica. ¡Porque dormir profundamente no solo repara nuestro cuerpo, también renueva nuestra mente y alimenta nuestra felicidad! - Entrevista en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital radio con el especialista deportivo, Juan Antonio Quintero. Analizamos la reunión de la Asamblea Generalk del C.D. Tenerife del día de hoy. - Entrevista en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital radio con, Clemente Afonso. Donde repasamos la actualidad informativa.

Cassius Clay is niet langer Cassius Clay. Vanaf nu heet hij Muhammad Ali, een naam die hij krijgt van de Nation of Islam.Zijn bokscarrière schiet omhoog, zijn naam klinkt wereldwijd. Tijdens een tour door Afrika ziet hij Malcolm X weer, het is een korte ontmoeting niet lang daarna wordt Malcolm X vermoord. Ali blijft achter met spijt, spijt dat hij hem ooit zo hard heeft laten vallen. Terug in de ring strijdt Ali om de wereldtitel en wint van Sonny Liston. Maar de overwinning roept vragen op: was het doorgestoken kaart? Ondertussen dient een ander gevecht zich aan, buiten de ring. De Vietnamoorlog woedt, Ali weigert de dienstplicht, wordt geschorst en raakt zijn titel kwijt. Jaren later keert hij terug, en de wereld omarmt hem opnieuw. The Greatest is niet vergeten. Dan volgt The Rumble in the Jungle, het legendarische gevecht tegen George Foreman. Maar deze aflevering laat ook de tol zien die Ali betaalt. Parkinson sluipt zijn lichaam binnen. Toch blijft hij een symbool van kracht en doorzettingsvermogen. Het hoogtepunt komt in 1996, als hij met trillende handen de Olympische vlam ontsteekt een moment dat de wereld in stilte aanschouwt. Een icoon dat zijn plek in de geschiedenis heeft verdiend.

Une overdose d'héroïne. Une mort naturelle comme l'écrit le légiste. Ou bien tout simplement un meurtre, dans le huis clos d'une chambre à coucher, à la veille du Jour de l'An 1971. Cinquante ans après, la mort de Sonny Liston, l'un des plus grands boxeurs de tous les temps, demeure une énigme totale. Une vérité occultée. Retrouvez tous les jours en podcast le décryptage d'un faits divers, d'un crime ou d'une énigme judiciaire par Jean-Alphonse Richard, entouré de spécialistes, et de témoins d'affaires criminelles. Ecoutez L'heure du Crime avec Jean-Alphonse Richard du 30 octobre 2024.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Muhammad Ali, was an African-American boxer, activist, entertainer, and philanthropist. Many experts regard Ali has the best heavyweight boxer of all time, and the greatest sportsman of the 20th Century. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. he became the heavyweight champ in 1964, and retired in 1981. Ali was an early performer of spoken word poetry and rap music. In 1963 his album "I Am The Greatest" was nominated for a Grammy Award. In 2001, Muhammad Ali was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by U.S. President Bill Clinton. You're going to hear ABC Radio's ringside descriptions of Ali's 1964 fight against heavyweight champ Sonny Liston which put him on the path to greatness.  From 1971 we'll hear Mutual Broadcasting System coverage of Ali's first bout with Joe Frazier which was called the "Fight of the Century". Unfortunately, during the late 1960s boxing promoters banned live ringside reporting by broadcasters, to force fans to buy tickets for closed circuit telecasts in theaters, thus ending radio's long tradition of carrying fights live from the scene. It also sparked a long decline in the popularity of boxing. Finally, there's a 1979 Muhammad Ali press conference on United Nations radio in New York, held just two years before he retired.  More at KRobCollection.com

Step back into 1962 with Johnny Rabbit as he shares fascinating stories of St. Louis life. Hear about the opening of the Playboy Club at 3914 Lindell, the thriving Grand Burlesque Theater, and sports highlights like Sonny Liston's heavyweight championship win. Johnny also recalls the unique entertainment area at Johnny Noll Tire Company, a Notre Dame High School fundraiser for leukemia victims, and the tense violence in Kenlock that year

In the wake of the Attica Prison Uprising, BB King performs for the prisoners at Sing Sing Prison in 1972. The Thanksgiving Day concert sparks a new conversation about prisoner rights. Documentarian Daivd Hoffman recalls his time behind the camera, watching BB King perform, and how he softened the hearts of otherwise life-hardened men. Meanwhile, with the surly Sonny Liston as a role model, George Foreman rises in the ranks as a heavyweight. He fights the Champ, Smokin' Joe Frazier, and is held hostage in Venezuela.   FILM/VIDEO REFERENCES Muhammad Ali poem from the Cathal O'Shannon TV show (available on YouTube) Sing Sing Thanksgiving, documentary by David Hoffman (available on YouTube) BOOKS “The Rumble in the Jungle” by Lewis Erenberg “Angela Davis: an autobiography” by Angela Davis  “Hit Me, Fred” by Fred Wesley (autobiography)  “Smokin' Joe” by Joe Frazier and Phil Berger (autobiography) “Smokin' Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier” by Mark Kram Jr.  “By George” by George Foreman (autobiography)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Une overdose d'héroïne. Une mort naturelle comme l'écrit le légiste. Ou bien tout simplement un meurtre, dans le huis clos d'une chambre à coucher, à la veille du Jour de l'An 1971. Cinquante ans après, la mort de Sonny Liston, l'un des plus grands boxeurs de tous les temps, demeure une énigme totale. Une vérité occultée. Retrouvez tous les jours en podcast le décryptage d'un faits divers, d'un crime ou d'une énigme judiciaire par Jean-Alphonse Richard, entouré de spécialistes, et de témoins d'affaires criminelles. Ecoutez L'heure du Crime avec Jean-Alphonse Richard du 30 octobre 2024.

Une overdose d'héroïne. Une mort naturelle comme l'écrit le légiste. Ou bien tout simplement un meurtre, dans le huis clos d'une chambre à coucher, à la veille du Jour de l'An 1971. Cinquante ans après, la mort de Sonny Liston, l'un des plus grands boxeurs de tous les temps, demeure une énigme totale. Une vérité occultée. Retrouvez tous les jours en podcast le décryptage d'un faits divers, d'un crime ou d'une énigme judiciaire par Jean-Alphonse Richard, entouré de spécialistes, et de témoins d'affaires criminelles. Ecoutez L'heure du Crime avec Jean-Alphonse Richard du 30 octobre 2024.

La mort mystérieuse du boxeur Sonny Liston, l'affaire Albert Pel ou encore l'impossible suicide de Joséphine Bard... Découvrez le programme de "L'heure du crime" pour la semaine du 28 octobre au 1er novembre. C'est une nouveauté que vous propose l'équipe de "L'heure du crime" cette saison. Chaque dimanche, retrouvez, Justine Vignaux et Jean-Alphonse Richard dans un podcast inédit. Ensemble, ils vous présentent le programme de la semaine à venir, du lundi au vendredi, de 14h à 15h sur RTL. Retrouvez tous les jours en podcast le décryptage d'un faits divers, d'un crime ou d'une énigme judiciaire par Jean-Alphonse Richard, entouré de spécialistes, et de témoins d'affaires criminelles.

Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's heavyweight title fight is considered one of the greatest sporting events of all time. What's less well known is that five weeks earlier in the very same stadium, James Brown headlined an epic, three-day long, pre-fight music festival. Rumble braids together both boxing and music history for a compelling account of Muhammad Ali's growth into both The People's Champ and the GOAT. For his first title fight, he takes on the “bad man” Sonny Liston. REFERENCE BOOKS: Ali: The Greatest, My Own Story by Muhammad Ali Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig Rumble In the Jungle by Lewis ErenbergSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's heavyweight title fight is considered one of the greatest sporting events of all time. What's less well known is that five weeks earlier in the very same stadium, James Brown headlined an epic, three-day long, pre-fight music festival. Rumble braids together both boxing and music history for a compelling account of Muhammad Ali's growth into both The People's Champ and the GOAT. For his first title fight, he takes on the “bad man” Sonny Liston. REFERENCE BOOKS: Ali: The Greatest, My Own Story by Muhammad Ali Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig Rumble In the Jungle by Lewis ErenbergSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this edition we take a look at African-American professional boxer Jersey Joe Walcott, who is regarded among the best heavyweights in the world during the 1940s and 1950s, winning the title at the age of 37. Walcott was born in 1914, and was only 15 years old when his father died. He quit school and worked in a soup factory to support his mother and 11 younger brothers and sisters, and then began training as a boxer. His first bout was in 1930. His last fight was in 1953, when he was knocked out by Rocky Marciano in the first round. After retiring from boxing, Walcott did some acting, playing small parts in a few movies and television shows. In 1956, Walcott performed the role of George the Trainer, in the Humphrey Bogart boxing drama The Harder They Fall. Walcott also refereed several boxing matches, including the second fight between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston. From 1971 to 1974, Walcott was the elected Sheriff of Camden County, New Jersey, the first African-American to hold the position. From 1975 to 1984, Walcott was the chairman of the New Jersey State Athletic Commission. You're going to hear Jersey Joe Walcott take on boxing legend Joe Louis in a 1948 rematch on ABC radio. It's one of the earliest bouts broadcast on closed circuit television. More at KRobCollection.com

An interesting weekend with numerous women's world titel fights in three different locations lead our latest "Big Fight Weekend Preview Podcast!'Host T.J. Rives is back with insider Dan Rafael of BigFightWeekend.com to go over it all.They talk the Top Rank Boxing/ESPN show Friday night in New York, as Mikaela Mayer goes for the WBO women's welterweight title against the UK's Sandy Ryan in the main event. Will Mayer get a world title back after being without one for over two years? Also, Xander Zayas and Bruce "Shu Shu" Carrington are in the undercard fights that we discuss.There's also an undisputed women's junior lightweight title fight on Friday night in Georgia, but you haven't heard very much about Alycia Baumgardner in this one. Dan laments.Meanwhile, in England on Saturday veteran Terri Harper will challenge unbeaten but little known Rhiannon Dixon for the WBO lightweight crown in the Matchroom Boxing/DAZN main event.There's fight news about the likely strawweight unification title bout with Oscar Collazo vto meet Thammanoon Niyomtrong (Knockout CP Freshmart) in November in an intriguing matchup. Plus, Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol and full card held a presser on Wednesday in London in advance of their October card in Saudi Arabia. The guys are getting reved up for this one.Finally, some nostalgia on the 62nd anniversary of "Sonny" Liston becoming heavyweight champion of the world with a 1 round demoliton of Floyd Patterson. And, much more recently from 2009, Dan was ringside in L.A. as Vitali Kltischko wiped out Chris Arreola defending the WBC heavyweight title with a memory of his own drama post-fight!It's all on the latest "Big Fight Weekend Preview" podcast and make sure to follow/subscribe on Apple/Spreaker/Spotify, etc.! 

An interesting weekend with numerous women's world titel fights in three different locations lead our latest "Big Fight Weekend Preview Podcast!'Host T.J. Rives is back with insider Dan Rafael of BigFightWeekend.com to go over it all.They talk the Top Rank Boxing/ESPN show Friday night in New York, as Mikaela Mayer goes for the WBO women's welterweight title against the UK's Sandy Ryan in the main event. Will Mayer get a world title back after being without one for over two years? Also, Xander Zayas and Bruce "Shu Shu" Carrington are in the undercard fights that we discuss.There's also an undisputed women's junior lightweight title fight on Friday night in Georgia, but you haven't heard very much about Alycia Baumgardner in this one. Dan laments.Meanwhile, in England on Saturday veteran Terri Harper will challenge unbeaten but little known Rhiannon Dixon for the WBO lightweight crown in the Matchroom Boxing/DAZN main event.There's fight news about the likely strawweight unification title bout with Oscar Collazo vto meet Thammanoon Niyomtrong (Knockout CP Freshmart) in November in an intriguing matchup. Plus, Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol and full card held a presser on Wednesday in London in advance of their October card in Saudi Arabia. The guys are getting reved up for this one.Finally, some nostalgia on the 62nd anniversary of "Sonny" Liston becoming heavyweight champion of the world with a 1 round demoliton of Floyd Patterson. And, much more recently from 2009, Dan was ringside in L.A. as Vitali Kltischko wiped out Chris Arreola defending the WBC heavyweight title with a memory of his own drama post-fight!It's all on the latest "Big Fight Weekend Preview" podcast and make sure to follow/subscribe on Apple/Spreaker/Spotify, etc.! 

There was shock and awe in the air at Wembley Stadium as Daniel Dubois demolished Anthony Joshua to continue his stunning career turnaround.What does this mean for Joshua, at 34 years old? Can he possibly come back? And is Dubois really as dangerous as he looked?In This Week we focus on another heavyweight thrashing as we go back to 1962 and the violent coronation of Sonny Liston.Subscribe to Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/TheOpeningBellPodcastAnd if you can't subscribe, please drop us a review to help our visibility.Many thanks, one and all! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the climactic conclusion of Floyd's story, we immerse ourselves in the gripping narrative of his two legendary bouts with Sonny Liston. We also uncover his pivotal contributions to the civil rights campaign during the tumultuous 1960s, and ultimately, we encapsulate his storied boxing career and other significant moments in his larger-than-life journey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the climactic conclusion of Floyd's story, we immerse ourselves in the gripping narrative of his two legendary bouts with Sonny Liston. We also uncover his pivotal contributions to the civil rights campaign during the tumultuous 1960s, and ultimately, we encapsulate his storied boxing career and other significant moments in his larger-than-life journey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is there a more Jersey story than a guy who becomes a beloved hero for almost winning? Chuck Wepner grew up in hardscrabble Bayonne. He served in the US Marines and was the NJ state heavyweight boxing champion. He bled all over Bayonne Times Editor Rosy Rosenberg's leisure suit in his 1970 fight against Sonny Liston and earned the nickname “The Bayonne Bleeder.” He fought Muhammad Ali in his prime as a huge underdog and stunningly managed to knock him down. His triumphant defeat inspired Sylvester Stallone to write the movie “Rocky.” He did three years in Northern State Prison (“I ran the place.”) He fought Andre the Giant and Victor the Kodiak bear (twice) in Asbury Park.  And that's just the beginning. Join Jersey Angle host Brian Donohue as he sits down at the kitchen table with 85-year-old Chuck Wepner, the only person whom the governor of New Jersey could possibly bestow with vanity license plates bearing one simple word: “Champ.”

On May 25th throughout history, pivotal moments have shaped our world. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy set a bold goal to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, a dream realized in 1969. Muhammad Ali's first-round knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965 became legendary, amid rumors of a phantom punch. The cinematic universe changed forever in 1977 with the premiere of "Star Wars," and the same day marked the end of "The Brady Bunch," sans Robert Reed. In 1986, Hands Across America united millions in a powerful stand against hunger and homelessness.

Prepare to step into the ring with returning guest ez from the EZ Sports Podcast as we uncork a few and exchange swings over one of boxing's greatest puzzles—the "Phantom Punch." With a glass in hand, we revisit the legendary Ali vs. Liston bout, scrutinizing the knockout that left the sports world in a daze. Was Ali's punch really that phantom-like? ez isn't pulling any punches with his take on the fight's spectacle and the ensuing legacy that continues to shadow both Ali and Liston.But there's more to a fighter than the blows he delivers or absorbs, and Sonny Liston's life story is as complex as the conspiracies that follow his name. From a childhood marred by abuse to a career intertwined with the mob, Liston's journey from the canvas to the grave is a tale of power, fear, and suspicion. Our conversation walks you through the dark alleys of Liston's past, exposing the societal battles that shadowed his every step and the enigmatic circumstances surrounding his untimely demise.As we pour one out for the unanswered questions left in the wake of Liston's mysterious end, we'll navigate through the theories that refuse to rest. The credibility of the official heroin overdose narrative; the unexplained delay in reporting his death; the whispers of mafia involvement—all get tabled as ez shares insights that might just leave you questioning the stories we've been told. Join us for a toast to the unknown and a hearty debate on one of the sport's most enduring conspiracies.

This week on the program we welcome our friend Deremy Dove into the hallowed halls to discuss the career of funny man Tracy Morgan. Join us won't you? Transcript:[0:41] Thank you so much, Doug and Nance. It is fantastic to be here with you all.And there are quite a few of you. I can see you queued up outside the SNL Hall of Fame.My name is J.D., and it is just a thrill to be with you here on this lovely Monday.We have got a fantastic show for you.But before we go any further, I feel it necessary to tell you to wipe your feetbefore coming into the hall. all.Now, back when I was a wee lad, my mother scolded me once for making a messof the floor, and ever since then I feel compelled to tell people to wipe their feet.There. I've said it. It's finally out in the public, and I feel great.Thanks for being my therapist by proxy. The check is in the mail.The SNL Hall of Fame podcast is a weekly affair fair where each episode we takea deep dive into the career of a former cast member, host, musical guest,or writer and add them to the ballot for your consideration.Once the nominees have been announced, we turn to you, the listener,to vote for the most deserving and help determine who will be enshrined for perpetuity in the hall.And that's how we play the game. It's just that That simple. You listen.You vote. We tabulate. We announce.Track 2[2:06] Repeat after me. You listen. You vote.We tabulate. And we announce. Speaking of announcements, our good friend MattArdill is standing around loafing.It looks like, hey, if you've got time enough to lean, you've got time enough to clean, young man.Track 3[2:25] Hey, JD, I saw the new exhibits on the way in. I really like the Norm Macdonaldhat collection that we've got going on.Turd Ferguson, that Turd Ferguson hat and that big hat. It's funny.Yeah, you can't go wrong with a funny hat. That's right.How are you doing? I'm excellent right now. Yeah, I'm pretty good.What have you got for us this week? I have got an awesome player of Tracy Morgan.So I'm really looking forward to sharing some facts about him. Well, let's do it.Great. Well, Tracy's 5'9", born November 10th, 1968.He has 67 acting credits, five producer credits, and eight writing credits.Born in Brooklyn and raised in Marlborough Houses and Tompkins Houses in Bedford.He was actually named after a platoon mate of his father who shipped off withhis dad to Vietnam, but was killed in an action within days of deployment.Track 3[3:31] So his dad was very close to this guy, and so that's why he got that name.Um yeah he went on tomarry his high school sweetheart and began hiscomedy career at the age of 17 by performing stand-upon street corners in new york he had his datefirst debut as hustle manon the television show martin sohe's been working hard since he was akid um and it shows i meanhe lists his influences as carol burnett lucille balljackie gleason which i actually see the mostin a lot of what he does uh martin lawrenceeddie murphy and richard prior uh buthe learned about that is a great pedigree huh yeah that's athat's a really good good lineup but yeah the thingis he he says he learned his comedy first fromhis dad who taught him about jonesing whichis basically roasting people he put put himon his lap and they would roast people on the the streetand he also drew from his uncles who he said were also very funny so you knowit runs in the family um you can actually see his first stand-up gig which isan apollo theater amateur night on youtube so if you want to go out and seehis first big break it's there for you to find.Track 3[4:52] I'm going to have to watch that. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get that.See that with a lot of comedians. No. Yeah.He nicknamed all the talk show hosts that he's appeared with.So David Letterman is D rock.Jimmy Fallon is Jimbo and Conan O'Brien is C black.Track 3[5:08] The line between Tracy Morgan and Tracy Jordan is remarkably thin. That's right.Yeah. So he has lobster for dinner every day.He does in fact own sharks. He has, at this point, 15, and he has a backyard tank.And now, to be fair, he has a very close relationship with his daughter,who wants to be a marine biologist.So at least partially he's doing this for her. Oh, it's a shark pony.Track 3[5:40] Yeah, it's a shark pony. Yeah, some people get pony ponies.She got a shark pony. um yeah toentertain his daughter uh and her friends he turnshis basement into a haunted house and he goes allout to the point he every halloweenhe actually won't go into the basement because he's afraid ofthe haunted house that he sets up in his own house umthat's spectacular now he whendrinking he does have a alter ego uh namedchico divine that he describes as thethe coolest dude who would never hurt anybody but chicodid at least piss piss one person off as princekicked chico out of his house uhfollowing a pre-grammy party he got a little out of control um now the thingis this actually helped turn tracy's life around because he got a dui whichled to a confrontation between himself and his son and from that point on he's been sober.Track 3[6:39] Wow. Good for him.Track 3[7:09] So it was a real uh great great thing for him to do to honor his dad that is great,what a tear-jerking end to trivia this week yeah a little bit more serious and and uh,intense uh trivia but it was one of those things where it's like you know iwas reading it i'm like should i you know leave this out because it's a littledown but it's like it really helps explain explain a lot of his comedy and thecharacter behind Tracy.I mean, I've met people who've done shows with him and they say he's like a really sweet dude.And this is where a lot of this comes from. Awesome.Well, our friend, Jeremy Dove is here and he is down with Thomas right now.So let's turn it over to those two.Track 4[8:30] All right. Matt Ardill, JD, thank you so much for that.And I am excited today because we have, first of all, a great guest.Second of all, really interesting nominee.Track 4[8:45] Very different nominee. And I think my guest today and I talking before we hitrecord, that's kind of the word that came up was different.Tracy Morgan is such a different cast member. He has such a different vibe comparedto a lot of people that have been on the show.So this is going to be a fun one to get into. So to talk all things Tracy Morganand SNL, I have with me my guest for today, my friend, a great guest on theSNL Hall of Fame in the past.He's been on for Dick Ebersole, Adam McKay, been on a roundtable.Track 4[9:21] Great guy, I think, to chat about Tracy Morgan. Deremy Dove.Deremy, how's it going, man?Thomas, I'm honored by your kind words, and I'm honored to be here to talk aboutsomeone who is, as you said, just so different in SNL history.We're going on near 50 years, and it's always you think like, oh, you've seen it all.But with Tracy Morgan, he is one of one.He's definitely one of one. With Tracy Morgan, it's a lot about vibes.So we're going to vibe out today on some Tracy Morgan.So you're a podcaster, obviously.So you have the Bigger Than The Game podcast with Jose Ruiz. I'm a fan.Tell everyone what's been going on over at Bigger Than The Game, man.Well, we just did our most recent episode was on the 60th anniversary of SonnyListon versus Cassius Clay, who later became Muhammad Ali.And it was just, like, incredible that, like, man, it's been 60 years sincethat legendary and epic match.And it was kind of fun to look at. I know you'll enjoy this, Thomas.Track 4[10:29] In the same month, February of 1964, the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan and youngCassius Clay Muhammad Ali upset Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion.Champion and it's like man in that month two thingsthat really changed not only the decade but the way welook at pop culture sports everything twoof the biggest figures of the 20th century the Beatles and Muhammad Ali reallyemerged all in that same month so it's just really fun to kind of get into justwhat this match set up for the rest of the decade and the rest of the 20th centuryas far as sports I love it you guys talk sports history but you break it downyou put Put it into that context.You talk about all the narratives surrounding the sporting event or whatevertopic you're talking about at the time.You and Jose do such a great deep dive into all the topics that you cover.So I love it. Thank you. Go check out Bigger Than The Game with Jeremy and Jose.And I'm told you have another podcast. Why don't you tell everyone about that?So it's this show called Pop Culture 5.It's me and this guy. What's his name? I think it's Thomas Senna oh my goshthat's right we do have a podcast together we have a show I mean who would have thought it so,that has been just so fun to do the show with you man my friend and.Track 4[11:53] We look at anything in music, movies, TV shows, and we're picking five essential things from that.So if it's TV, it's episodes, music, it could be songs for an actor, a director, movies.And we're just kind of talking about our five essentials. And depending on who'sthe host, if you're the host that week, you get three.The co-host gets two, but gets veto power.So it's really like a fun twist on it. And we've gotten nothing but great responses,and I've just really enjoyed doing the show with you, man.Yeah, I look forward to it every week, recording episodes.I love deep diving into our topics at any given week.So one week, I'm all about Nirvana.One week, I'm deep diving into Spike Lee movies and Spielberg.And so it's just been a lot of fun, man. And I think when this Tracy Morganepisode gets released, we'll be up to 25 episodes around then, something like that.Yeah. Yeah. So being released because we have some banked. So this has been– I think we found a really nice groove.Absolutely. Absolutely. Big credit to you for that, man.And you too. So everybody go check out my podcast and Deremy's podcast, Pop Culture 5.Track 4[13:14] Today, we're here on the SNL Hall of Fame. See, I got to get into SNL Hall of Fame mode.Yeah. Yeah, I was going to do this introduction like I was on Pop Culture 5,but we got to get into SNL Hall of Fame mode here.I know, it's a brain shift. It is a brain shift.So, today we're talking about Tracy Morgan here on the SNL Hall of Fame.Tracy joined the cast when he was 27. He auditioned at the same time as Stephen Colbert.Track 4[13:38] Stephen Colbert and Tracy Morgan auditioned, and Tracy auditioned with a littlekid character named Biscuit. Have you seen his audition?I have. I have seen it. Well, can you describe his audition and who Biscuit is?Because it was a really memorable audition to me. I'll be honest, right?Track 4[13:57] It's really weird. For the whole audition, there's certain people,like when you watch Phil Hartman's and Will Ferrell, and to me,it's just like, oh, that's a lock.Track 4[14:06] That guy has to be on. or even Jimmy Fallon forTracy's it was really like I'm likeman like it's not that it's not funny but it'sjust so it's just so different and unique andI'm just like I wonder what they talked aboutin the room once he like got done and saidthank you like you know what I mean because like you mentioned Biscuitand Biscuit was just this I'm probably gonnastruggle to describe but like just this odd character thathe kind of like had I feel like he did it from his stand-up days yeahit was like a little kid who was this kindof shy kid but not almost a socially awkward kidbut he would but then the premise was that he was asked torecite like a christmas poem or something yeah soit was like he was this shy kid but like hewas awkward but would kind of say these like weirdlike i don't know sassy kind of stuff at times like itwas was just really like it was differentit was just so weird for a character to biscuit littlekid named biscuit that's like definitely a tracy morgan touchon this and so like i mentioned he he and steven colbert were two of the finalistsand i've heard norm mcdonald even say like norm mcdonald was part of the selectionprocess and he watched the uh all the uh people audition and And he even said,he's like, I just assumed that Stephen was going to get it.Track 4[15:31] Yeah. We saw both of them. And even Norm said, I just thought,oh, Stephen Colbert is going to be a cast member. Right.Track 4[15:38] But I don't know. His audition, Tracy's audition won the show over, Jeremy.So one, I mean, what do you think?Track 4[15:50] It was about Tracy that might have won SNL over.And two, that's quite the what if between Stephen Colbert and Tracy. Yeah.Well, number one, I believe Tracy just has raw charisma.There's some people who they're just naturally funny.It's like the guys, like the class clown when you're in school or at the lunch table.Track 4[16:16] They just are funny. and they can almost like readthe phone book to you and they'll crack you upand Tracy has that you know a lot of times comedians they'rethey're you know it's an art form and it's trained it's timing andall those things but then there's just some who break throughwho it's just something about them they just make you all their mannerisms justmake you laugh and you can't pinpoint one specific thing you're like I likethis guy he just cracks me up and Thomas I don't know this is a hot take foryou or not but when i'm thinking about tracy morgan and getting ready for this episode.Track 4[16:52] I think this is lauren michaels most uniquehire and i also think whenit comes to judging how good of a talent evaluator lauren michaels is i go totracy morgan as number one yeah because of it's such a unique hire like thisshows me like lauren he thought outside the box when it comes to who who he's bringing on the cast.No, I don't think that's a hot take. I think I used a different word,but I think it encapsulates the same thing.We were probably both thinking along the same lines. I think it's one of Lorne's most inspired hires.That's a good word. It's a better word. No, it's a different word,but I think unique's a great word too for it. A unique hire, an inspired hire.I have to give Lorne and the other producers, I think Steve Higgins was probably,Obviously, Steve Higgins has been there forever.He's been there longer than Keenan. That's how long Steve Higgins has been there. Yes, yes.So I have to think whoever is in charge, Morrissey. Mm-hmm.Track 4[17:52] Choosing Tracy Morgan, they could have gone the easy route and chose StephenColbert and, you know, just plugged him in.But choosing Tracy was just like such a – it was a conscious,it was a deliberate choice to choose somebody like Tracy.Yeah, I'm wondering, like, if you look at the cast, like, do you think at thetime that they needed somebody like Tracy, like, to feel some sort of thing to add?Well, it's interesting because he came in 96, so he's not part of that 95 castwho saved the show again with Will Ferrell and Sherry O'Terry and everything.But he's still remembered as part of that group, even though he came a year later.He's still kind of grouped in with those guys as part of the group that kind of saved the show.So it's interesting because that's one season kind of removed from the toughesttime Lorne has really had on the show where like the network executives werekind of breathing down his neck and being like, you got to get the show funnier.And, you know, you kind of lost. And we've talked about this before.We kind of understand where they're coming from. That 94, 95 season was not really that good.So I think he was looking for people to kind of had an original voice.I think you hear Lawrence say that a lot when he's doing those interviews.I think he wanted people who were original and kind of got back to.Track 4[19:21] Snl really is and i think he wanted someone totracy's credit who people like towork with and was easy to work with too and ithink that's also a big thing that people don't talk about for tracyi'm glad you mentioned about the show's originalvibe and hearken back to that because there's an element of tracy that i thinkis part of the spirit of the original snl and that's almost that danger aspectyes yes like that unpredictability and that's that's a good thing and tracycould be unpredictable but in like a controlled way he's still a professional,he's still you know it's not like he sabotaged sketches ordid anything like that tracy was a professional but he had this aura vibe abouthim that was uh dangerous or unpredictable i think that did harken back to theoriginal time then that was something to me they probably wanted to shy awayfrom that in season 21 because they had just come off of sandler and farley and they were.Track 4[20:18] Dangerous quote-unquote and unpredictable but it got to bea disruption on the show i think right i thinkthey maybe consciously didn't hire somebody like that for the immediate seasonfollowing sandler and farley and those guys but maybe they re-evaluated andlike let's get somebody who can add that danger that unpredictability i meanis there something to Am I just being a weird SNL fan? No, no. I think there is.It was that tamed. Like you said, it's a controlled danger.It wasn't someone that, oh, he's off the rails and is not willing to work.And I think also he brought a confidence, too, where just from Tracy's background,his upbringing, you know, doing stand-up, I think, as well.Like there's a difference between being an improv actor and being a stand-upcomic. and I think Tracy just kind of did...Track 4[21:11] Not to say he's in this person's ballpark overall as far as SNL,but one thing about Eddie Murphy,when he was a part of that cast that replaced the original people from the firstfive years, a lot of those guys, and I understand, rightfully so,they're replacing the epic first five years. They were scared.They were nervous, all this pressure, the presses on them, and everyone alwayssaid Eddie just had a confidence where he didn't care.He's like, I know I'm good. I'm doing it. And I'm not saying Tracy's Eddie Murphy,but Tracy kind of always gives a confidence of, I know who I am.I don't care what you think. I'm here. I'm ready to go.And I think that's what Tracy kind of really brought. I feel like Lorne andthe others kind of saw in him.He wouldn't be scared of the moment. No, I definitely agree.And Tracy was confident in the material. He's like, I know this is funny.I know my inflection's funny. I just know what's funny about this.And so I'm going to get on screen and show you. So that, yeah,that's such a good point.And I think another element, especially around this time, 96,when Tracy got hired, that fascinates me.It's hard to think about Tracy getting cast around this time,to me, without thinking about SNL's history, somewhat tenuous history with black cast members.Track 4[22:26] So I'm wondering, Jeremy, like, can you talk about the show's history with blackcast members, like up until that point, and even like on?On yeah yeah it's always it's beensomething um i remember when ifirst saw tracy do stand-up comedy was after hehad left snl but people in the crowd wereyelling out like you know brian fellows and everything and hemade the joke that honestly my whole life i heard which is like black peopledon't watch snl except for when eddie murphy was on there right in my wholelife people my own family a lot of said i felt weird because me and my brotherliked it but they were like ohwe don't watch that except for when Eddie Murphy was on and it was always,you saw what happened in the original cast with Garrett Morris and how,you know, he really was neglected and just kind of stereotyped and.Track 4[23:15] Made to just either wear drag or just play this token black.And I think Eddie Murphy, he talked about his struggles and he had those battlestoo, but he was such a star and the show had no stars.So he kind of really emerged and became that guy.But then you see Damon Wayans came and he had struggles and just frustrationsof being that only black voice.Track 4[23:40] And you're seeing a room filled with white people who don't understand you.Not willing to really understand you becausethey're going to go to this performer who they either knowor feel like will get their work over better they're notsitting down trying to understand your comedic sensibility understandyour background and you know you saw that from damonit went to you know chris rock had the same battles and hereally struggled there where everyone here knows chrisrock and legendary stand-up comic but if hewasn't who he became came after SNL no one reallyremembers what Chris Rock did in that time and that'sa glorious time those early 90s of SNL soreally you look at from Eddie Murphy by thetime Tracy comes on there you know Tim Meadows was onbut he you know did his roles andstuff like that but didn't really like stripe it and I feel likenow he gets a little more appreciation forhis time on SNL but I feel like he was kind of like an underrated hecould do a lot of things but minus likeyou know the oj when the oj trial happenedi feel like that kind of helped him out and then the ladies man a little bitbut never really got that shining star treatment that i think tim meadows shouldhave gotten too so i think tracy is really an interesting um i guess like amarker for blacks being on the show where.Track 4[25:05] He still battled it too, and I know we'll talk about that, but he kind of reallyset the stage to me for Kenan, for Leslie Jones, Jay Pharoah.He was that guy to kind of really set the stage for seeing SNL starting to improveon that relationship with Black cast members.Oh, that's really great perspective and well put. And even though we're allSNL fans, love the show, I wouldn't be doing an SNL podcast if I didn't love the show.But there's also in the show's 49-year history stuff that they need to reckon with.You know, this is their treatment of women, their treatment of black cast members,maybe not enough representation.Yeah. Even like as a Latino myself, I always kind of look like about Latinorepresentation as well.I mean, that's just the reality of it and something that I know.You know, SNL, about when Leslie got hired, that's something that they madea conscious effort to get a black woman onto the show.And that was almost spearheaded by Kenan, telling them, you know what,look, you need to hire a black woman.Track 4[26:16] Plenty of qualified black women to do a lot of these roles. You need to get one on the gas.No. Oh, and I think it was shown in the conversations. Like,you look at it when In Living Color came out in the early 90s and just like,okay, then what are we saying here?Like, there's this show on Fox that's reaching this other demographic.And then people are kind of, like, I think kind of trying to say,like, oh, there's not that whole excuse of, well, there's no one to bring on.And it's like, that was a lie. You saw from the Weyans to all these different people.You know, it's funny that Damon Wayans, this great comedic talent,was on Saturday Night Live and was just misused and then becomes an all-timesketch performer on In Living Color, you know, four years later.Like, what's that say to you? Exactly. He was so frustrated on SNL that he sabotaged a sketch. Yeah.The Monopoly Man sketch with John Lovitz. Like, Damon just sort of sabotaged it and he wanted out.Right. Right, and Chris Rock leaves SNL to go to In Living Color because he'slike, hey, that's where my voice will be heard.Now, he picked bad timing because it was the way in –.Track 4[27:26] They left One Living Color, so his timing was off. But the decision to me wascorrect, where it's like, yeah, who's going to get your voice heard and understood?It's like, not Saturday Night Live. And Chris Rock has said there were so manygreat comedic minds from JimDowney, Al Franken, Lorne, and great cast members, great friends of his.But still, he wasn't being represented and wasn't being heard there.Yeah, I think it's an important discussion. and that's whyI think Tracy's one of the many reasons why Tracy's such aninteresting figure to me as far as Tracy goes Jeremy likehow did you get introduced to him how are you like most familiar withTracy was it SNL you see you mentioned his stand-up yeah so he was someone Ibeing you know I know you are too big fan of stand-up comedy you I would seehim on different things and different tapes and stuff like that but honestlyit was Saturday Night Live where it It was like, I was like, oh, that dude.I saw him on like the Apollo doing stand-up and everything.Back when the, you know, Steve Harvey used to host the Apollo and it would air Saturday nights.And I remember seeing Tracy Morgan. And then when I saw him on Saturday NightLive, I was like, oh, that guy.Because like this mid-90s era is when I really started watching SNL live.Track 4[28:40] I would watch the reruns before, but like watching it live was kind of like around 93, 94.So I was really kind of getting into my SNLlike fandom you know the year before and then whenTracy arrived so it was kind of cool to see and ofcourse as a black man when you saw like that other oh they brought on a blackcast member male or female you kind of like oh okay let's see what how theydo and Tracy Tracy in his own way shined through yeah yeah that's awesome soSo we mentioned he started in 96 at SNL was on the show until 2003.What's a we'll dive into it. What's the character sketch that kind of firststicks out to you during Tracy's time?Track 4[29:25] It's one that I kind of, I'll be honest, I didn't really like at first,and a lot of people, like, disagreed with me, like friends, but Brian Fellows is funny.Like, I will give Brian Fellows, and I kind of thought it was,like, overdone and stuff like that, but as I look back on it,and I'm like, you know what, that is, it's classic Tracy.And just the way he does that and just him being this Safari,Brian Fellows, Safari planet and this animal enthusiast, but doesn't have anyidea about any of the animals and always kind of got freaked out by him.And it is really, he's playing Brian Fellows, but in all honesty,it's just different forms of Tracy in all these sketches.That's really funny to me. Our first guest is like a human cactus.Please welcome our porcupine.Track 4[30:16] Ooh, and who are you? I'm Dale Dudley from the Texas Wildlife Sanctuary in Austin. Hello, Austin.Track 4[30:26] No, I'm from the Wildlife Sanctuary in Austin. My name is Dale Dudley. I'm Brian Fellow.Hello, Brian. I want you to meet my porcupine friend. His name is Willie.That rat needs a haircut.So that one and then the classic Christmas band member. I thought, yeah, I loved that.I loved it when it happened. I remember watching it live and loving it.And I still love it to this day when they kind of all got back together likea few years ago to do it. I always loved that.And I love Tracy in it. And just his facial expression always cracked me up.Those are just a couple of the memorable sketches or in moments with Tracy thatI have. I'm glad you brought up Brian Fellow's safari plan at first,and not just because I think this was the most times that he did a character.I think he did it nine times on SNL, so I think that was his most recurring character.But it just, to me, the story behind this just totally encapsulates Tracy's time at SNL and why...Track 4[31:29] He's successful, I think, in a major way.So Norm MacDonald, again, Norm, said that this came about because he and RobertSmigel wrote the Brian Fellows sketch as kind of a rib on Tracy because of theway Tracy would pronounce his S's.Like they wanted to mess with Tracy at the table read and give him somethinghard to read because of how he pronounced stuff.And as far as iknow they did like tracy like norman smigel idon't know like as far as i know yeah yeah smigel sayinganything bad about tracy so i guess itwas all in good fun but i love this becausetracy took something that was supposed to be a jokeon him and turned it into something that was his own andsuper memorable like he's he he basically waslike yeah screw this like in his own little way likethis is supposed to be a rib on me but the joke's onyou because i'm going to make this like a really successful sketch and a characterso that's a big reason why like to me that almost encapsulates big reason whytracy's just successful just in general right he just keeps on yeah and andyou hit on a couple things here which is like,you know rip norm and you know smigel is a great great all-time writer but justlike Like, how messed up that is.Track 4[32:53] And, like, that's a small example of that cultural difference where,like, that wouldn't happen to him on In Living Color.You know what I mean? Or, like, whatever that day's Key and Peele or Chappelleshow, that wouldn't have happened to him.Right. He would have had writers in there who understood, who knew him,like, know his background.They can relate to him. They kind of, like, did it as a spoof.And to your point, Tracy took it. And I think that's what makes Tracy greatis there's just a confidence about him and a no fear kind of mentality.Like because he has that background and I think like, hey, I was out here,you know, selling different items in front of Yankee Stadium a few years ago,you know, just trying to make, you know, $30.So I'm on NBC on Saturday Night Live. What do I have to lose?So he has that kind of fear that was like, all right, you want to like mock it?Fine, let's go. Oh, and he takes it and makes it his most memorable character. Yeah, absolutely.Track 4[33:53] And the sketch itself, his delivery is so great.I think the just genius part about it is Tracy does these characters and hehas this delivery to where it seems like it's an accident.It seems like he's not putting a lot into it, but it's by design.A lot of his inflection, his timing, him being amped up Tracy Morgan,it's by design because he knows that that's going to get the laughs.He knows how to pull laughs from people. Like Brian Fellowes.Track 4[34:26] Just how he pauses or how somebody will say their name on the show and thenhow he'll pause and say, he'll say, well, I'm Brian Fellow.Track 4[34:35] Tracy knows that that pause and then his kind of shoulder shake,the delivery is going to pull the laugh.So it seems like he makes it look so easy and natural, but it's just by designbecause Tracy has that comedic mind.I always was entertained by the Brian Fellow Safari planet because of that.No, and to me, like you said, it was by design. It's just that inflection.But what he did, which I feel like Chris Rock didn't do, and I think a lot ofthe people who were stand-ups on the show before him didn't do,is when you're not an improv person who knows how to do that,like working with others and different characters and acting,a lot of times they say if you're on SNL as a stand-up, it's best to be on aweekend update or have a solo thing where you're on a show.You're looking in camera and kind of doing your own thing, almost like you'redoing standup and Chris rock didn't really figure that out. Right.But I think Tracy, when you have like, you know, he would have a guest on, but from Brian fellows,astronaut Jones, different things, he kind of found his lane and kind of pokedand reconstructed like improv and sketch by doing this, these individual charactersthat really highlighted his sensibility.Yeah. And with astronaut Jones again, like he made it look like,Oh, oh, that's just Tracy playing himself.Track 4[35:57] But he just knew his delivery. Maybe there's danger.He knew how to tap into just how to say something.That one in particular, Ashton Jones, is almost like anti-comedy in a way.There's a big old theme song.Track 4[36:38] The sketch itself is anticlimactic. Oh, yeah.But that's like a lot of anti-comedy. And then Tracy just has to do like just a few little things.I'm just, the Britney Spears astronaut Jones is the one that I always went back to.My name is Craig Ellera. I'm the queen of Orpheoleans. A proud and peace-lovingrace. My people have been awaiting your arrival for some time now.We're in desperate need of your help. The Galaxians have besieged our citiesand plundered our riches. What?Say what? Right. Dig. Uh-huh. Right.Well, why don't you drop out of that green jumpsuit and show me that fat ass?Track 4[37:25] It's like a one-joke thing, but it's like anti-comedy in a way, but that's just like,you brought up such a good point, Jeremy, me earlier abouttracy's just a different funny personhe's like that got the your friend at the lunch table yourfriend who just makes you you should read the phone book and crackyou up and things like astronaut jones arelike a perfect example to me no for sure actuallyand you you nailed it on what makes that you know that because i rememberthat britney spears and it was almost what was funnywas just a dichotomy of having britney and tracy togetherand it's like the odd couple effect waslike that cracked you up just being like britney spearsand tracy morgan like having even though like it's scripted andstuff but like having a conversation it just was odd but like itwas that alone made you laugh but i remember um i think it was season 25 andjamie fox was the host and it was a time where uh it was like you know in betweenwe're like you know jamie's walking and tracy's like oh what's up jamie what'sup man he goes i'm glad we got some some brothers on the show,and Jamie's like, oh, yeah, yeah.Because Tracy's like, yo, these writers don't understand me.They don't get me or that dude with the white hair.And Jamie's like, you mean Lorne Michaels?Track 4[38:38] He's like, I don't know, whatever. He's like, he's your boss.He's like, yeah, he's just always saying weird stuff and doing weird things.And he's like, I'm going to be on the show a lot this week with you here,and we're going to take over. Revolution will be televised.And Jamie's like, yeah, you know, he kind of looks all quiet,like he's sneaking something.He's like, you're right, man, we're going to take over. I got mad lines,man, and this week I'm blowing up the spot.That's what I'm saying. All right, come on, let's go. We're in the middle ofa show. Okay? Yeah, yeah, all right.Jamie? Give me a soda, bitch!Track 4[39:16] Okay all right but it was one ofmy favorite tracy morgan moments because he just just thatline get me a soda like he just nailedit bitch yeah yeah bitch and lauren just goes okaylike i'm like that was great that was like that dangerousaspect of tracy i always love likehe's he's like one of the only ones that could pull that offconvincingly quite honestly we're inseason 49 and i think the current cast ismissing someone like that for sure if they tryto do a backstage and like i wouldn't andrews music is myfavorite cast member currently i don't think hecould pull that off convincingly james austin johnson idon't think keenan can it's not in keenan's nature necessarilyto like pull that off convincingly they don't havesomeone currently like tracy morgan thatadds that kind of unpredictability danger thisbackstage stage stuff with lauren that he did he because he did that a fewtimes the garth brooks one was another yes funny oneto me when he was talking to garth brooks and he was like manthat chris gaines i don't know like uh you're doinga great job garth but like what's up with that chris gaines guy and whateverand then lauren comes to talks to tracy and and he's like hey tracy you knowand then tracy's like no i know i know i know garth is chris gaines i know thatso it's almost like yeah yeah like a turnabout like he's just telling laurenlike i know that you like you got to give Give me some credit.Track 4[40:37] And then I don't know if it was this one or another one where all he has todo is look at Lauren and Lauren goes, orange soda, right? Yeah.Track 4[40:47] So credit to Lauren for playing along. But Tracy's the only one or one of thefew, I think, over the last 25 years or so that could pull something off likethat convincingly. And I think you're right.And it's not a knock on cast members past or present. you said Kenan's greatthat's just not who he is and the people who were on with Tracy that's not who they were like.Track 4[41:13] You can't find like you can't teach that what tracyhad like just like it just comes fromit's part natural part upbringing inyour experiences but like i i alwaysthink about something um jim brewertold a story uh i forget what radioshow he was on but he talks about you knowhim and tracy kind of were high around the same time and itwas the week that you know tragically like when farley cameand hosted and how he was just not in not ingood good shape and uh marcyhe said marcy went to because he was not doingwell during the week and not showing up and was not all thereso he was trying to hang out withlike different people in the cast and jim brewer's like me andtracy weren't doing that but then like marcy andpeople were looking at those to and kind of putit on them like oh you two must be getting chris into troubleand so they said marcy went intolike the office talked to jim and tracy and waslike you two need to stay away from chris so doall these things and like leave him alone and jim brewerwas like you know i'm new so i got nervous and scared andhe said credit to tracy he said tracy stood upand said i'm a grown man with children's you can't talk tome that way i got children's you ain't gonna talk tome like that and he was like but credit to him he's likehe's i didn't do nothing i'm a grown man with children's andi'm like yeah and jim brewer said andi'm like right like he was like no new or not you're not going to come in and.Track 4[42:43] Accuse me something i didn't do and disrespect me i'm gonna stick up for myself.Track 4[42:46] And jim brewer's like he got courage from seeing tracy to be like yeah we didn'tdo anything we didn't take chris out we're not the bad influences here don'tyell at us but that But Tracy was new,and him doing that to Marcy, who's a high-up person,that shows the kind of courage he came in with.Well, yeah, that's that thing where you were right.You alluded to, I mean, he was selling things outside of Yankee Stadium justa few years back, and now he's on SNL. He made it.Track 4[43:18] He's making that salary. That's why he said during a...When he was going to his audition, he was confident because he was like,I shouldn't even be here.The fact that I'm in this last audition, I got nothing to lose.I'm going to go in here and just show my stuff and just be confident.That's just how he carried himself. He's almost like, I shouldn't be here.I already won. The fact that I'm in this room, I already won,so I'm not going to compromise myself and stand down to Marcy Klein or something like when she comes in.Track 4[43:52] And tries to yell at us for something that we didn't do, especially.That just speaks a lot to how Tracy even got to the show. Right.No, for sure. For sure. It just kind of shows, especially by the time you getto the 90s and on, even before then, but that is the goal of so many improv actors.Whether you're at Second City or the Groundlings or whatever,is to make it to Saturday Night Live.That's the goal. So then, of course, no matter how talented you are,if you're on that level and trying to get to SNL, if you get there,you're going to be, especially early on, nervous.And I'm not knocking anyone, but scared because this was your dream.This is the big time SNL. I can make it here.I can maybe be a movie star or a TV star from here.So then you're trying to kiss up to the writers and the big time producers.Juicers i think it was an advantage for a guy like tracymorgan you know same like it was for eddie back in theearly 80s that wasn't his they were stand up likethat wasn't their goal and it was just like all right like we know what it'slike to be in front of this crowd on our own and having to make someone laughand when i come here like i'm not intimidated by this stage i made it the factthat i'm already here i made it here let's go what's the worst that could happen to me Yeah,that speaks to why we're even talking about him right now and why he...Track 4[45:18] Resonates as such a fan favorite because it'shis personality it's kind of the vibe that thatTracy gives off that that compel peopleto watch that draw people to him and it comes through in the sketches and hisand his work on SNL for sure like I have a bunch of example I don't know ifyou remember this one it's toward the end if it's like his second to last seasonand he and Rachel Dratch had a it was a one-off thing it was a talking to thestars with Rachel and Tracy and they were talking to Jon Stewart.All right, well, hosting an awards show of that caliber must be quite stressful.Y'all like to get high, right?Track 4[45:59] Uh, no, no, I don't. What? Get real, Dratch.I've been backstage at those awards shows, man. The Source Awards was like Weed City, bruh.Come on, tell me. Y'all like to get lifted, right? Uh, lifted.Lifted um i find if tracy says aword that i don't know it usually means hi oh okay andthis showed like that loose loose canon element oftracy and just like how tracy mightbe if you're just hanging out with him and the bit was like thatrachel dratch is taking the interview with john store.Track 4[46:32] Very seriously she has her cards and she'sasking him questions and tracy's just being tracy he'sjust goofing around he's ribbing dratch he's asking johnstore inappropriate questions ends and that's justlike the vibe like that that one uh thatsketch with with rachel dratch like that perfectly encapsulatesjust that whole vibe to me darren likelike there's a reason like i heard you kind of breakinto a tracy morgan voice like there's areason why people want to like imitate tracy soi'm gonna take you outside and get you pregnant like peoplejust want to get you you pregnant doodoo pampasyeah jay moore does a great there's a great oh yeahbut uh there's a reason why peoplejust want to imitate him and love him and want toimitate his mannerisms and the way he you know because hejust gives off that like vibe yeah there'ssomething that he has that is rare thatsometimes it's more valuable than if you're the most polished orthe best the best writer or the best you know setupguy and you you can see it with certain peopleand you know pop culture even like in politics there'scertain people who have they just have a likability that comes through the screenand people just you like no matter what they might even portray the worst charactersthat are you know they're delivering bad news but you know what people justreally like this person and i think tracy even in that sketch with rachel dratch.Track 4[48:00] You just like Tracy Morgan. I think a lot of us fans just always liked him andgravitated toward him, which is why then and now, for those years,for that era, you hear Will Ferrell, Sherry O'Terry,Molly Shannon, but you're going to hear Tracy Morgan being mentioned too.To me, not just because of what he's done post-SNL, just talking about thatera SNL, for as he wasn't someone who was always used, I think it's incrediblethat we still talk about that era in the show's history,and one of the first names we're going to talk about is Tracy Morgan.Track 4[48:35] Yeah, yeah, right. That's why this is probably a different feeling episode,even for the SNL Hall of Fame, which is fitting to me with Tracy Morgan.He was just a different feeling kind of cast member, just a different dude that we all love.You had mentioned his stand-up, and I've seen a little bit of it.How would you describe his stand-up comedy? buthe raw and all over the place i'veseen him twice and i'll be honest the first time wasat i was at temple university um andhe was about an hour and a half late and hecame out and he seemed unprepared hehad some funny lines just because tracy's funnybut he seemed unprepared and it was kind of like underwhelmingi'll be honest okay i went a couple years later andsaw him new york in New York at a comedy club and heseemed much he was still that like we talked aboutthat raw like danger feel but likehe was more prepared he was on time and he was a lot better as a stand-up comedyso he it's almost in a way what he brings to SNL he still brings to stand-upwhich is I would never say Tracy's like number one stand-up of all time butI would tell anyone like would Would you like,should I buy a ticket to see Tracy Morgan do state? I would say,yeah, because you're going to laugh.Track 4[49:56] You're going to have a good time because of all the things we're talking about.He's just charisma, that sense of danger. You don't know what he's going to say.He doesn't care. He's not afraid of being canceled or not afraid of like someonefrom the crowd may shout something.Track 4[50:10] He's not like worried about that. He's going to fire right back or go along with it.You're going to be entertained and you're going to end up liking him.If you don't know him or you're not sure, you're going to like Tracy.So it's that same kind of vibe.Same vibe. So there's a sense of danger when he does stand-up.But maybe it's a little more chaotic because he doesn't have Lauren or SteveHiggins or Marcy Klein or the censors on him.But similar vibes. Yeah, that's how I felt with some of the stand-up that I'veseen just on YouTube or going back and watching some of bits and pieces of hisspecials or whatever. Yeah.Uh just some quick hitters too from SNL like probably some stuff that a lotof people would remember Dominican Lou.I love to watch the movies the Sling Blade, the Eddie Maguire and the English Pages.It's a good movie a lot of people they enjoy this movie they love to see itthey love to see the Tom Cruise it's very good for them they like it.Track 4[51:18] What was your favorite part of the movie i don't knowi didn't see it i have notime i'm working all the time you know but ihear it's a good movie it's a good movie people in the building they're talkingabout it a lot they love the movie they like to see the movie all the time they'retalking about it oh hell yeah he did three times i love dominican lou becauseit was like Like, Dominican Lou was this, it was a perfect,like, it's a very specific archetype of a person.It's the person who wants to be part of the conversation, but they haven't really,like, lived it themselves.So, Dominican Lou's always like, yeah, like, this thing was good.I hear everybody talking about it. So, he's not really giving his opinion.He's saying that, like, I heard people in the building talk about it.So, it's like this person who really wants to be part of the conversation.They want to be clued in. but they don't have like the firsthand experiencethemselves so they only have a certain amount of,like i said firsthand experience to go off of so he's always like living vicariouslythrough others yeah and he's fine with it yeah you know what you just said somethingthat and maybe i don't know how people will react to this but.Track 4[52:31] When it comes to, like, you look at, like, the legacy of a Dan Aykroyd,one of the things people talk about is the everyday, everyman characters thathe brought to, you know, sketch comedy and Saturday Night Live.That, like, blue-collar guy that everyone knows, but you didn't really see on,you know, sketch and on TV yet, like, being portrayed that way.And I'm wondering, I feel like Tracy Morgan, even though he has some outrageouscharacters, some of his characters kind of—he kind of brought that, too, where—.Track 4[53:01] But not like his main one, not like Brian Fellows or anything,but like Dominican Lou and some other ones like that, where it's like, you know that guy.Yeah. You know that guy, and it was the kind of representation you weren't reallyseeing on Saturday Night Live before.I think you're absolutely right. I see a little bit of that,too, in his Woodrow character.Yes. Obviously, it's like a heightened kind of thing, but I mean,you've come across someone like that.Mm-hmm. And I can see that. And the commonality, too, is like there's some heartunderneath there, too, because somebody like Woodrow, even Brian Fellows,like I root for him. Yeah. He's likable.And we had brought up Britney Spears with the Astronaut Jones,but it was like Britney Spears and Woodrow had had she did a Woodrow sketchwith him and they went they were hanging out in the sewer and having a little conversation.And there's something about how tracy portrayed woodrowwho's this uh he's a homeless gentleman yeahan eccentric homeless gentleman who told britney spears that uh that he hasthe the post office box down there because the because that's where they werehaving keeping secrets on him so he stole it and put it down in the sewer sohe says kind of goofy stuff like that but But there's a lot of human quality.There's a lot of humanity in a character like that. I think it's easy for Tracyto bring that humanity, I think, too.Track 4[54:31] And I kind of wonder, because you mentioned... I know that episode,and I remember all the sketches.Those were two different episodes, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,okay, they're two different ones. I'm wondering, do you think...Track 4[54:45] Britney Spears kind of requested to be with Tracy in some sketches, you think?Or something because it's like, Britney Spears, I mean, people still,I think, know how big she is.But at that point, she's like, you can make a case like the hottest star outthere is Britney Spears.It's not Will Ferrell in these weird ones. It's Tracy Morgan doing these things.So I'm just like, I wonder if Britney was a fan or it could have been the writersjust thinking that's an odd couple pairing.But it's interesting. now that's a good thought so she did thewoodrow one with him in season 25 at the end of season 25and she came back in season 27 that's where they did the astronaut jones andif you watch re-watch the astronaut jones sketch at the end when he says hislike famous when he says his famous line as astronaut jones oh why don't youdrop out of that green jumpsuit and show me that fat ass.Track 4[55:38] When he says that you could see britney laughand i don't know or she's like smiled and i don't know ifthat was supposed to happen like the character because ifshe was supposed to be this robotic alien but when tracysays that you see britney crack a smile at the end and then they go to the themeto the ending credits for the sketch i kind of do think that britney likes tracyand enjoyed and enjoyed working working with him that's like that's a good thoughtman that's It's something that's a good thing to pick up.Yeah, I was just like, because it's just not, for all the people who were onSNL at the time, it's like you could have put a lot of people with Britney Spears,but it's very memorable. So, yeah, I was just wondering, yeah.Yeah, no, I love that. One of my other favorite ones, one of my last favoriteones is Uncle Jemima's Pure Mash Liquor. Yes, yes.Classic. I love the concept of Aunt Jemima's husband having his own product.And he even says in the commercial, like, they asked me, like,why mash liquor? And he's like, well, sell what you know.And I know, like, so Tracy's whole delivery of this sketch was just so greatto hear me. Oh, it was classic.Track 4[56:46] Now she says that selling booze is degrading to our people.I always say that black folk ain't exactly swelling up with pride on accountof you flipping Framjack.Ain't I right, Sammy? Listen, don't get me in this mess. Then she say,but why booze? I said, sell what you know.And I know about booze.Uncle Jemima's Pure Man Snicker has a 95% alcohol content, and that's per volume.Track 4[57:15] What the hell does that mean? That means you get up for less money.And that might be my low-key favorite one.Track 4[57:26] Great like you said like just who wouldhave thought about that like to like you know everyone and jemimaand how controversial and jemima can be looked on and for him to kind of goin there and do like her husband and kind of doing that like you know i getno respect and i gotta sell something to here and don't forget about me feelit was just classic tracy morgan i'm like that's it's a genius character honestlyyeah it's great they only did it one time i would have led to see Uncle Jemima pop up,even more and he has those cartoon birds around him andhe's swatting at them and then at the end Tim Meadows calls itout he's like what are you swatting at he asked him that's hilarious I forgotyep that's so good yeah that's so good that's from season 25 Uncle Jemima'sPure Mash Liquor yeah that was awesome is there anything else like well I thinkthis was after his tenure but,you know everyone I know is excited for the,the big SNL 50th celebration and, you know, how epic the S the 40th was,but Tracy had had that accident that, you know, his friend tragically passed away.And a lot of people thought Tracy, you know, weren't sure if he was going to survive that accident.And Tracy was absent from SNL 40.And I know Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey gave, he had a special little segment wherethey gave shout out to him. And I thought how even in the moment then and even more like now I.Track 4[58:53] How big that was that a lot of times, you know, it's sad, but that those kindof things go to like the cast members or people who have passed away.And Tracy wasn't hadn't passed. He was, you know, just injured.Track 4[59:04] But like he had that kind of lore and Alec Baldwin, you know,did a great impression of him, too.And that part, you know, was dead on. Actually, I was really good by Alec Baldwin.But in that moment, it kind of hit me like, yeah, that was somebody who wasso missing from that celebration.Inspiration and I'm like yeah I wish Tracy Tracy wouldhave been so good in that sketch or in that thinglike oh but awesome but just also like theimpact that Tracy made that for at that 

A bounce back KO for unbeaten super middleweight Edgar Berlanga leads off, but we also have KOs in the Japanese bantamweight title fights and some tremendous nostalgia involving the massive heavyweight title upset by then, Cassius Clay over Sonny Liston, on the newest "Fight Freaks Unite Recap Podcast!"Host T.J. Rives is joined by insider Dan Rafael of BigFightWeekend.com and they go break it all down.From Berlanga's KO of Padraig McCrory in Orlando headlining the Matchroom Boxing show there to the wins by knockout for Takuma Inoue and Junto Nakatani in separate world bantamewieght title fights in Tokyo, there's lots of insight and analysis.There's also fight news on whom Subriel Matias and his next opponent at 140 lb., Francis Ngannou will apparently go back to MMA after he boxes Anthony Joshua in two weeks and why is Ryan Garcia the only one saying that his Devin Haney title challenge isn't happening in New York?Finally, some nostalgia on Clay/Muhammad Ali caprturing the heavyeight title in a massive surprise of over Sonny Liston 60 years ago this weekend and the horrible result for American Gerald McClellan being knocked out and being permanently brain damaged by Nigel Benn in February 1995. And, some personal insight on Dan Rafael beginning his boxing career, as the USA today boxing writer 24 years ago this weekend.It's all on the "Fight Freaks Unite Recap Podcast" and make sure to follow/subscribe on Apple, Spreaker, Spotify, Google, etc.!!

In today's episode of This Day in Miami History, we discuss arguably the most important sporting event in South Florida's history. It's the 60th anniversary of Sonny Liston's defeat at the hands of Cassius Clay, who would go on to become Muhammad Ali and change the course of history.Remember to follow This Day in Miami History Podcast on your preferred podcast provider, as well as Twitter and Facebook!And visit the This Day in Miami History shop on Spreadshirt for your "Elect Ralph Renick Governor" bumper sticker, t-shirt, and more, as well as TDMH-branded material!The Greatest Weekend - 60th Anniversary of Clay vs. Liston Fight Tickets, Multiple Dates | EventbriteMuhammad Ali | Washington Ave. BID (washavemb.com)AP Archive - YouTube - Clay AND ListonWolfson Archives | MDC Archives | Miami Dade CollegeWatch Muhammad Ali | Full Documentary by Ken BurnsKing of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David RemnickMuhammad Ali: Made in Miami | Miami-Dade Public Library System (iiivega.com)Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/this-day-in-miami-history-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

For the 60th anniversary of the first fight between Muhammad Ali(Cassius Clay) and Sonny Liston the guys talk about this historic fight! This fight is one of the defining Sporting Events of the 20th century! They talk about how big of an upset this was for Ali. How Sonny Liston was feared and was the most intimidating fighter of all time. Ali's great verbal skills and if they got in Liston's head? Ali being associated with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. How this fight helped to define the 1960's and beyond. All this and more on Bigger Than The Game with Deremy and Jose! Please check out the rewatch of this legendary fight on our YouTube channel!! https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKDO9o1p7W_dyyGhmpY5oog/featured

It's a barn burner of an episode featuring our amazing friend, Setoiyo! Back in October he came on the pod to tell us all about the history surrounding the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston in 1964. A lot of incredible ground is covered in this episode. You can listen to Setoiyo's album on apple music or follow him on instagram to laugh and learn so much more everyday! Last call for the Hey Hun tier! To become a Pearlmania500 Team leader: Join our patreon (not a cult): https://pearlmania500.netYou can preorder HNWD's album here: http://hisnamewasdusk.comThe Pearlmans have a Post Office Box: P.O. Box 72549, Thorndale, PA 19372.Our theme song and all of the music for our show comes from our friend's project called "His Name Was Dusk." You can get his album "Let Us Prey" at "hisnamewasdusk.com" and hear all of his other music projects at "tesseractsociety.com" Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Float like a butterfly, sting like... a standup comic? Sixty years ago, long before the current golden age of smack talk, a 21-year-old Cassius Clay was nominated for a Grammy, for what should be considered the first diss album — a poetic, heavyweight takedown of Sonny Liston in the lead-up to their epic 1964 title bout. Andscape's Justin Tinsley tracks how this forgotten record led to the name Muhammad Ali, to national conversations around Black Muslims, to Ali protesting the Vietnam War, even to the birth of hip-hop... and the prevention of tooth decay. Further reading: The Grammy-nominated Cassius Clay (Andscape) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Float like a butterfly, sting like... a standup comic? Sixty years ago, long before the current golden age of smack talk, a 21-year-old Cassius Clay was nominated for a Grammy, for what should be considered the first diss album — a poetic, heavyweight takedown of Sonny Liston in the lead-up to their epic 1964 title bout. Andscape's Justin Tinsley tracks how this forgotten record led to the name Muhammad Ali, to national conversations around Black Muslims, to Ali protesting the Vietnam War, even to the birth of hip-hop... and the prevention of tooth decay. Further reading: The Grammy-nominated Cassius Clay (Andscape) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” ~ Muhammad AliThis Habits 2 Goals episode is FREE for ALL subscribers.From Ring Conqueror to Hollywood CanvasForget the Rocky Balboa wannabes. Meet Michael Bentt. A man who claimed the World Boxing Organization (WBO) Heavyweight Championship title (1993) and would later star in the boxing classic “Ali” as Sonny Liston (2001).Our conversation reveals an intelligent, complex man whose life defied expectations; a tapestry of grit, resilience, and seized opportunity.Roots of a Champion:* Aviation Aspirations: A bright student at New York's Aviation High School, Bentt harbored dreams of soaring as a pilot. Baseball, however, was his first love, a passion nurtured by his supportive father.* Fistic Footsteps: Fate had other plans. His father, a former boxer and aficionado, saw raw talent and a fighting spirit in young Michael and steered him toward the ring. This wasn't just about toughening up; it was about channeling raw energy building discipline and elevating his stature.The Ring:* The Paradox of Safety: Inside the squared circle, amidst the roars and stinging jabs, Bentt found his sanctuary. The controlled chaos, the rhythmic dance of offense and defense, became a refuge from the uncertainties of life outside.* A Crown and a Crushing Blow: His amateur accolades are legendary, but it was in 1993 that Bentt etched his name in boxing history, a huge underdog, he captured the WBO Heavyweight Championship with a thunderous first-round KO of Tommy Morrison. The subsequent brutal loss in his first title defense, however, could have broken him.Canvas to Canvas:* A Writing and Guiding Hand: Enter Thomas Hauser, a well-known boxing writer who saw beyond the knockout. Thomas showed sincere concern for the former champ and became Bentt's unlikely mentor providing much-needed guidance and contacts along the way.* Reinvention in the Spotlight: Seizing multiple opportunities, Hollywood welcomed Bentt and he appeared in dozens of films, adding depth to roles like Sonny Liston in the iconic “Ali” alongside Will Smith.The Man Unmasked:Michael Bentt's story transcends the ropes and the silver screen. It's a beautiful tapestry and a testament to the human spirit – its capacity to find a way; to arise from life's unexpected storms, weather the blows, and emerge with greater wisdom and grace. It's a powerful story (EVERYTHING is a F*cking STORY) that affirms, “Regardless of the last punch you took, the fight remains, and another round is coming quickly!”Ding. Ding. Ding.Enjoy the show!~mgP.S.: From the world of statistics: All models are flawed, but some are useful.With this in mind, we asked Google's AI experiment Bard to “break” the “Three Circles of Behavior System” model (perhaps a future post). The short story (no pun intended) is he/she/IT could not. The best Bard offered: “What about people who aren't aware of their unconscious stories/thinking? It's a good question and a nice attempt. However, an unconscious story is still a story (represented within the model), and that is the point of the latest book, EVERYTHING is a F*cking STORY where the latest version of the model was revealed.BTW: YOU are also invited to try and “break” the “Three Circles of Behavior Echo-System” model.If you think you can, please email or leave comments here.*Note: ChatGPT's does not know the model yet, officially published in October of 2022. GPT's latest update is from January 2022. ***Get the inspiring, free and world's first HABITS to GOALS tracking template here: → https://thehabitfactor.com/templates“The Three Circles of Behavior Echo-System” / The Grunburg Behavior Model is a holistic, fluid, and dynamic behavior-change model. It's the first behavior-change model to demonstrate how our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and even our environment vibrate (echo and reverberate) to influence each other. Hence, the “Echo-System.” Other behavior models represent human behavior in a linear-flow type diagram.Background here.If you'd like to understand human behavior at an even deeper level, learn more about the “Three Circles of Behavior Echo-System” which is featured in the book, “EVERYTHING!” I teach and coach organizations and individuals worldwide how to best utilize and leverage “The Three Circles of Behavior Echo-System” (below) and the P.A.R.R. [Plan, Act, Record & Reassess] scientifically-backed methodology for individual and organizational behavior design. Check out the latest cohort offering; the waitlist is now open: The 28-Day Breakthrough!*Recently Awarded: “Finalist: Self-help, Motivation”International Book Awards: EVERYTHING is a F*cking STORY.Visit https://thehabitfactor.com/templatesTo learn more about P.A.R.R., just Google “P.A.R.R. and The Habit Factor.”Get The Habit Factor® FREE with your audible trial! https://audibletrial.com/habits2goalsFeedspot's “Top 10 Habit Podcasts You Must Follow in 2021”New listeners, grab your free habits 2 goals tracking template here: https://thehabitfactor.com/templatesFREE copy of As a Man Thinketh (PDF) right here: As a Man ThinkethSubscribe iTunes here! Subscribe: Android This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit habits2goals.substack.com/subscribe

Billy C & Alex Pierpaoli give a Blast From The Past on one of the most feared fighters of all time, Sonny Liston. Also joining them will be an expert on Sonny Liston and the author of the book, Sonny Liston: The Real Story Behind The Ali-Liston Fights, Paul Gallender.

Once Mutual finished running the last of the Lewis-directed Jay Kholos episodes of The Zero Hour on March 14th, 1974, they went dark for six weeks. They were busy completely changing the format. Now, one star would be featured in five different anthologies during a week. The show returned on April 29th. The first week's star was Mel Torme. “Bye Bye Narco” was the first new script produced under Mutual's umbrella. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 16th, 1974 “Rod Serling, master writer of the mysterious and macabre, is playing a game of suspense with the good earth. On the side, he serves as host of The Zero Hour, a weekday radio mystery series beamed by the Mutual Broadcasting System. “Serling's feelings about the recent upsurge in radio drama prompted a call to his rural home. It soon became apparent that he is disappointed with radio drama and TV. “Serling made it clear that he has nothing to do with the writing or producing of the twenty-five minute dramas. "I've caught the show about three times. One was passable and two I would have flunked off the air. What they're trying to do—and they may succeed—is a show that is contemporary. But it sounds campy.” “Serling said, "The same thing applies to The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. It has to be relevant stuff for 1974. Short of that, why not resurrect old Shadow recordings? So far, I have yet to see either show relate to our time, either in story or technique. if they're selling us nostalgia, they've succeeded. It's thoroughly reminiscent of radio thirty years ago.” “I'm not bad rapping it,” he said. “It's just not what I expected. I realize the economics of the situation. I wouldn't want to spend my time writing a provocative radio drama and get a check that would buy me a carton of cigarettes. Radio drama currently has the value of an antique." “Won't it change for the better? “I don't know," Serling said. “I have no idea. I'm frequently wrong, anyhow. I thought Nixon would be out of office by now. And I thought Sonny Liston would be heavyweight boxing champion for 20 years.” “Summing up his feelings about radio and television, Serling said, “I feel the same way about radio as I do television as an art form. It doesn't rise to the occasion like it should...although television occasionally has.” “Radio today is more of a display case than an art form.” — Raymond P. Hart The Zero Hour in the new format ran thirteen additional weeks before being canceled after the July 26th, 1974, episode. In total, one-hundred-thirty episodes of The Zero Hour were produced. Most can be heard today.

On today's episode, Georgia tells the story of boxer Sonny Liston and Karen covers disgraced plastic surgeon Anthony Pignataro.For our sources and show notes, visit www.myfavoritemurder.com/episodes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As November 1963 began, President Kennedy had emergency meetings on Vietnam. He also received members of the US Industrial Payroll Savings Committee and had meetings on the goings on in Berlin. Meanwhile, The U.S. Secret Service concluded that the more secure and the larger of two locations for the President's upcoming fundraising luncheon in Dallas would be the "Women's Building" at Fair Park at the east side of downtown, rather than the Trade Mart on the west side near Dealey Plaza. Despite the recommendation, the state Democratic Party leaders in Texas settled on the Trade Mart. On November 6th, Jean Shepherd signed on from WOR talking about, and poking fun at, the 1964 World's Fair, slated to open the next April. Part of what made Shepherd so popular was that no one was safe from his scrutinizing eye, even himself, and his biting style was perfect for late night radio. Perhaps Shep was wrong. Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston twice, changing his name to Muhammad Ali in the process, while the cover of the next day's New York Daily News, Wednesday November 7th, told the story of a bartender from Connecticut who won nearly eighty thousand dollars, an all-time record twin double at Roosevelt Raceway. That same day, Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, announced on NBC's Today Show that he would be a candidate for the 1964 Republican Party nomination. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the front-runner, made no comment, but was expected to enter the race. President Kennedy was not expected to face opposition in his nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for 1964.

Matthew Perry gone too soon, Eli Zaret in studio to break down Michigan's Signalgate, Britney Spears teases a 2nd book, Maine mass murderer is dead, Dwight Howard out of the closet, RIP Bull from Night Court, and James Blunt was quite the partier. RIP Matthew Perry. He foreshadowed his ending on Instagram. Eli Zaret Sees It His Way on NFL quarterback injuries, the legend of Tyson Bagent, preview the Detroit Lions and Oakland Raiders, the Detroit Lions MNF uniforms, MSU's latest loss to Minnesota, Mel Tucker loss, the threat of OSU, Coach Prime's losing streak, the World Series ratings, the Michigan cheating debacle and much more. We remember the best of Chandler Bing. RGIII is crushed. Other celebs honor him as well. Make sure you check your mental health if you are a Michigan cult member. SNL slammed Meghan Markle because everyone hates her. You have another opportunity to win Drew's Michigan football tickets by following our YouTube page. Taylor Swift was NOT in attendance for Travis Kelce and the Chiefs vs the Broncos. Jay Z says Blue Ivy didn't ask for this, but he could have stopped it. Britney Watch 2023: We re-visit the mean Ryan Seacrest interview with Britney Spears. Some of the whoppers of her book are being exposed. Jessica Biel is being bullied by Britney fans. Britney is writing her second memoir. Britney's high school bf vs Justin Timberlake. Jason Alexander claims their love was true. Justin Timberlake is CANCELED. Drew Crime: Mass shooter Robert Card found dead. Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston once fought in Lewiston (BLOOP). Deepfake porn is a criminal activity. Tara Reid still looks bizarre. Dwight Howard's hottest texts. Aaron Carter's 1-year-old brat sure is litigious. James Blunt wrote a book and it seems promising. Chris Brown is being sued AGAIN for being a dick. An influencer's bodyguard punches another influencer friend of another influencer. Either way, brutal punch. The guy behind the Harvard doxxing truck was swatted. Middle East: Angelina Jolie decides to weigh in on the Israel/Hamas conflict. James L. Simon vs missing posters. Elon Musk is providing Starlink to Gaza. Breaking News: Lisa Kudrow might consider adopting Matthew Perry's dog. RIP Bull. Cher is getting called out by her daughter-in-law. Kanye West REALLY loves Hitler. Colin Kaepernick's new Nike line drops. Clay Travis is trying to put together a high school state champ basketball team vs WNBA Champs for $1M. We'll be live on YouTube first thing Tuesday morning to discuss the Monday Night Football matchup between the Lions and the Raiders. Visit Our Presenting Sponsor Hall Financial – Michigan's highest rated mortgage company If you'd like to help support the show… please consider subscribing to our YouTube Page, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Drew and Mike Show, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels, Jim Bentley and BranDon).

Championship boxer & Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston was found deceased in his Las Vegas home by his wife just after New Years. Police would find small bags of heroin and marijuana in his home, and by some accounts, a syringe. His wife Geraldine adamantly denied that Sonny was a drug user, while others said he was a regular heroin user. Was Sonny a victim of a drug overdose - accidental or purposely? Or was Sonny murdered by organized crime bosses when he wouldn't throw a fight? Join Mark and Amy in the City of Sin to take a closer look at the life and death of Sonny Liston. Thank you to Mat Graham from Artificial Fear for allowing us to use his amazing cover of the Unsolved Mysteries Theme Song! Check out his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoQNyGGSIl_ZbEDq-teZDWQ And thank you to Ryan Hughes from Planet H for lending us his spot-on “Stack Voice” and working with us to have such a cool intro and outro! Check out his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYrlNAFRMlWQN1rhWboZh2g

President Kennedy speaks at the Naval Academy; Barry Goldwater hits the radical left; possible coup in South Vietnam; Marlon Brando is heckled; Cassius Clay cuts a record; Sonny Liston has a spiritual guide. Newscaster: Joe Rubenstein.  Please subscribe to this podcast, and thanks for your support! 

West Berliners cheer President Kennedy; N.J. Governor Hughes scores a major coup; the Mississippi D.A. seeks the death penalty for Byron De La Beckwith; the Viet Cong set booby traps; Malcolm X speaks out; Sonny Liston bites back at Cassius Clay. Newscaster: Joe Rubenstein.  Please subscribe to this podcast, and thanks for your support! 

This week, we finish up what is maybe the strangest, and most crime soaked life, in sports history. He shows the holiday spirit by fighting an entire police squad, on Christmas Day. He also is involved in one of the most iconic, and controversial fights, in history, against Ali. Did he throw the fight? Did the mafia make him? The Nation of Islam? In the end, Sonny winds up dead, in a terrible condition. Which leads to even more conspiracies? Was it a simple OD? Heart problems? Or, was he murdered? If so... Who did it? The mystery continues...Fight 10 cops on Christmas Day, try to rehab your image by being a "nice guy", and have your death be a mystery, that endures for decades with Sonny Liston!!Check us out, every Tuesday!We will continue to bring you the biggest idiots in sports history!! Hosted by James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman Donate at... patreon.com/crimeinsports or with paypal.com using our email: crimeinsports@gmail.com Get all the CIS & STM merch at crimeinsports.threadless.com Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things CIS & STM!! Contact us on... twitter.com/crimeinsports crimeinsports@gmail.com facebook.com/Crimeinsports instagram.com/smalltownmurderSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, we check back in with Sonny Liston for Part 2! When we left off, last week, he was being arrested. As we kick off this week, he's getting arrested! Sense a pattern here? We cover a very strange incident, in which Sonny pretends to be a cop, and several other run ins with individual police officers. All of this, while becoming the heavyweight champion of the world, and (sort of) training for his first fight against Ali. Not to mention, his thoughts on the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and being investigated by senate committees!Pretend to be a police officer to pull women over, eat hot dogs & drink beer to prepare to fight The Greatest, and get arrested a whole bunch more with Sonny Liston!!Check us out, every Tuesday!We will continue to bring you the biggest idiots in sports history!! Hosted by James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman Donate at... patreon.com/crimeinsports or with paypal.com using our email: crimeinsports@gmail.com Get all the CIS & STM merch at crimeinsports.threadless.com Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things CIS & STM!! Contact us on... twitter.com/crimeinsports crimeinsports@gmail.com facebook.com/Crimeinsports instagram.com/smalltownmurderSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, we look at maybe the greatest sports crime personality of all time!! He was the heavyweight champion of the world, but is best known for being the guy on the mat, with Ali standing over him, in the most famous sports photo, ever. But his real profession was crime. Lots of crime. He was arrested more times than could be counted, and things only escalated, as he got older. He is, in real life, what Tupac was, in his own rhymes. The legend. The gangster. The champion! Part one is soaked with crime, and the rest will be the same!!Have no idea when you were born, be one of 26 children, and always punch, first, and ask questions, later with Sonny Liston!!Check us out, every Tuesday!We will continue to bring you the biggest idiots in sports history!! Hosted by James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman Donate at... patreon.com/crimeinsports or with paypal.com using our email: crimeinsports@gmail.com Get all the CIS & STM merch at crimeinsports.threadless.com Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things CIS & STM!! Contact us on... twitter.com/crimeinsports crimeinsports@gmail.com facebook.com/Crimeinsports instagram.com/smalltownmurderSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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