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161 - Ron Pope In episode 161 of “Have Guitar Will Travel”, presented by Vintage Guitar Magazine, host James Patrick Regan speaks with guitarist, band leader and record label owner Ron Pope. In their conversation Ron tells us about his different touring iterations and his tour routines. Ron talks about his new album “American Man, American Music” and the personnel on the album and how that differs from his road personnel. Ron talks about how he moved from electric guitar to acoustic and we discuss gear, vintage guitars and modeling amps and Carter's guitars in Nashville. Ron describes the benefits of living in Nashville as a musician. Ron discusses his record label “Brooklyn Basement Records” Ron also talks about teaching himself guitar from listening to Albert King and Steve Cropper records. To find out more about Ron you can go to his website: ronpope.com Please subscribe, like, comment, share and review this podcast! #VintageGuitarMagazine #RonPope #BrooklynBasementRecords #GibsonGuitar #GibsonCustomShop #FenderAmps #MartinGuitars #FenderCustomShop #AmericanManAmericanMusic #theDeadlies #haveguitarwilltravelpodcast #HGWT . . . Please like, comment, and share this podcast! Download Link
Des rockstars des 60’s qui n’ont pas encore joué leur dernière note ouvrent le bal de ce soir. Nous ferons frire les oignons verts avec Steve Cropper tandis que les cordes des guitaristes de fin d’émission seront préalablement lubrifiées pour... Continue Reading →
Discover who wrote most of the Rascals songs. Find out what ex lead singer and founder Felix Cavaliere is doing now and learn all about one of the greatest bands of the '60s. Felix Cavaliere is a celebrated musician, songwriter, and vocalist, widely regarded as a pioneer of blue-eyed soul. Born in Pelham, New York, Cavaliere was introduced to music at an early age, taking classical piano lessons under his mother's encouragement. While initially drawn to classical music, he soon discovered his passion for rhythm and blues, inspired by legends like Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye. Cavaliere pursued pre-med studies at Syracuse University but found himself increasingly immersed in music, forming his first band, The Escorts, while still in college. His decision to follow his musical aspirations led him to New York City's thriving music scene in the early 1960s. In 1965, Cavaliere co-founded The Rascals (originally called The Young Rascals) with Eddie Brigati, Gene Cornish, and Dino Danelli. The group became synonymous with the era's evolving rock and soul movement, producing a string of iconic hits that combined soulful melodies with socially conscious lyrics. Cavaliere's distinctive voice and masterful Hammond organ playing defined hits like "Good Lovin'," which topped the charts in 1966, followed by enduring classics like "Groovin'," "A Beautiful Morning," and "People Got to Be Free." The latter, inspired by the civil rights movement, became an anthem for unity and social justice. As the principal songwriter for The Rascals, Felix played a crucial role in shaping the band's innovative sound, which bridged the gap between rock and R&B. The Rascals enjoyed commercial success, releasing six gold albums and earning a devoted following. However, internal tensions and changing musical landscapes led to the band's breakup in the early 1970s. After The Rascals disbanded, Cavaliere embarked on a solo career, releasing several albums throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His solo work, including tracks like "Only a Lonely Heart Sees," reflected his evolving artistry, blending soulful ballads with pop-rock influences. Felix also collaborated with numerous artists, including Todd Rundgren and Steve Cropper, further solidifying his reputation as a versatile and respected musician. In 1997, Cavaliere and his fellow Rascals were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, cementing their place in music history. The band reunited in 2013 for a critically acclaimed multimedia concert series, Once Upon a Dream, produced by Steven Van Zandt. The reunion celebrated their groundbreaking legacy and brought their music to a new generation of fans. Beyond his achievements with The Rascals, Cavaliere remains an active performer and advocate for music education. He continues to tour, sharing his timeless songs with audiences worldwide. Cavaliere's influence on rock and soul endures, with his groundbreaking contributions inspiring countless artists and fans. Today Felix Cavaliere calls Nashville home base, where he is constantly collaborating and writing new material. He's also finishing his memoir and has an active tour schedule with Felix Cavaliere's Rascals. To learn more about Felix and his music, head for his website To request a guest to be interviewed on the show, head to my website and send me a message.
ABOUT JOE GRUSHECKY: Rock legend known for his work with the Iron City Houserockers and collaborations with Bruce Springsteen. He recently released the album “Can't Outrun A Memory”….. and also “Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology”. Over the years, his albums have included productions & contributions from Mick Ronson, Steve Van Zandt, Steve Cropper, Ian Hunter and Springsteen, among others. ABOUT THE PODCAST: Candid discussions with and about those behind the scenes in the music business including industry veterans representing the segments of: Musician, Design & Live ABOUT THE HOSTS: All three Music Buzzz Podcast hosts (Dane Clark, Hugh Syme and Andy Wilson) have spent their careers working with the biggest names in entertainment and have been, and still are, a fly on the wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
ABOUT JOE GRUSHECKY: Rock legend known for his work with the Iron City Houserockers and collaborations with Bruce Springsteen. He recently released the album “Can't Outrun A Memory”….. and also “Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology”. Over the years, his albums have included productions & contributions from Mick Ronson, Steve Van Zandt, Steve Cropper, Ian Hunter and Springsteen, among others. ABOUT THE PODCAST: Candid discussions with and about those behind the scenes in the music business including industry veterans representing the segments of: Musician, Design & Live ABOUT THE HOSTS: All three Music Buzzz Podcast hosts (Dane Clark, Hugh Syme and Andy Wilson) have spent their careers working with the biggest names in entertainment and have been, and still are, a fly on the wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
George Porter, Jr. is one of New Orleans' music royalty! A Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award member, he was co-founder of the phenomenal Funk/Soul/R&B/Blues band The Meters. You'll find him as an integral member of The Funky Meters, too! Today George's legacy is continuing to be made heading up the Runnin' Pardners Band, whose latest album is Crying For Hope. Multi-award winning program director Ray White caught up with George before taking the stage with his band in May of 2024 to talk about highlights of his esteemed career and his latest projects. You'll find more from George on our Episode 57. In our showcase segment, Lisa Davis highlights the latest from another legendary musician, Steve Cropper, who just released Friendlytown. The show closes with a tour-de-force, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who recently released their album Struck Down which is receiving rave reviews. Getting to the heart of the matter, on this episode of the Coool CAT!!
! Turn On - Choon In - Zig Zag ! - ! What's Past - Is Prologue ! ! ! Callin' ALL The Boom Booms & The Zoom Zooms ! ! . . . GROUND DOWN TO THE REAL UNDERGROUND . . . * * * GROOVIN' BLUE 24 - 11 * * * Groovin' Blue is dedicated to Dr. Li Wenliang 1. (5:39) WAGRadio GB 24 - 11 Intro - Produced by WAGRadio Vinyl Librarian William "Fats Is Back" Reiter (formerly CKLG-FM 96.9 Boss Jock - 'Bill Reiter - The All-Niter') * features a segment of "Otis (Redd Remix)" - Jay-Z, Kanye West, Otis Redding [Roc-A-Fella/Roc Nation/Def Jam] 2011 - - this is a re-worked version of "Try A Little Tenderness" - Otis Redding [Volt 45rpm No. 141] 1966 Prod. Otis Redding, Steve Cropper, Jim Stewart 2. (3:30) "All Of My Dreams (BBQ '79 Afterhours Keys Mix)" - RASMUS FABER, DYANNA FEARSON [Soul Love] 3. (3:31) "Energy Remix" - KABAKA PYRAMID, JEMERE MORGAN, SEAN PAUL [Ghetto Youth Intl.] 4. (3:32) "Sonidos De Primavera (DJZigZag Summer Bo Bo EdiT)" - KRY [KryGenetic Music] 5. (3:45) "In 5D" - BUCKLEY [Moxy Music] 6. (4:44) "Playaz (Dubstrumental Mix)" - MAXWELL CUTTY, TAKIMBA [InStereo Recordings] 7. (3:32) "Somethin' About Ya" - J. HOWELL [JTP Productions] 8. (4:54) "Soul Time (DJZigZag Whoa There EdiT of the Original Mix)" - MATT SHREWD [Jump Beat] 9. (2:44) "Faithful" - J. HOWELL [JT Productions] 2022 10.(3:02) "Feel Good Disco (DJZigZag Move 'Round EdiT)" - BLOCK & CROWN [Freaks Do Dance] * samples "Disco Inferno" - The Trammps [Atlantic Records Lp No. SD 18211 "Disco Inferno"] Prod. Baker, Harris & Young Productions Arr. Ron "Have Mercy" Kersey - A Tom Moulton Mix 11.( :05) WAGRadio Id 12.(5:24) "Equinox" - BOB BALDWIN [City Sketches Inc. Cd No. BFD 1003 "Songs My Father Would Dig"] - Richie Goods (bs), Tony Lewis (dm), Edson Da Silva (perc), Bob Baldwin (pn), 13.(3:29) "Soko (DJZigZag Bam Sunny Bam Bam EdiT)" - LUMINODISCO [Transmit] 14.( :09) WAGRadio Id 15.(3:37) "Are You Ready For Me (DJZigZag Shop Early EdiT)" - MOHTIV [Municipal] 16.(3:12) "Lavender" - JVKE, PINK SWEAT$ [AWAL] 17.( :11) WAGRadio Woo wOO Id 18.4:14) "Rebound Jazz (DJZigZag MashEdiT of the Foo Fonkers Dub & Original Dub Mixes)" - BECKA, SEN-SEI, STRANGER DANGER [Mood Funk] 19.(3:50) "Mamacita (DJZigZag EdiT - Part One)" - CONRAD HERWIG ft. JOE LOVANO [Half Note Records Inc. Cd No. HN 4557 "The Latin Side Of Joe Henderson ft. Joe Lovano"] - Ronnie Cuber (br sx), Joe Lovano (tn sx), Conrad Herwig (tbn), Alex Sipiagin (tpt), Ruben Rodriguez (bs), Robby Ameen (dm), Bill O'Connell (pn), Richie Flores (perc) Conrad Herwig: Arr. 20.(3:02) "VIP (Intro - Outro Version) - LGS [Kuroneko] 21.( :05) "WAGRadio Jungel Id 22.(4:46) "Mamacita (DJZigZag EdiT - Part Two)" - CONRAD HERWIG ft. JOE LOVANO [Half Note Records Inc. Cd No. HN 4557 "The Latin Side Of Joe Henderson ft. Joe Lovano"] - Ronnie Cuber (br sx), Joe Lovano (tn sx), Conrad Herwig (tbn), Alex Sipiagin (tpt), Ruben Rodriguez (bs), Robby Ameen (dm), Bill O'Connell (pn), Richie Flores (perc) Conrad Herwig: Arr. 23.(4:06) "I'm Lyin'" - J. HOWELL [JTP Productions] 2021 24.(3:02) "Feel Good" - MR. DORIS, D-FUNK, CATALOOP, NEW SHAKESPEARE [Jalapeno] 2023 25.( :07) GB Nu End 79:37
Today's show features music performed by T-Bone Walker and Steve Cropper
This legendary musician and songwriter was integral to the Staxx Records sound, and has writing credits on "Green Onions" and "Sittin' On The Dock of the Bay".
Text us about this show.Terry Manning has a long and stellar history in the music business. His résumé reads like a Who's Who because of the sheer number of artists he's worked with over the past sixty-plus years. If you're a soul music fan, Terry worked on hits by Otis Redding, Al Green, Sam & Dave, and more. Classic rock fan? Albums like Led Zeppelin III, ZZ Top's Eliminator, and Big Star's #1 Record list Terry as engineer. Terry's worked in a wide variety of genres at studios like Stax Records, Ardent Studios, Compass Point Studio, and currently Sonic Ranch Studio and his talents aren't just in music, but he's an outstanding photographer, writer, athlete, and more. In other words, Terry's one-of-a-kind and on this episode of Into The Music we find out why.For more about Terry, make sure to visit terrymanning.com and themanninggallery.com."It's You (Beacon)" performed by Terry Manningwritten by Terry Manning℗ 2015 Lucky Seven Records under exclusive license to ECR Music Group. Used with permission of Terry Manning."I Am The Cosmos" performed by Terry Manningwritten by Chris Bell℗ 2019 Lucky Seven Records under exclusive license to ECR Music Group. Used with permission of Terry Manning."What's The Use?" performed by Terry Manningwritten by J.P. Richardson and Terry Manning℗ 2020 Lucky Seven Records under excluSupport the Show.Visit Into The Music at https://in2themusic.com or https://intothemusicpodcast.com!Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Host/producer: Rob MarnochaVoiceovers: Brad BordiniRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie Angel of Los StraitjacketsT...
When I spoke with guitarist Jimmy James a few weeks ago for Caropop Ep. 143, he cited Steve Cropper of Booker T. and the M.G.'s. as a key inspiration. Listen to James' work with the organ trio Parlor Greens and, before that, the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, and you hear how he, like Cropper, is a rhythmic guitarist who never overplays yet can make your head spin. I told James I'd love to hear him to interview Cropper, and he said that would be a dream come true. Turns out, the 82-year-old Cropper, my guest for Caropop Ep. 93 last summer, has a new album, Friendlytown, coming out Aug. 23. I pitched the idea of James talking with Cropper, guitarist to guitarist, generation to generation, and here it is—with fantastic stories and insights plus a few guitar licks. (Photo by Stacie Huckeba.)
Night Traxx Presents Legendary Guitarist Steve Cropper, New album FriendlyTown Legendary Guitarist Steve Cropper Announces New Album ‘Friendlytown,' Out August 23rd Via Mascot Label Group Featuring Billy F Gibbons, Brian May and Tim Montana First Single “Too Much Stress feat. Brian May” Not many people start new bands in their 80s, but legendary guitarist, producer, and songwriter Steve Cropper isn't slowing down any time soon. The triple-threat musician, recently nominated for his first solo GRAMMY for the debut album from his tight and tuneful rock n' soul quintet, Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour, has announced details of his highly anticipated sophomore album, ‘Friendlytown,' due out August 23rd via Mascot Label Group/Provogue. Always pushing ahead and never repeating himself, Cropper has brought in the talents of Billy F Gibbons from ZZ Top to play on the record. The album also features guest appearances from Queen guitarist extraordinaire Brian May and country-rock singer-songwriter and guitarist Tim Montana, who has balanced a successful solo career with high-profile collaborations with Gibbons and Kid Rock.
| Artist | Title | Album Name | Album Copyright | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour | I Leave You In Peace | Friendlytown | | Mark Hummel | Mr Two-Thirds | True Believer | | Ilana Katz Katz | Woman, Play the Blues | In My Mind | | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour | Lay It On Down | Friendlytown | | Errol Linton | Bo Diddit | Break The Seal | | Hubert Sumlin With James Cotton & Little Mike And The Tornadoes | Juke | Heart And Soul | | Joe Louis Walker | Keep The Faith | Hornet's Nest | | Samantha Fish | Let's Have Some Fun | Black Wind Howlin' | | Albert Ammons | Ammons Stomp (Young) | Albert Ammons 1946-1948 | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour | Too Much Stress (feat Brian May) | Friendlytown | | Seasick Steve & The Level Devils | Sorry My Jesus | Cheap | | | Fats Domino | Don't Lie to Me | Roots of Rock N' Roll Vol 7 1951 | Son Of Dave | Rock & Roll Talent Show | Shake A Bone | | Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour | Reality Check | Friendlytown | | Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown | Trick Up My Sleeve | Electrified | | Canned Heat | So Sad | Finyl Vinyl |
Night Traxx presents Legendary Guitarist Steve Cropper Announces New Album ‘Friendlytown,' Out August 23rd Via Mascot Label Group Featuring Billy F Gibbons, Brian May and Tim Montana First Single “Too Much Stress feat. Brian May” Cropper has won two GRAMMY Awards from his seven nominations. He's been ranked the number two greatest guitarist of all-time—behind Jimi Hendrix—by England's Mojo Magazine, and number 36 in Rolling Stone magazine's “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” Cropper's name is synonymous with the world-famous soul label Stax Records, and he is featured in HBO's new documentary, ‘Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.'
#23- Otis Redding-Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul (Stax) Released October 1966, Recorded May-September 1966 Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, recorded at Stax Recording Studios in Memphis, is a seminal work in Otis Redding's career and soul music. Produced by Jim Stewart, Isaac Hayes, and Booker T. Jones, the album features legendary Stax studio musicians like Steve Cropper, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones, and the Memphis Horns. It includes standout tracks such as the iconic "Try a Little Tenderness," "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)," and "My Lover's Prayer." It covers like "Day Tripper" and "Tennessee Waltz," each showcasing Redding's dynamic vocal range and the band's tight, soulful arrangements. The album received critical acclaim, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 73 on the Billboard 200, solidifying Redding's legacy as a master of soulful expression and musical innovation. Full Album on YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn1E4mv4x-I4oNQ0qlroeWXxa4lDD4Lj9&si=6SlxhnkIL8UdM3Ms Full Album on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/25uNcuL4dAoV62eKmr8Q0Y?si=hK3DknToSX2TkN_3ggWDiA Curated 1966 Playlist Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7I6dzYc5UJfko8unziRMWf?si=a07e4d1e27944d00
This week, we talk to rapper, producer, visual artist, and video director VIDEO DAVE (whose new album with OPEN MIKE EAGLE & STILL RIFT as PREVIOUS INDUSTRIES is out now on MERGE RECORDS) about a film that speaks to him from the heart of his home town of Chicago and both of our childhoods, THE BLUES BROTHERS. We discuss the film's impact on Chicago (and vice-versa), tech vs. artistry, the incredible musical cameos in the film, Dave's original story & the development of his iconic sewing skills, how he created a Jaws shot by shot video that he made for Previous Industries, splitting time between disciplines, making art on acid, the difficulty of being asked what your favorite movie is, 1980's banner year for R-rated comedies, how the studio wanted The Blues Brothers to go disco instead of blues, how as kids the film was our first exposure to John Lee Hooker, James Brown and Aretha Franklin, the extended version of the film and what was cut out of the original release, Cab Calloway's sequence in the movie, Dr. Detroit disappointment, the lovely sloppiness inherent in the film, Donald “Duck” Dunn & Steve Cropper, the chicken wire bar scene and what venues Video Dave has played that were close to that experience, musicians being actors vs. actors being musicians, The Pope coming to The Blues Brothers' movie set, other classic musicals, John Waters' films being locked away in the adult section of the video store and so much more!So let's get the band back together on this week's Revolutions Per Movie!!!VIDEO DAVE:https://vaud.art/https://videodave.bandcamp.com/https://www.mergerecords.com/artist/previous_industriesPliers Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blmGMjkxJVkREVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday. If you like the show, please subscribe, rate, and review it on your favorite podcast app.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. There, you can get weekly bonus episodes and exclusive goods just for joining.SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieX, BlueSky: @revpermovieTHEME by Eyelids 'My Caved In Mind'www.musicofeyelids.bandcamp.comARTWORK by Jeff T. Owenshttps://linktr.ee/mymetalhand Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Let's go to Memphis in the meantime, baby! Our featured interview is with Rob Bowman, the Toronto based academic scholar and Grammy Award-winning professor of ethnomusicology. Notably, Rob is a recognized authority on Stax Records, and has produced numerous Stax box sets in addition to writing an exhaustively researched book, Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records. He is also an executive producer and main source for Jamila Wignot's fantastic four part HBO Max documentary series, STAX: Soulsville, U.S.A. We also speak with Eric Friedl and Zac Ives from contemporary Memphis record store, Goner Records, who tell us about their store, their label, and their annual fall festival, Gonerfest. The Record Store Day Podcast is a weekly music chat show written, produced, engineered and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music. Executive Producers (for Record Store Day) Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton. For the most up-to-date news about all things RSD, visit RecordStoreDay.com) Sponsored by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery (dogfish.com), Tito's Handmade Vodka (titosvodka.com), RSDMRKT.com, and Furnace Record Pressing, the official vinyl pressing plant of Record Store Day. Please consider subscribing to our podcast wherever you get podcasts, and tell your friends, we're here every week and we love making new friends.
To Support the Channel:Patreon https://www.patreon.com/AskZacTip jar: https://paypal.me/AskZacVenmo @AskZac Or check out my store for merch - https://my-store-be0243.creator-spring.com/The Blues Brothers movie was a blockbuster in the summer of 1980. Even with a 27.5 Million dollar budget, that's 102 million in 2024 money, it managed to make that back in a couple of weeks. A sequel was even being discussed, but plans were shelved when John Belushi passed away in 1982. Today we take a look at the impact of the movie on both viewers, and the careers of its musical stars, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Cab Calloway, and John Lee Hooker. We also take a look at the guitars used in the film by Steve Cropper, and Matt "Guitar" Murphy. We end with a short lesson showing how to play Murphy's intro to "Sweet Home Chicago." Strings: D'Addario NYXL 95-44https://amzn.to/41rnl0V1953 replica Telecaster2023 Headstrong Lil' King with 12" Eminence GA-SC64 speakerhttps://headstrongamps.com/lil-king-amp#askzac #bluesbrothers #stevecropperSupport the Show.
Welcome to the premiere "Song Dive" bonus episode: a way to hear the story behind a song that has made (or will soon make) our collective mixtapes & playlists! On this "Song Dive" episode, I am joined by Guy Fletcher of Dire Straits, and we're talking about the story behind Mark Knopfler's Guitar Heroes' “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero),” which Guy produced. This new 10-minute rendition was recorded in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America, and features over 60 musical legends on the track. We also take some time to discuss tracks from Dire Straits' catalog including: Money For Nothing, Walk Of Life, Heavy Fuel & The Bug; working with “Weird Al” Yankovic on his Dire Straits' parody “Money For Nothing / Beverly Hillbillies;” recording the soundtrack for The Princess Bride; the experience of mixing Dire Straits' "Live At The Rainbow, London UK, 12/1979" album from the original tapes; Guy's accreditation as a Dolby ATMOS engineer and how that factored into the new Going Home mix; bringing ATMOS to households via the Airsound Spatial speaker technology; and so much more! The full list of artists who appear on “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)” are (in alphabetical order): Joan Armatrading, Jeff Beck, Richard Bennett, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Brown, James Burton, Jonathan Cain, Paul Carrack, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jim Cox, Steve Cropper, Sheryl Crow, Danny Cummings, Roger Daltrey, Duane Eddy, Sam Fender, Guy Fletcher, Peter Frampton, Audley Freed, Vince Gill, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Keiji Haino, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, John Jorgenson, Mark Knopfler, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Greg Leisz, Alex Lifeson, Steve Lukather, Phil Manzanera, Dave Mason, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Robbie McIntosh, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Rick Nielsen, Orianthi, Brad Paisley, Nile Rodgers, Mike Rutherford, Joe Satriani, John Sebastian, Connor Selby, Slash, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey, Sting, Andy Taylor, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Ian Thomas, Pete Townshend, Keith Urban, Steve Vai, Waddy Wachtel, Joe Louis Walker, Joe Walsh, Ronnie Wood, Glenn Worf, & Zucchero. A minimum of 50% of the proceeds from the single are being donated to Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. To purchase the 12" vinyl, CD or digital edition of the single, please visit: https://www.markknopflersguitarheroes.com/ Be sure to visit MyWeeklyMixtape.com to hear all of the songs we discussed in this episode, and join the My Weekly Mixtape Discord Server via the link on the main menu! FOR MORE ON MY WEEKLY MIXTAPE Website: http://www.myweeklymixtape.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myweeklymixtape Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/myweeklymixtape Twitter: https://twitter.com/myweeklymixtape Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myweeklymixtape TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@myweeklymixtape Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
GUEST OVERVIEW: Composer, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Bruce has toured, performed, recorded and appeared on records with some of the biggest names in music including Little Richard, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Dr John, Steve Cropper, Joe Satriani, Joe Bonamassa, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath), Simon Phillips (Toto, The Who, Jeff Beck), Leslie West and Corky Laing (Mountain), Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki (Big Country) and his father the late Jack Bruce of Cream. Malcolm curated a tribute to his father in October 2016 alongside Pete Brown (Cream lyricist) at O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire and performed with legends such as Lulu, Eddi Reader, Maggie Reilly, Paul Young, Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones), Dennis Chambers (Santana, Parliament / Funkadelic), Gary Husband (Level 42, John McLaughlin), David Sancious (Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Stanley Clarke) and Ginger Baker (Cream). He released his album ‘Salvation' in 2017, a collection of 10 songs recorded at Kevin McKendree's (Delbert McClinton, Brian Setzer) The Rock House Studio in Franklin TN and mixed by Steve Orchard (Paul McCartney, Chris Cornell) and toured the UK and USA in support.
The small Memphis label Stax Records created soul hits by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, Rufus and Carla Thomas, and others. It's the subject of a new documentary on MAX. We're featuring interviews with musicians who were a big part of the Stax sound: Guitarist, songwriter, and producer Steve Cropper tells us about becoming part of the house rhythm section, and going on to help write hits for Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. Keyboardist Booker T. Jones remembers being pulled out of class in high school to go play music at Stax. And Issac Hayes tells us about writing the classic hit "Soul Man."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
The small Memphis label Stax Records created soul hits by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, Rufus and Carla Thomas, and others. It's the subject of a new documentary on MAX. We're featuring interviews with musicians who were a big part of the Stax sound: Guitarist, songwriter, and producer Steve Cropper tells us about becoming part of the house rhythm section, and going on to help write hits for Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. Keyboardist Booker T. Jones remembers being pulled out of class in high school to go play music at Stax. And Issac Hayes tells us about writing the classic hit "Soul Man."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Rock N Roll Hall of Famer Guy Fletcher joins UAWIL in a very special episode where we talk the charity single he produced, his days in Dire Straits, on the road and in the studio with Mark Knopfler and more. Going Home has for decades been the theme song to the movie Local Hero, which Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame not only composed but was the tune with which he always closed his shows. When the idea of rerecording the song for the benefit of Teenage Cancer Trust (UK) and Teenage Cancer America came about, he jumped on board. And that spurred other legends to take part as well like Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Duane Eddy, Steve Cropper, Peter Frampton, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend, Ringo Starr, Sting and many, many more. Over 60 artists and legends participated and it was Guy's job to put it all together. We talk with him about putting this amazing charity single together and the cover which evokes Sgt. Peppers as it was done by the same artist, Sir Peter Blake. Guy also relayed some stories of his decades long career in Roxy Music, Dire Straits, working with Mark Knopfler on his many solo albums and tours and on working in a true gem of a recording studio, British Grove. Though Mark Knopfler was ready to walk away from the Straits in the 90s so he could have more freedom, he kept Guy around as Mr. Fletcher is in-sync with Mark's musical wavelengths and can assimilate the great amount of information that Mark creates. He served as Musical Director of Mark's solo band and shared some stories of life on the road with Mark. Guy is a brilliant producer who told us a bit about his high hopes for the future of Atmos mixing and what makes British Grove such a special place to record music. He even relates a story about Mark's desire to make an album with Jeff Beck which sadly never had the chance to materialize. It was a true honor and a lot of fun to welcome Guy Fletcher to The Wolf!! Watch and download Going Home - Guitar Heroes Version Ugly American Werewolf in London Website Ugly American Werewolf in London Store - Get your Wolf merch and use code 10OFF2023 to save 10%! Visit our sponsor RareVinyl.com and use the code UGLY to save 10%! Twitter Threads Instagram YouTube LInkTree www.pantheonpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rock N Roll Hall of Famer Guy Fletcher joins UAWIL in a very special episode where we talk the charity single he produced, his days in Dire Straits, on the road and in the studio with Mark Knopfler and more. Going Home has for decades been the theme song to the movie Local Hero, which Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame not only composed but was the tune with which he always closed his shows. When the idea of rerecording the song for the benefit of Teenage Cancer Trust (UK) and Teenage Cancer America came about, he jumped on board. And that spurred other legends to take part as well like Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Duane Eddy, Steve Cropper, Peter Frampton, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend, Ringo Starr, Sting and many, many more. Over 60 artists and legends participated and it was Guy's job to put it all together. We talk with him about putting this amazing charity single together and the cover which evokes Sgt. Peppers as it was done by the same artist, Sir Peter Blake. Guy also relayed some stories of his decades long career in Roxy Music, Dire Straits, working with Mark Knopfler on his many solo albums and tours and on working in a true gem of a recording studio, British Grove. Though Mark Knopfler was ready to walk away from the Straits in the 90s so he could have more freedom, he kept Guy around as Mr. Fletcher is in-sync with Mark's musical wavelengths and can assimilate the great amount of information that Mark creates. He served as Musical Director of Mark's solo band and shared some stories of life on the road with Mark. Guy is a brilliant producer who told us a bit about his high hopes for the future of Atmos mixing and what makes British Grove such a special place to record music. He even relates a story about Mark's desire to make an album with Jeff Beck which sadly never had the chance to materialize. It was a true honor and a lot of fun to welcome Guy Fletcher to The Wolf!! Watch and download Going Home - Guitar Heroes Version Ugly American Werewolf in London Website Ugly American Werewolf in London Store - Get your Wolf merch and use code 10OFF2023 to save 10%! Visit our sponsor RareVinyl.com and use the code UGLY to save 10%! Twitter Threads Instagram YouTube LInkTree www.pantheonpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the premiere "Song Dive" bonus episode: a way to hear the story behind a song that has made (or will soon make) our collective mixtapes & playlists! On this "Song Dive" episode, I am joined by Guy Fletcher of Dire Straits, and we're talking about the story behind Mark Knopfler's Guitar Heroes' “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero),” which Guy produced. This new 10-minute rendition was recorded in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America, and features over 60 musical legends on the track. We also take some time to discuss tracks from Dire Straits' catalog including: Money For Nothing, Walk Of Life, Heavy Fuel & The Bug; working with “Weird Al” Yankovic on his Dire Straits' parody “Money For Nothing / Beverly Hillbillies;” recording the soundtrack for The Princess Bride; the experience of mixing Dire Straits' "Live At The Rainbow, London UK, 12/1979" album from the original tapes; Guy's accreditation as a Dolby ATMOS engineer and how that factored into the new Going Home mix; bringing ATMOS to households via the Airsound Spatial speaker technology; and so much more! The full list of artists who appear on “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)” are (in alphabetical order): Joan Armatrading, Jeff Beck, Richard Bennett, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Brown, James Burton, Jonathan Cain, Paul Carrack, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jim Cox, Steve Cropper, Sheryl Crow, Danny Cummings, Roger Daltrey, Duane Eddy, Sam Fender, Guy Fletcher, Peter Frampton, Audley Freed, Vince Gill, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Keiji Haino, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, John Jorgenson, Mark Knopfler, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Greg Leisz, Alex Lifeson, Steve Lukather, Phil Manzanera, Dave Mason, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Robbie McIntosh, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Rick Nielsen, Orianthi, Brad Paisley, Nile Rodgers, Mike Rutherford, Joe Satriani, John Sebastian, Connor Selby, Slash, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey, Sting, Andy Taylor, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Ian Thomas, Pete Townshend, Keith Urban, Steve Vai, Waddy Wachtel, Joe Louis Walker, Joe Walsh, Ronnie Wood, Glenn Worf, & Zucchero. A minimum of 50% of the proceeds from the single are being donated to Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. To purchase the 12" vinyl, CD or digital edition of the single, please visit: https://www.markknopflersguitarheroes.com/ Be sure to visit MyWeeklyMixtape.com to hear all of the songs we discussed in this episode, and join the My Weekly Mixtape Discord Server to join in the musical discussions: https://discord.gg/hhDQAnXasm FOR MORE ON MY WEEKLY MIXTAPE Website: http://www.myweeklymixtape.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myweeklymixtape Discord: https://discord.gg/hhDQAnXasm Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/myweeklymixtape Twitter: https://twitter.com/myweeklymixtape Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myweeklymixtape TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@myweeklymixtape Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
#1,005 - Steve Cropper Steve Cropper Interview on The Paul Leslie Hour. Are you here? Yes, you're tuned into episode #1,005 of The Paul Leslie Hour. Ahh! Yes indeed, we've been piling on the good stuff, talking to some of the most iconic people of all time and today is no exception. Paul is so excited about this one that you can hear his heart beating Now, ladies and gentlemen, we're elated to welcome the one-and-only Steve Cropper — one of the most legendary guitarists in music, a great songwriter, A&R man, record producer and renowned live performer. Steve Cropper, called one of the greatest guitarists of all time, was the rhythm guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Cropper had a hand in pretty much every record issued by Stax Records. Cropper has written with everyone from Otis Redding to Eddie Floyd. Just think about all of the great tunes he co-wrote. Man, there's “(Sittin' on the) Dock of the Bay,” “In the Midnight Hour,” “634-5789,” “Knock on Wood.” No wonder Cropper was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, And then we can't forget those great instrumentals he co-wrote like “Green Onions” and “Time is Tight.” Steve Cropper just doesn't stop. Everyone's talking about this incredible new track he plays on: “Going Home: Theme of the Local Hero,” by Mark Knopfler. If you haven't heard it, please check it out. It's to support the Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. It's got more than sixty fabulous musicians on it, including Steve Cropper. I see that Paul is giving me a thumbs up and okay symbol. It's time for Steve Cropper, but real quick please subscribe and like The Paul Leslie Hour on Facebook and YouTube, it's a great help and it keeps you plugged into what we're doing. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.
We discuss guitarists who move us from Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike McCready, Trey Anastasio, Lindsey Buckingham, and Alex Lifeson to Jack White, Kurt Cobain, John Frusciante, Tom Morello, Steve Cropper, and more. Who is the best guitarist in the Beatles? Who is Sister Rosetta Tharpe? And who would be on our Mount Rushmore of top guitarists?
ABOUT STEVE CROPPER: Legendary American guitarist, songwriter and record producer Steve Cropper is known as the guitarist of the Stax Records house band and Booker T. & the M.G.'s, which backed artists such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas and Johnnie Taylor. He also acted as the producer of many of these records. He was later a member of the Blues Brothers band. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 36th on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, and has won two Grammy Awards from his seven nominations. ABOUT THE PODCAST: Candid discussions with and about those behind the scenes in the music business including industry veterans representing the segments of: Musician, Design & Live ABOUT THE HOSTS: All three Music Buzzz Podcast hosts (Dane Clark, Hugh Syme and Andy Wilson) have spent their careers working with the biggest names in entertainment and have been, and still are, a fly on the wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
ABOUT STEVE CROPPER: Legendary American guitarist, songwriter and record producer Steve Cropper is known as the guitarist of the Stax Records house band and Booker T. & the M.G.'s, which backed artists such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas and Johnnie Taylor. He also acted as the producer of many of these records. He was later a member of the Blues Brothers band. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 36th on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, and has won two Grammy Awards from his seven nominations. ABOUT THE PODCAST: Candid discussions with and about those behind the scenes in the music business including industry veterans representing the segments of: Musician, Design & Live ABOUT THE HOSTS: All three Music Buzzz Podcast hosts (Dane Clark, Hugh Syme and Andy Wilson) have spent their careers working with the biggest names in entertainment and have been, and still are, a fly on the wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Karen Dillard Brown and Michelle Isom are special guests for today's intro. They visited the studio to discuss the upcoming Kitchen & The Cross benefit at Neil's Music Room on March 24th. Kitchen & The Gross raises funds to help feed the homeless. Last year, they raised enough money to make 10,000 meals. Our featured guest is legendary bassist Davy Dave Smith. After our Josheen Moisturizer shenanigans, we dig deep into Dave's history as a Memphis bass player both on stage and in the studio. He has worked with such acts as Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Jonny Lang, Buddy Guy, John Mayall, Cat Power, Leo Kottke, Luther Allison, Al Green, Willie Mitchell, Steve Cropper, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Scotty Moore, Dj Fontana, Rufus Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Ike Turner, BB King, and others. Currently, Dave works with The Deb Jam Band and Landslide: A Memphis Tribute to Fleetwood Mac Davy Dave Snith FB https://www.facebook.com/davythekid
Embark on an auditory journey that celebrates the spirit of John Belushi and resonates with the rich legacy of music history. As we traverse the soul-stirring performances of the Blues Brothers, you'll discover how Belushi and Dan Aykroyd amplified the talents of music greats like Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn. But the intrigue doesn't end there; we unravel the tangled web involving Cathy Smith, her infamous involvement with Belushi's untimely demise, her past love affair with Gordon Lightfoot, and her connections to The Band. This episode is a sonic tapestry, interlacing stories that span generations and genres, leaving you with a newfound appreciation for music's interconnectedness.Prepare to be moved by personal tales that weave the fabric of our lives with the threads of music. I'll share how a chance bar encounter and a touching email reaffirmed the impact of our podcast, and how the virtuosic bluegrass of Billy Strings at the State Farm Arena captivated even the most uninitiated listener. Revelations abound as we reflect on the bittersweet memories tied to Supertramp's "Breakfast in America," Music's profound influence on our personal narratives is undeniable, and this chapter invites you to explore the soundtracks of your own life stories.Concluding our episode, we delve into music rankings, where the expected hallmarks of the industry yield to some surprising chart-toppers. You might anticipate Sgt. Pepper's to reign supreme, but instead, we'll discuss the roaring success of albums like Whitney Houston's "The Bodyguard" soundtrack and Shania Twain's celebrated hits. Join us as we examine the unpredictable nature of public taste in music and give thanks to the talents behind our show, including our producer Jimmy Guthrie at Arcade 160 Studios and the musical stylings of Vic Thrill. Together, we celebrate the evolving soundscape of the music world, inviting you to tune in for more insightful episodes of Music in my Shoes.
Send us a Text Message.When Lee Finkelstein lays down a beat, it's not just rhythm—he's telling a story, painting a landscape. It's a philosophy I, John Simeone, share wholeheartedly. Our recent conversation took us on a tour through the world of drumming, where we unpacked the essence of what it means to truly play for the music. Lee, with his wealth of experience across genres, emphasizes the idea that serving the song trumps personal showmanship. We riff on the camaraderie between drummers, the joy found in simplicity, and the magnetic pull of a groove that unites a band. The heartbeat of our episode pulses with discussions on live performance and the wisdom Lee shares gleaned from playing with legends like the Blues Brothers band and stepping in for David Garibaldi with Tower of Power. As we explore the shifting tides of the music industry, we offer nuggets of advice for up-and-coming drummers striving to stay relevant. Join us as we share stories of triumph, the humbling moments of our careers, and the lessons that resonate beyond the stage. It's a rhythmic ride that speaks to the core of every musician's spirit.Lee has recorded, performed with and backed up Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Nancy Wilson, Grover Washington Jr, Eric Gale, The Oregon Symphony Orchestra & Randy Brecker, Isaac Hayes, Eddie Floyd, Bette Midler, Blood Sweat & Tears, Russ Freeman, Julio Iglesias, Frankie Paul, Johnny Winter, Steve Cropper, Lou Marini, Will Lee, Paul Shafer, John Tropea, Leon Pendarvis, Alan Rubin, Saturday Night Live, Dave Valentine, Cornelius Bumpus, Anthony Jackson, Mary Wilson, Daryl Hall, John Oates, Hudson River Rats, Joey Ramone, Vaneese Thomas, Mario Cruz, Jens Wendelboe, Don Blackman, Oz Noy, Buzz Feiten, Neil Jason, Deena Miller, Dave Fields, Jay Prince, Bill Heller, Cosmic Oven, Derretub Snub, Hadrian Decree, Red Flannel Hash Band, Small Talk/Jim Small Band, The Paper Bag, Timberwolf, Yasgur's Farm, Jim Pin Band 5+2-1, Eclipse, Funk Filharmonik, The Zen Tricksters, Major Domo, Chick Singer Night NYC, Jonny Rosch, Bobby Harden, Stevie Cochran, Ed Palermo Big Band, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Wycliff Gordon, Marc Ribler, Jack Daley, JT Bowen, Southside Johhny, Bowling For Leftovers, Dead On Live, Felix Cavaliere and The Rascals, Felicia Collins, David Spinozza, Vernon Reid, Corey Glover, Bill Murray, Chris Noth, Ben Vereen, Friends of the Brothers, the Royal Scam and Paul Sorvino. Support the Show.
Summary Justyna Kelley is a "Nashville-by-way of France" recording artist, producer, songwriter, actress, and a whole bunch of other stuff! In this conversation, Justyna and Blake discuss her background in music, her work as a producer, and her love for different genres. Justyna shares her experiences growing up in Nashville and being surrounded by country music. She also talks about her journey as a musician and how she ended up living in Paris. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes the importance of putting oneself out there and finding your people. She also shares stories about her guitars. Later in the conversation, Eddie joins the chat to discuss Steve Cropper's guitars, how Justyna and himself work together, and a whole lot more! including writing from titles and finding sources of inspiration. They also share their experiences with song ideas coming from dreams and the importance of using the mighty voice memo app! You are going to like this one! Check out Justyna's website HERE: https://www.justynakelley.com/ Give her a follow on Instagram HERE: https://www.instagram.com/justynakelley If you'd like to work with Eddie and Justyna check out their website HERE: https://www.eddieandjusty.com/ Takeaways Writing from titles can be a methodical approach to songwriting. Song ideas coming from dreams Having a simple rig and a few versatile electric guitars can be effective for live performances. Working in TV and film can involve writing music specifically tailored to the project. Sometimes a change of scenery is what you need. Cheese pizza and bacon cheeseburger pizza. We'll leave it at that. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Background 07:25 Working in the Studio 11:19 Understanding the Role of a Producer 13:46 The Joy of Collaborative Music Making 15:11 Early Musical Influences 22:26 Exploring Different Genres 25:37 Living in Paris and the Influence of Travel 30:16 Favorite Guitars and Songwriting 33:25 The Significance of Instruments 34:12 Tom Waits Story 35:16 Personal Writing Process 36:39 Writing from Titles 37:12 Methodical Approach to Songwriting 37:25 Finding Inspiration 38:11 Song Ideas in Dreams 39:33 Using Voice Memos 40:28 The Importance of The Voice Memo App 44:46 Justyna's Personal Rig 45:45 Electric Guitars 52:26 Working in TV and Film 57:03 Justyna's Music and Album 58:54 Favorite Boss Pedal 01:00:46 Favorite Kind of Pizza Support The Show And Connect! The Text Chat is back! Hit me up at (503) 751-8577 You can also help out with your gear buying habits by purchasing stuff from Tonemob.com/reverb Tonemob.com/sweetwater or grabbing your guitar/bass strings from Tonemob.com/stringjoy Release your music via DistroKid and save 30% by going to Tonemob.com/distrokid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"Changing Beats: Goose's Drummer Departure and New Musical Ventures"Larry Mishkin dives into a live performance of the Grateful Dead's Mardi Gras Show from 1986. The discussion highlights the additional set by The Nevels, a brief comparison of songs played, and the significance of the venue, Kaiser Convention Center. The conversation transitions to Goose, a contemporary jam band, announcing a change in drummers and their new album release. Larry also touches on the Grateful Dead's record-breaking achievement of having the most Top 40 albums on the Billboard 200. Lastly, it explores the origins and themes of the Grateful Dead's song "Cassidy," drawing connections to individuals associated with the band and the Beat Generation. Throughout, there's a mix of musical analysis, historical context, and personal anecdotes, offering a comprehensive exploration of the music and culture surrounding these iconic bands plus the latest cannabis news. Grateful DeadFebruary 12, 1986 (38 years ago)Henry J. Kaiser Convention CenterOakland, CAGrateful Dead Live at Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center on 1986-02-12 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Show Title: Dead and the Neville Brothers Rock Oakland Celebrating Mardi Gras A short Dead show by Nevilles played a set after turning it into a marathon evening of great music INTRO: Sugaree Track #3 Start – 1:35 Jerry comes out smoking on this crowd favorite to get things rocking (second song after Hell in a Bucket). Released on the Jerry's first solo album, Garcia, in January, 1972. Played 362 times 1st at on July 31, 1971 at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CN six months before its release Last played on July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago Kaiser Convention Center is a historic, publicly owned multi-purpose building located in Oakland, California. The facility includes a 5,492-seat arena, a large theater, and a large ballroom.[2] The building is #27 on the list of Oakland Historic Landmarks.,[3] and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.[4]The building is located at 10 10th Street, in the Civic Center district of the city. It is next to the Oakland Museum, Laney College, Lake Merritt, and near the Lake MerrittBARTstation.he Beaux-Arts style landmark was built in 1914; the architect was John J. Donovan.[3] The structural engineer was Maurice Couchot.[5] Originally known as the Oakland Civic Auditorium, it was renamed in honor of Henry J. Kaiser after a 1984 renovation.The city closed the facility in 2006 and its future was uncertain for a decade.[1] In 2006, Oakland voters defeated a ballot proposition advocating a library space in the building.The facility was owned by the City of Oakland until 2011, when it was sold to the local redevelopment agency for $28 million.[6] However, the redevelopment agency was dissolved by the State of California in 2012,[7] so ownership reverted to the city of Oakland.In 2015 the city chose a local developer, Orton Development, Inc. to renovate the facility. The plans are to turn it into a commercial space, with the Calvin Simmons Theater being renovated as a performing arts venue. The building is also supposed to be registered as a national historic landmark.In the 1950s and 1960s the Roller Derby played there hundreds of times. Elvis Presley performed at the convention center on June 3, 1956, and again on October 27, 1957. On December 28, 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to an audience of 7,000 at the auditorium to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.[13]Ike & Tina Turner performed at the Oakland Auditorium on January 13, 1967.From 1967 through 1989, the Grateful Dead, an American rock band, performed at the convention center 57 times. Their first 23 concerts at the convention center were billed at "Oakland Auditorium", and later, starting in 1985, the venue changed to "Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center". In the 80's the band started performing "runs" of shows over the course of three to seven days.[ SHOW No. 1: Tons of Steel Track # 4 1:07 – 2:40 A “new” Brent song, released on In The Dark in 1987. Love the harmonizing with Phil – “She wasn't built to travel at the speed a rumor flies, these wheels are bound to jump the tracks, before they burn the ties.” Crowd loves it too – any excuse to hear Phil sing – this is just about a month before the Hampton show where Phil broke out Box of Rain, Deadheads couldn't get enough of him. David Dodd:Brent wrote the words and music for “Tons of Steel.” It was first performed on December 28, 1984, at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco (now Bill Graham Civic). The other first in the show was "Day Tripper." I was there! It sounded like a hit to me. But then, I was completely disconnected from whatever it was that passed for hit-making in the 1980s.It was performed fairly regularly throughout 1985 through September 1987, making its last appearance on September 23 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. That seems odd to me, because it was dropped from rotation just a little more than two months after it was released on In the Dark, in July. Any thoughts?So, it's a song about a train. One of the prime motifs in Grateful Dead lyrics. Quick—name five Grateful Dead songs with trains! No peeking!What do trains evoke in Dead lyrics? Everything from danger (“Caution,” “Casey Jones”) to adventure (“Jack Straw”) to love (“They Love Each Other”) to farewell (“He's Gone”) to whatever that thing is that we feel when Garcia sings about wishing he was a headlight... (and take a look at the back cover of Reflections sometime). Played 29 times First played December 28, 1984 S.F. Civic Auditorium (NYE run) Last played September 23, 1987 at the Spectrum, Philly SHOW No. 2: Cassidy Track #6 2:20 – 4:09 "Cassidy" is a song written by John Barlow and Bob Weir[1] and performed by the Grateful Dead, Ratdog, and Phil Lesh & Friends.[2] The song appeared on Bob Weir's Ace, and the Grateful Dead's Reckoning and Without a Net albums.[3]The song was named after Cassidy Law, who was born in 1970 and was the daughter of Grateful Dead crew member Rex Jackson and Weir's former housemate Eileen Law.[1] The lyrics also allude to Neal Cassady, who was associated with the Beats in the 1950s[4] and the Acid Test scene that spawned the Grateful Dead in the 1960s. Some of the lyrics in the song were also inspired by the death of Barlow's father.[5]The song was quoted in the admiring and admirable obituary of Barlow in The Economist.One of my favorite songs, a great sing a long.I really like this version because it gets nice and trippy. Always good for a helping define the mood of the show, usually about mid to late first set. A very fun tune. Played 339 times 1st: March 23, 1974 at the Cow Palace in Daley City, just outside S.F. Last: July 6, 1995 Riverport Amphitheatre, Maryland Heights, MO outside of St. Louis SHOW No. 3: Willie and the Hand Jive Track # 14 1:23 – 3;05 Played with the Neville Bros. but without Phil who left the stage for this one song. Willie and the Hand Jive" is a song written by Johnny Otis and originally released as a single in 1958 by Otis, reaching #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #5 on the Billboard R&B chart.[1][2] The song has a Bo Diddley beat and was partly inspired by the music sung by a chain gang Otis heard while he was touring. The lyrics are about a man who became famous for doing a dance with his hands, but the song has been accused of glorifying masturbation,[2]though Otis always denied it.[3] It has since been covered by numerous artists, including The Crickets, The Strangeloves, Eric Clapton, Cliff Richard, Kim Carnes, George Thorogood, The Bunch, and in live performances by The Grateful Dead.[4][5] Clapton's 1974 version was released as a single and reached the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 26. Thorogood's 1985 version reached No. 25 on the BillboardRock Tracks chart. The lyrics tell of a man named Willie who became famous for doing a hand jive dance.[1][2] In a sense, the story is similar to that of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode", which tells of someone who became famous for playing the guitar and was released two months before "Willie and the Hand Jive".[1] The origin of the song came when one of Otis' managers, Hal Ziegler, found out that rock'n'roll concert venues in England did not permit the teenagers to stand up and dance in the aisles, so they instead danced with their hands while remaining in their seats.[2][5] At Otis' concerts, performers would demonstrate Willie's "hand jive" dance to the audience, so the audience could dance along.[2] The dance consisted of clapping two fists together one on top of the other, followed by rolling the arms around each other.[2] Otis' label, Capitol Records, also provided diagrams showing how to do the hand jive dance. Eric Clapton recorded "Willie and the Hand Jive" for his 1974 album 461 Ocean Boulevard. Clapton slowed down the tempo for his version.[12] Author Chris Welch believes that the song benefits from this "slow burn".[12]Billboard described it as a "monster powerful cut" that retains elements from Clapton's previous single "I Shot the Sheriff."[13]Record World said that "Clapton slowly boogies [the song] into laid-back magnificence. George Thorogood recorded a version of "Willie and the Hand Jive" for his 1985 album with the Destroyers Maverick.[27] His single version charted on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, peaking at #25, and reached #63 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.[1][28]Allmusic critic James Christopher Monger called the song one of Thorogood's "high points. Other artists who covered the song include: Johnny Rivers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Sandy Nelson, The Tremeloes, Amos Garrett, Ducks Deluxe and Levon Helm.[4]Lee Michaels released a version of the song on his 1971 album, 5th To my surprise, played 6 times by the band, all in '86 and once in ‘87 This is the fist time they ever played it Last: April 4, 1987 at the Centrum in Worcester, MA SHOW No. 4: In the Midnight Hour Track # 16 2:20 – 4:01 Played with the Nevilles, Phil back on stage Again, Jerry's playing really stands out. "In the Midnight Hour" is a song originally performed by Wilson Pickett in 1965 and released on his 1965 album of the same name, also appearing on the 1966 album The Exciting Wilson Pickett. The song was composed by Pickett and Steve Cropper at the historic Lorraine Motel in Memphis, later (April 1968) the site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Pickett's first hit on Atlantic Records,[1] it reached number one on the R&B charts and peaked at number 21 on the pop charts. Wilson Pickett recorded "In the Midnight Hour" at Stax Studios, Memphis, May 12, 1965. The song's co-writer Steve Cropper recalls: "[Atlantic Records president] Jerry Wexler said he was going to bring down this great singer Wilson Pickett" to record at Stax Studio where Cropper was a session guitarist" and I didn't know what groups he'd been in or whatever. But I used to work in [a] record shop, and I found some gospel songs that Wilson Pickett had sung on. On a couple [at] the end, he goes: 'I'll see my Jesus in the midnight hour! Oh, in the midnight hour. I'll see my Jesus in the midnight hour.'" and Cropper got the idea of using the phrase "in the midnight hour" as the basis for an R&B song.[3] More likely, Cropper was remembering The Falcons' 1962 song "I Found a Love," on which Pickett sings lead and says "And sometimes I call in the midnight hour!" The only gospel record Pickett had appeared on before this was the Violinaires' "Sign of the Judgement," which includes no such phrase.[4]Besides Cropper, the band on "In the Midnight Hour" featured Stax session regulars Al Jackson (drums) and Donald "Duck" Dunn (bass). According to Cropper, "Wexler was responsible for the track's innovative delayed backbeat", as Cropper revamped his planned groove for "In the Midnight Hour" based on a dance step called the Jerk, which Wexler demonstrated in the studio. According to Cropper, "this was the way the kids were dancing; they were putting the accent on two. Basically, we'd been one-beat-accenters with an afterbeat; it was like 'boom dah,' but here was a thing that went 'um-chaw,' just the reverse as far as the accent goes."[5]Pickett re-recorded the song for his 1987 album American Soul Man."In the Midnight Hour" t has become an iconic R&B track,[citation needed] placing at number 134 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,[citation needed] Wilson Pickett's first of two entries on the list (the other being "Mustang Sally" at number 434).[citation needed] It is also one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll,[citation needed] Pickett's only such entry. In 2017, the song was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant."[7] In 1999, "In the Midnight Hour" recorded in 1965 on Atlantic Records by Wilson Pickett was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Covers:· The Grateful Dead regularly performed the song in concert from 1967 onwards, most notably with extended improv vocals by frontman Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. It was occasionally the Dead's “midnight song” at their NYE shows – I saw them do it in 1985 at midnight on the 31st. Fun way to start the new year although I was always partial to Sugar Mag at NYE midnight. 57 times played 1st: December 10, 1965 at the Fillmore in S. F. Last: October 17, 1994 at MSG, NYC OUTRO: Johnny B. Goode Track #17 Start – 1:40 We just featured this song from a different show, but this version demands recognition. Played with the Nevilles – great mash up of musicians, singers, the whole thing is just great. Interestingly, not the encore, but the last song of the second set (US. Blues was the encore, a ripping version, but no Neville Bros so I went with JBG instead to hear them one more time). Chuck Berry tune Dead played it 283 times First played: September 7, 1969 at The Family Dog at the Great Highway, S.F. Last played: April 5, 1995 at the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum, Birmingham, AL .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast
Composer, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Bruce has toured, performed, recorded and appeared on records with some of the biggest names in music including Little Richard, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Dr John, Steve Cropper, Joe Satriani, Joe Bonamassa, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath), Simon Phillips (Toto, The Who, Jeff Beck), Leslie West and Corky Laing (Mountain), Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki (Big Country) and his father the late Jack Bruce of Cream.
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We spin the reels of the rock and roll fruit machine this week and get the following pay-outs … … the preposterous present they gave Bobby Charlton when he retired. ... “the leaning man from Alabam”. … ‘Skinny Minnie Shimmy' by Lattie Moore And The Emperors and other apparently fictitious rock and roll hits. … a Radio One DJ who was also an actor, erotic sculptor, travel writer, sheep farmer, flamenco guitarist and ballet dancer. Why has no-one made a film of the life of Mike Raven? … why Born To Run was “a quantum leap”, the record where Springsteen wanted “to sing like Roy Orbison and write like Bob Dylan on an album that sounded like it was produced by Phil Spector”. … a leaked 1982 Radio One memo of ground rules for DJs! “Don't resort to ‘common talk' in a pathetic attempt at humour.” “You can say Cornflakes but not Shredded Wheat …” … how rock is adopting the Gilbert & Sullivan business model. … Richard Thompson, Steve Cropper, John Fahey, Hubert Sumlin … : who's the greatest guitarist of all time? … the story-spinning genius of John Prine. … the afterlife of the Love Affair. … Ernest ‘Boom' Carter's brief but marvellous moment of glory.… and birthday guest Giles Fraser wonders at what point a band shouldn't use their original name.Rolling Stone's top 250 guitarists …http://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-guitarists-1234814010/nile-rodgers-5-1234814197/ The amazing story of Mike Raven …http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Raven Everybody's in the Mood by Howlin' Wolf …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV0gDlzEnYUGet your exclusive Nord VPN deal here: https://nordvpn.com/yourearIt's risk-free with Nord's 30-day-money-back guarantee!Tickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21 Soho on November 27th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ZOthfatjxiSubscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello friends! Nashville based, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, Jesse Daniel Edwards is my guest for episode 1321! His latest album, the gorgeous, piano driven, Violensia, produced by the legendary, Joe Chiccarelli (U2, Beck, Spoon) on Cavity Search Records. Go to jessedanieledwards.net for show dates, vinyl and more. We have a great conversation about growing up in the church and not hearing secular music until his teens, making Violensia with producer Joe Chiccarelli, working with legendary guitar player, Steve Cropper, dropping out of music to become a music teacher at a camp, tour managing Morrisey, Jason Isbell and Lucinda Williams, finding his voice as writer, and much more. I had a great time getting to know Jesse. I'm sure you will too. Let's get down! Get the best, full-spectrum CBD products from True Hemp Science and enter code HDIGH for a special offer from How Did I Get Here? If you feel so inclined. Venmo: venmo.com/John-Goudie-1 Paypal: paypal.me/johnnygoudie
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SUMMARYStax Records legend Deanie Parker talks about writing songs for Otis Redding, Albert King, William Bell, and Carla Thomas, dives deep on what made the Stax environment so special, and shines a light on the recently-released box sets of forgotten Stax songwriter demos. PART ONEScott and Paul discuss the wild story behind the monumental box set Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos.PART TWOOur in-depth interview with Deanie ParkerABOUT DEANIE PARKERWhile still in high school, Deanie Parker won a Memphis talent contest and an audition for Jim Stewart at Stax Records. He signed her and released her debut single, on the Volt label, in 1963. The self-penned “My Imaginary Guy” became a regional hit, but the life of a touring artist was not for Parker. She became the first Black employee at Stax's Satellite Record Shop before joining the label staff as the company's first publicist in 1964. Learning on the job while studying journalism at Memphis State, Parker eventually became the company's Vice President of Public Affairs. One of the first female publicists in the music industry, she worked closely with Isaac Hayes, Booker T & the MG's, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Albert King, and others. Wearing many hats at Stax, Deanie continued to write songs with colleagues such as Steve Cropper, Booker T. Jones, Eddie Floyd, Bettye Crutcher, Mack Rice, Mable John, and Homer Banks, with whom she penned the soul classic “Ain't That a Lot of Love.” The list of Stax artists who recorded her songs includes Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, William Bell, Sam & Dave, The Staple Singers, and more. Her other writing skills were put to use penning liner notes for classic albums such as Sam & Dave's Hold On, I'm Comin', Albert King's Born Under a Bad Sign, Otis Redding's Live in Europe, and Shirley Brown's Woman to Woman. From 1987 through 1995, Deanie served as the Assistant Director of the Memphis in May International Festival. A tireless champion of the Stax legacy, she became the first President and CEO of Soulsville, the nonprofit organization established to build and manage the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Stax Music Academy, and the Soulsville Charter School. She was appointed to the Tennessee Arts Commission in 2004 and, in 2009, was awarded two Emmy awards for the I Am a Man documentary short, for which she was an executive producer and the title song composer. The list of artists outside the Stax family who've covered Deanie Parker's songs includes The Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello, Darlene Love, Taj Mahal, Three Dog Night, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Band, New York Dolls, Simply Red, Hall & Oates, and many others. She is a co-producer and co-liner notes writer of the seven-CD collection Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, and was recently announced as a 2023 inductee into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... start your 14-day free trial and take the next big step in your songwriting career today! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether) from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut. Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time. The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m
Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Does writing with a pro songwriter guarantee a cut? Does it automatically upgrade your career? And why is it so difficult to get on the books with a pro? Here's the truth, in only 3(ish) minutes! Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You're talented as a songwriter or musician or singer. But... is that enough? Is talent all you need to make it in music? Here's the truth. Songwriting Pro Membership allows you to connect to the real music business- no matter where you live and even if you don't "know anybody." Get all the details at the link below... and take the next big step in your songwriting career! https://SongwritingPro.com Who is Brent Baxter? Brent is an award-winning songwriter with songs recorded by Alan Jackson (the top 5 Country hit "Monday Morning Church"), Randy Travis, Lady A, Joe Nichols, Ray Stevens, Steve Cropper, Andy Griggs, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Gord Bamford (the #1 hit and CCMA Single Of The Year "When Your Lips Are So Close"), The Sound (the #1 hit and Dove-nominated Southern Gospel Song Of The Year "Can I Get A Witness"), Wilburn & Wilburn (#1 hit "Hallelujah Homecoming"), The LeFevre Quartet, Brian Free & Assurance and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On this Brent Mason Interview: Brent shares the story behind his move to Nashville, and the alternative misery he would face if he didn't move... working with Chet Atkins, Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, Brad Paisley, Glen Campbell, Nancy Sinatra… his favorite music to play, 5 things responsible for his success as a studio musician, strangest (and funniest) sessions he's been on, sacrifices he made to succeed, toughest decision he's had to make, overcoming shyness. VERY COOL convo w one of the most respected players in Nashville's history. Cool Guitar & Music T-Shirts, ELG Merch!: http://www.GuitarMerch.com Brent is one of the most recorded guitarists in history, has played on 1,800 top ten hit singles, and has recorded with Toby Keith, Aaron Lewis, Reba McEntire, Allison Krauss, Darius Rucker, Asleep at the Wheel, Alabama, George Jones, Trace Adkins, Jamey Johnson, Martina McBride, Amy Grant, Brad Paisley, Willie Nelson, Billy Ray Cyrus, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Neil Diamond, Marty Stuart and 00's of others As well as being a Grammy Award winning artist he is also a 14 time winner of the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Guitarist of the Year Award, and a 2 time winner of the CMA Award Musician of the Year (being nominated every year since 1991). He has been named as one of the top ten session guitarists in the world, joining the ranks of Jimmy Page, Larry Carlton, Tommy Tedesco and Steve Cropper. Brent has played on well over a thousand albums and continues to add to this extensive resume. In October 2019 he was inducted into the Musician's Hall of Fame and in May 2023, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame Nashville Cats Subscribe & Website: https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe Support this show: http://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support
Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. 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 "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th
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