Podcasts about t bone walker

It's time for another journey through the heart and soul of the blues on Blues is the Truth, hosted by Ian McHugh. This week's episode delivers a fresh and fiery mix of timeless legends and modern masters, with all the regular features you love—plus a spotlight on the inimitable Blues Driver section presented by Paul Michal, bringing you high-octane blues every week. On the playlist this time around: the raw power of Albert King, the soulful picking of Muireann Bradley, the spiritual swagger of Reverend Freakchild, and the deep London groove of Errol Linton. We've also got Joe Bonamassa delivering his signature style, Brooks Williams with his smooth Americana-blues blend, and Andrea De Luca holding down the contemporary Italian blues scene. Bob Stroger and The Headcutters give us a taste of classic Chicago tones, while Lachy Doley shakes the room with his powerhouse organ work. There's slide-driven fire from Dave Arcari, timeless licks from T-Bone Walker, and some British humour and grit from The British Bluescasting Corporation. Jimmie Rogers and Lowell Fulson roll back the years, David M'ore brings some serious edge, Cathy Lemons adds smoky soul, and Jerron Paxton continues to charm with his rootsy authenticity. Bywater Call brings soaring vocals and searing guitar, Ian McHugh gets in on the act himself, Samantha Fish turns it up as only she can, and Amy Helm brings soulful serenity. Rounding things out are Travellin' Blue and the always electric Ruzz Guitar's Blues Revue. Whether you're a blues purist or a curious newcomer, this episode has something to lift your spirit and stir your soul. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and review the podcast wherever you listen. Your support keeps the blues alive and well!

This week's Blues is the Truth is packed with soul, grit and powerful music from across the blues spectrum, hosted as always by Ian McHugh. There's a heartfelt tribute to the legendary Joe Louis Walker, who features heavily in the show, and Ian also brings news about two outstanding new blues films you won't want to miss. Musically, it's a journey through classics and new favourites, including the raw emotion of John Primer and the powerful collaboration between Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Bobby Rush. Katie Bradley and Chris Corcoran light up the speakers with their distinctive style, and we've got searing guitar work from the likes of Eric Clapton, Popa Chubby, Matt Schofield, Robin Bibi, Sean Chambers, and Eric Johansen. The iconic sounds of Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Musselwhite, and the Vaughan Brothers sit comfortably alongside the soulful voices of Janiva Magness, Kyla Brox, Lou Pride, and Ally Venable. There's also music from Darcy Perry, Jordan Officer, and a brilliant track from Joe Louis Walker that reminds us just how much he's shaped the modern blues landscape. Don't miss this emotional, exciting and expertly curated episode. As always, like, follow, share, subscribe, and leave a review—it all helps spread the blues even further!

Songs include: I'll See You In My Dreams by Django Rheinhardt, Farruca by Ramon Montoya, Strollin With Bone by T-Bone Walker, Step it Up And Go by Blind Boy Fuller and You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To by Billy Baur. 

Text us about this show.Greg Koch is undeniably one of the best guitarists on the planet today. He's well versed in a plethora of styles that he doesn't just play technically well, but with feeling and touch that leaves the listener in awe. His knowledge of guitars and who knows how many influential guitarists from a breadth of genres is deep. Very deep. His videos on YouTube, especially the ones he does for Wildwood Guitars, aren't just jaw droppingly good for his playing (with some gristle, of course), but they come with a good dose of humor that pulls you in even further. Most of all, Greg is genuine. The guy you'll hear in this episode is the same here, on social media, and when you see him live. Get ready to be blown away by the one and only Greg Koch!"Spank It (live)" written and performed by Greg Koch℗ 1997 Greg Koch. Used with permission of Greg Koch"The Damn Thing" written and performed by Greg Koch℗ 2012 Greg Koch. Used with permission of Greg Koch"Stormy Monday" performed by Greg Koch and Festering Woundwritten by Aaron Walker (a.k.a. T-Bone Walker)℗ 2007 Greg Koch. Used with permission of Greg Koch"Six Legged Fire Breathing Dog" written and performed by The Koch Marshall Trio℗ 2024 Greg Koch. Used with permission of Greg KochMelody Audiology LLCAudiology services for all. Specializing in music industry professionals and hearing conservation.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showVisit Into The Music at 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.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 StraitjacketsThis podcast copyright ©2025 by Project X Productions. All rights reserve...

Explore the life and music of saxophonist Eddie Chamblee, best known for his work in jazz and R&B music. Chamblee worked with many legendary performers, including Lionel Hampton, T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, and Dinah Washington. In fact, Chamblee was married to Dinah Washington in 1957. Eddie Chamblee was born, in Atlanta, Georgia in 1920. By 1928, he was living in Indianapolis. His father, Robert Chamblee, was president of the Citizens Life Insurance Company. Their offices were located at 229 Indiana Avenue. After spending several years in Indianapolis, Chamblee's family moved to Chicago. But Chamblee would eventually return to Indianapolis.  From 1953, to 1955, Chamblee held down a series of steady gigs at the Indiana Avenue club George's Bar, where he became famous for playing his sax while swinging from the club's rafters. During the 1950s, Chamblee performed at many Indiana Avenue venues, including Sunset Terrace, the Walker Theatre, and Ferguson Hotel.

This week's guest, Mr. Conrad, joined Rockabilly Greg In the Flamingo Lounge on November 19, 2024. Mr. Conrad, a lifelong lover of blues, rockabilly, and swing, has been immersed in the music scene since his early teens. Inspired by legends like Big Joe Turner, Bill Haley, and Chuck Berry, he dove deep into the genre's history, discovering influences like T-Bone Walker. A pivotal moment came in 1969 when he saw Jerry Lee Lewis perform, inspiring him to pick up the piano. After gaining experience in local bands, he joined the East Side music scene in Buffalo, jamming with renowned musicians like Eli Hall and Count Rabbit. This exposure honed his skills and instilled a deep understanding of the music's emotional core. In the 1980s, Conrad formed Mr. Conrad and The Excellos, gaining local recognition. However, his ambition led him to Austin, Texas, where he collaborated with renowned musicians like Keith Ferguson. He later moved to Los Angeles, further solidifying his reputation as a talented guitarist and performer. Now back in Buffalo, Mr. Conrad continues to share his passion for blues and rockabilly, captivating audiences with his energetic performances. His deep knowledge of the genre and his dedication to the music make him a true legend in the Buffalo music scene.

#hiphop #rap #bluesguitar #snoopdogg #pimp While cruising and performing on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise, Mark sits down with Fillmore Slim the legendary bluesman, and grandfather of HIP HOP. He has toured the greatest blues, soul, R&B, and jazz artists including Sly and the Family Stone, BB.King, Dinah Washington, Ike and Tina Turner, T-Bone Walker, Holly Maxwell, Sista Monica, Guitar Shorty, Etta James, Frankie Lee, J.J. Malone, Johnny Guitar Watson, Joe Louis Walker, Rick Estrin, Bonnie Rait, the Allman Brothers Band, and Chris Cain. Rappers such as Snoop Dogg, Too Short, Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Frank Stickemz pay homage to him in the lyrics their songs. He has influenced an entire generation of young artists with his music & lyrics, and trend setting fashionable style. In 2017 he was crowned the Godfather of Hip Hop at the West Coast Hip Hop Awards, Oakland, CA. and inducted into the Black Music Hall of Fame as a music icon.

Today's show features music performed by T-Bone Walker and Steve Cropper

In this week's episode of Blues is the Truth, host Ian McHugh brings another fantastic blend of blues, rock, and soul, featuring a special tribute to Matt Long of Catfish, who sadly passed away last week. The show honors his incredible talent and lasting influence on the blues community, with several appearances by Catfish throughout the episode. As always, you'll hear regular features like the “Song Remains the Same” and the “Blues Driver,” along with Ian's insightful commentary about the stories behind the tracks. This episode kicks off with the incredible sounds of Tedeschi Trucks Band, a group that has redefined modern blues with their soulful, Southern-infused rock. We then move on to the raw energy of Catfish, showcasing Matt Long's dynamic performances and powerful vocals. The smooth yet gritty grooves of CW Ayon will take you on a journey into the heart of Mississippi Hill Country, while The Travelling Blue Kings deliver a European take on classic Chicago blues. Samantha Fish brings her fiery guitar and captivating voice, and we honor the legendary Fenton Robinson and his contributions to the blues world. Other highlights include the soulful tones of Mississippi MacDonald, the Chicago-born Guitar Jack Wargo, and the iconic harmonies of The Pointer Sisters, showcasing their unique flair for crossing genres. New favorites like Brooks Williams and Kat Riggins share the stage with veteran bluesmen such as Buddy Guy, T-Bone Walker, and Bob Angell. Throughout the episode, Ian also highlights the work of King Bee and the Stingers, TJ Wong, Jimmy Adler, and Brick Briscoe. Fans of swamp blues will especially enjoy a powerful track from Tab Benoit, capping off the show with one last appearance by the energetic Catfish in memory of Matt Long. Tune in for an unforgettable mix of blues legends, rising stars, and a heartfelt tribute to a truly gifted artist.

A Father's Day special for The Day of the Dad. And since so many dads love electric guitar, Blind Mango Chutney delivers a very special Jazz Show based around the instrument, with lots of electric guitar from six-string legends including Larry Coryell, George Benson, T-Bone Walker, and even Lou Reed and Van Morrison, interspersed with the trumpets of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, and the keys of Duke Ellington.

Mr. Sipp performs live at the 2024 Blues Music Awards on Edition 655 of Blues Radio International, with T Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Albert & Rayne Castiglia feat. Christone "Kingfish" Ingram, and Sara Lazarus.Photograph by Laura Carbone.Find more at BluesRadioInternational.net/

Intro Song –  Zac Harmon, “Babe And Ricky's Inn”, Floreada's Boy 
First Set - New Blues!
 L.A. Big Daddy's, “Why I Sing The Blues”, Single  
 Pontchartrain Shakers, “Going Fishing”, Self Titled
 Richard Wilkins, “Somebody”, Empty Seats

 Second Set – New Blues!
 Chris Cain, “Good Intentions”, Good Intentions Gone Bad         Curtis Salgado, “Better Things To Lie About”, Fine By Me
 Glenn Patrik, “Down To The BarBQ”, Original Blues  Third Set - From The Vinyl Vault Joe Williams with the Count Basie Orchestra, “Everyday”, Everyday I Have The Blues, 1959 Joe Turner, “Corinne Corrina”, Bosses of the Blues - Vol. 1, 1989 Lazy Lester, “Lester's Shuffle”, Rides Again, 1987
 Jumping' Johnny and the Blues Party, “She Said, You Said, I Said”, Where y'at?

 Fourth Set - From The Vinyl Vault
 The James Cotton Blues Band, “Feelin' Good”, Self-Titled, 1967 T-Bone Walker, “Sail On”, Bosses of the Blues - Vol. 1, 1989
 Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, “Real Life”, Real Life, 1986

"The Old Man's Rhythm and Blues Hour" is TODAY at 12noon pst / 3pm east / 8pm Tenerife. We have Jimmy Dawkins, T-Bone Walker, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elmore James and MANY MORE!!!! Tune in to Ride Time Radio here: https://www.easyridertenerife.com/ridetimeradio  What a GREAT way to head into the weekend!!! Later Gators!!   Get everything you need to start your own successful podcast on Podbean here: https://www.podbean.com/tomspodcastPBFree   Visit our webpage where you can catch up on Current / Past Episodes: www.theoldmanspodcast.com     Contact us at: theoldmanspodcast@gmail.com

Here is my Bluesland radio show from June 6, 2024. Included is an interview with Carl Verheyen is support of his upcoming shows in Washington State soon. Buddy Guy, Joe Cocker, Memphis Minnie and Kansas City Joe, Led Zeppelin, T-Bone Walker and more. See you next Thursday 7-9 PM live on KMRE 88.3 FM. 

Performers include: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey, T-Bone Walker, Ida Mae Mack, Lightnin Hopkins, Blind Willie Johnson and Harmonica Slim. Songs include: Don't Trust Nobody, God Don't Never Change, Big Mama Jump, Howlin Wolf Blue and You Better Believe It.   

Today's show features music performed by Earl Hooker, T-Bone Walker, and Gladys Knight

National Hamburger day.  Entertainment from 1988.  1st quintuplets born, 1st monkeys to survive space flight, 1st indoor swimming pool was in a brothel.  Todays birthdays - Ian Fleming, T-Bone Walker, Gary Stewart, Gladys Knight, John Fogerty, Sandra Locke, Roland Gift, Phil Vassar, Kylie Minogue, Colbie Caillat.  Audie Murphy died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard    http://defleppard.com/I really like hamburgers - The Hungry Food BandOne more try - George MichaelEighteen wheels and a dozen roses - Kathy MatteaEye of the tiger - SurvivorBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent   http://50cent.com/Don't go back to New Orleans - T-Bone WalkerShe's acting single, I'm drinking doubles - Gary StewartMidnight train to Georgia - Gladys Knight & the PipsBad moon rising - Creedance Clearwater RevivalShe drives me crazy - Fine Young CannibalsJust another day in paradise - Phil Vassarlocomotion - Kylie MinogueBubbly - Colbie CaillatExit - Its not love - Dokken     http://dokken.net/

Edition 703 of "Blues is the Truth," curated and presented by the incomparable Ian McHugh, marks a historic moment as it becomes the inaugural show to grace the airwaves of Buddy Guy Radio. As always, McHugh delivers an electrifying blend of blues classics, deep cuts, and emerging talents, promising listeners an unforgettable journey through the soul-stirring landscape of blues music. The episode features the beloved regular segments that fans have come to cherish, including "The Song Remains the Same," where timeless tracks are revisited and celebrated, and "The Title Track Tango," a segment that delves into a pair of albums by spotlighting their titular tracks. Additionally, the revered Paul Michael introduces a standout selection in "Blues Driver," ensuring that each moment of the show is filled with sonic treasures waiting to be unearthed. Buddy Guy's unmistakable touch graces the airwaves with soulful melodies and searing guitar licks, setting the stage for an unforgettable musical odyssey. Among the luminaries featured are Connolly Hayes, Otis Grand, Big Harp George, Jimmie Vaughan, Johnny Guitar Watson, Doug Macleod, The Guv'Nors, T Bone Walker, The Cinelli Brothers, Billy Bragg, Brigitte Purdy, Paul Cook Blues Band featuring Katie Bradley, David Sinclair 4, Long John Baldry, Linsey Alexander, Mississippi Heat, Steve Purcell, Big Mama Thornton, BB King, Richard Townend and the Mighty Bosscats, Travelling Blue Kings, Duke Robillard, Amba Tremain, and the Steady Rollin' Revue. With a lineup as rich and diverse as the blues itself, edition 703 of "Blues is the Truth" is a testament to the genre's enduring power to captivate, inspire, and move audiences of all backgrounds. So, tune in, turn up the volume, and let the blues wash over you in all its raw, unfiltered glory.

Décimo y último capítulo dedicado a recordar y reivindicar las Mod Jazz Series. Estas compilaciones fueron editadas por la escudería Kent Records y manufacturadas por el director del sello, Ady Croasdell, gran conocedor de todos los estilos de jazz o cercanos al jazz que escuchaban los mods británicos de los años 60.Playlist;(sintonía) FREDDIE McCOY “Collard greens”THE PAC KEYS “Dig in”CLARENCE DANIELS and OBIE JESSIE “Hard workin’ girl”GOOGIE RENE COMBO “Bossa baby”ETTA JONES “Nature boy”KING CURTIS “Free for all”ERIC KLOSS “Comin’ home”BILLY LARKIN and HIS ORCHESTRA “That’s a lie”JACKIE IVORY TRIO “Hi heel sneakers”JOHNNY HAMMOND SMITH “Sticks and stones”OTIS SPANN “I’m a dues payin’ man”T-BONE WALKER “Shake it baby”PLAYBOY FIVE “Spoonful”FLOYD WHITE “Another child lost”GATE WESLEY “Do the thing”GENE WALKER “Empire City”EDDIE BRIDGES and HIS LOW RIDERS “Out house”CANDY PHILLIPS “Timber (part 2)”HANK JACOBS “Pushin’ the button of soul”MARK MURPHY “It’s like love”BOBBIE JENKINS QUARTET “What is love”Escuchar audio

Embark on a soulful journey through the heart of the blues with "Blues is the Truth," where host Ian McHugh guides you through an unforgettable musical experience. Joining him once more is the illustrious Paul Michael, who presents another timeless track in his Blues Driver segment. This episode is enriched by the diverse requests of devoted listeners Joe Brabant and David Sinclair, ensuring a tapestry of blues brilliance. Get ready to be enthralled by an extraordinary lineup featuring the likes of George Thorogood, The Reverend Shawn Amos, Betty Padgett, James Carr, Connolly Hayes, Ray Charles, Van Morrison, Doug MacLeod, Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, Misty Blues, Big Harp George, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Pat West, Noe Socha, Kirk Fletcher, The Kokomo Kings, Rick Estrin and the Nightcats, T Bone Walker, Duke Robillard, Petra Bornerova Trio, Boogie Beasts, Deb Ryder, and Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. From searing guitar solos to heartfelt vocals, each artist brings a unique flavor to the blues, reminding us of its enduring power and authenticity. Join us as we delve into the rich tapestry of blues music on "Blues is the Truth."

Tune in to this week's electrifying episode of "Blues is the Truth" with your host Ian McHugh! Get ready for an immersive journey through the heart and soul of blues music, spanning over two hours of pure musical magic. In this week's edition, the legendary Paul Michael takes us on a retro ride with the Blues Driver segment. From the timeless classics of Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys to the contemporary sounds of Otis Grand, Tad Robinson, and British Bluescasting Corporation, the lineup is stacked with talent and passion. Featuring captivating tracks from blues icons like Taj Mahal, T Bone Walker, Freddie King, Otis Rush, alongside modern maestros including Jo Harman, Eric Bibb, Slash, The Cinelli Brothers, and Vaneese Thomas, this episode promises to keep you hooked from start to finish. Join us as we groove to the rhythm of Hubert Dorrigatti, Steady Rolling Revue, Johnny Burgin featuring Anson Fundeburgh, Tim Penn and the Second Line, Boz Skaggs, Bobby Elvin, Cole and Ward, Jimmy Johnson, Mike Zito, Rick Vito, Breezy Rodio, Whitney Shay, and more, while exploring the rich tapestry of blues music that transcends time and space. Don't miss out on this soul-stirring edition of "Blues is the Truth" - where the essence of blues resonates deeply with every note played. Tune in and let the blues set you free!

Today's show features music performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, T-Bone Walker, and Marva Wright

There's going to be a free form mix of sounds this week with some ‘scenes of devastation' as well as some blues and tradition. We'll set the tone with a song that inspired the title lines from The Pine Hill Project and then head into some tradition and some covers that speak in the language of the sacred and secular…from Saturday night at the juke to Sunday morning in the pew. A great mix of sounds from some classic female blues gems from the 1940s like Wea Bea Booze and Ethel Waters. We'll also go down to the crossroads and Deep Elem with the likes of Champion Jack Dupree and T-Bone Walker, some deeper/darker blues from Geeshie Wiley and Blind Lemon Jefferson as well. But we'll also fill the air with the tops in great interpretations from Van Dyke Parks, Willie Watson and Bob Brozman. Join us for some ‘last kind words' from the Rocky Road Blues to James Alley on a Friday morning in West County.

Today's show features music performed by Arthur Crudup and T-Bone Walker

Get ready for a soul-stirring journey through the heart and soul of blues music with the latest edition of "Blues is the Truth," presented by the incomparable Ian McHugh. Joining him in the blues-infused exploration is the charismatic Paul Michael, who takes the wheel in the Blues Driver segment, steering us through the rich landscapes of blues music. This edition is a special treat as it features the incredible talents of the nominees in the UK Blues Awards. Feel the power of the blues with spellbinding tracks from Keb'Mo', Connolly Hayes, Benny Turner, Clarence Spady, Little Walter, Emma Wilson, Rhythm Travellers, Magic Sam, Stevie Watts Organ Trio with Alice Armstrong, Robert Cray Band, Dan Reeder, JJ Grey and Mofro, Connor Selby, Dom Martin, Junior Wells, Guitar Jack Wargo, Al Lehman, T-Bone Walker, Chloe Josephine, Johnny Winter, Philipp Fankhauser, The Della Grants, and the Blues Engineer. Immerse yourself in the raw, emotional energy of these legendary blues artists as they weave tales of love, loss, and the indomitable spirit of the human experience. Ian McHugh and Paul Michael guide you through a sonic landscape where each note is a testament to the enduring power of the blues. Don't miss out on this unforgettable musical journey! Tune in to "Blues is the Truth" and let the blues transport you to a world where the music speaks straight to the soul. It's an experience that will leave you craving for more and reaffirming that, indeed, Blues is the Truth.

Texas Scratch is made up of three born-and-bred Texas guitarists – Jim Suhler from Dallas, Buddy Whittington from Fort Worth and Vince Converse from Houston.  This mighty threesome of big dog guitar slingers takes no prisoners when it comes to red-hot guitar performances, both live and in-studio.This trio of six-string guitar beasts are accompanied on the album by drummer Jeff Simon and bassist Nathaniel Peterson, both fine musicians in their own right.The band's name derives from the term Texas scratch, which is a style of guitar picking (also known as the Carter Scratch) said to have originated by Mother Maybelle Carter back in 1927.Their combined efforts have resulted in a debut album consisting of – obviously -  fiery, passionate guitar licks everywhere you turn, soaked in the blues and kicked in the ass by the blues-rock they all love to play.Some of the song titles on the album alone lets the listener know what they are in for – What the Devil Loves, Trip Hammer, Showdown and Louisiana Cock Fight – give a few clues as to what to expect musically.But the album is far from just a six-string shootout or shredding contest between top gun guitarists; the nine total songs on the album feature seven original songs written by a combination of Suhler, Whittington and Converse with killer arrangements, passionate vocals, tight ensemble playing, and clever lyrics.  One can hear the mutual sense of love and joy for the music in the band's playing and singing together.But, given the level of talent in this band, none of the musical goodness that flows from this album should come as any surprise.Suhler's and Simon's day jobs are longtime members of George Thorogood and the Destroyers…in fact, Simon is an original member of The Destroyers (he co-founded the band with Thorogood in 1973) and Suhler has been a Destroyer since 1999. Suhler is also a founding member of the band Monkey Beat since 1991.Whittington recorded and toured with blues legend John Mayall for 15 years before heading off to an acclaimed solo recording and touring career in 2008 that continues to this day.  Converse made his bones with heavy blues-rock power trio Sunset Heights, touring with acts like Johnny Winter, Peter Green, Fats Domino, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.  A devoted blues musician, he now kicks ass with his band, Vince Converse and Big Brother.  And Nathaniel Peterson shone brightly as a member of Savoy Brown.For one reason or another through the years -- be it music industry woes, conflicting gigs, budget issues, and most recently, the pandemic -- this hot blues album never got its release. That didn't stop the stories from spreading throughout the music world about what a tremendous album this was.  We're thrilled to be the label that finally releases this legendary album,” says Quarto Valley Records President & CEO Bruce Quarto. “Texas plays such an integral role in the history of blues music. So many great blues musicians hail from the Lonestar State  - Freddie King, Lightnin' Hopkins, T Bone Walker, Johnny and Edgar Winter, Stevie Rae Vaughn and Billy Gibbons -- just to name a few. It's only fitting that these three stellar blues shredders, Jim, Buddy and Vince, while a part of that history in their own right, join the list as Texas Scratch!”  I'd Rather be Lucky Than Good - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIASP8HwN_0  Ain't Got the Scratch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMDB8k14jhs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Air Week: December 4-10, 2023 T-Bone Walker Drop a nickel in the ol' Rockola Juke to hear one of the best selling and most influential bluesmen and guitarists of all-time, T-Bone Walker. This week's show looks at how T-Bone's immense guitar talent developed from his first recordings in the early 1940s to his breakthrough after […]

Today's show features music performed by T-Bone Walker and Bo Diddley

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

Whether thrilling fans with T-Bone Walker style or sweet slide guitar, Jimmy Adler delivers great performances in a professional manner and he's easy to work with. Jimmy Adler has released 5 CDs. The 4th, Grease Alley was recorded and produced by Blues Music Award winner Kid Andersen at the incomparable Greaseland Studio in San Jose, CA. It has created a buzz and has garnered high praise from DJs, fans and promoters: “Grease Alley is a real pleasure, both vocally and instrumentally” and “This is Jimmy's best work to date” are some of the comments that have been delivered. Featured music from: The Sneaky Heat Missiles, Overload in Stereo, Jared Barry, Jimmy Adler, Warehouse 11, Billy the Kid and The Regulators, KGBInterview Segment 1 with Jimmy Adler What is your favorite thing about the Pittsburgh Blues scene and what do you think needs worked on? Tell us about Blue Mondays at the Bridge Music Bar. What song writer would you like to sit down with and write a song? Can you pinpoint the moment that you knew you had to be a blues musician? Please tell us about the song, “What I've Done”. Who is your Dave Grohl? What is the best pizza that you've had because you are a musician? Please tell us about Capa. What is your favorite thing about being on stage? What is coming up next? Interview Segment 2Interview Segment 3

National hamburger day. Entertainment from 1963. 1st monkey in space, 1st quintuplets, 1st indoor swimming pool. Todays birthdays - Ian Fleming, T-Bone Walker, Gary Stewart, Gladys Knight, John Fogerty, Roland Cliff, Phil Vassar, Kylie Minogue, Colbie Caillat.

The Manfreds start their 60th Anniversary Tour in September with Paul, Mike D'Abo and Tom McGuinnness in the line-up. He talks to us here about the first and best shows he's seen and …   … being told “there's a soul/R&B singer in Birmingham and if he ever comes to London you're finished”. … how Brian Jones “opened up a secret door”. ... “stealing from Tennyson” for the lyrics of 5-4-3-2-1. … being with Mick Jagger and Long John Baldry watching Alexis Korner calling up guest “shouters” and all thinking “pick me!” … what T-Bone Walker taught him. … seeing Lonnie Donegan at the Kings Theatre, Southampton, and the absurdity of doing ‘It Takes A Worried Man' in your skiffle band when you're only 15. … Bob Dylan at Earl's Court. … the earth-shifting impact of the Modern Jazz Quartet. … and the early adventures of ‘Blues Boy' Jones.   Tickets for the Manfreds' 60 Anniversary tour here …https://myticket.co.uk/artists/the-manfredsTickets for Word In The Park in London on June 3rd here!: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-happy-return-of-word-in-the-park-tickets-576193870377Subscribe 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.

The Manfreds start their 60th Anniversary Tour in September with Paul, Mike D'Abo and Tom McGuinnness in the line-up. He talks to us here about the first and best shows he's seen and …   … being told “there's a soul/R&B singer in Birmingham and if he ever comes to London you're finished”. … how Brian Jones “opened up a secret door”. ... “stealing from Tennyson” for the lyrics of 5-4-3-2-1. … being with Mick Jagger and Long John Baldry watching Alexis Korner calling up guest “shouters” and all thinking “pick me!” … what T-Bone Walker taught him. … seeing Lonnie Donegan at the Kings Theatre, Southampton, and the absurdity of doing ‘It Takes A Worried Man' in your skiffle band when you're only 15. … Bob Dylan at Earl's Court. … the earth-shifting impact of the Modern Jazz Quartet. … and the early adventures of ‘Blues Boy' Jones.   Tickets for the Manfreds' 60 Anniversary tour here …https://myticket.co.uk/artists/the-manfredsTickets for Word In The Park in London on June 3rd here!: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-happy-return-of-word-in-the-park-tickets-576193870377Subscribe 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.

The Manfreds start their 60th Anniversary Tour in September with Paul, Mike D'Abo and Tom McGuinnness in the line-up. He talks to us here about the first and best shows he's seen and …   … being told “there's a soul/R&B singer in Birmingham and if he ever comes to London you're finished”. … how Brian Jones “opened up a secret door”. ... “stealing from Tennyson” for the lyrics of 5-4-3-2-1. … being with Mick Jagger and Long John Baldry watching Alexis Korner calling up guest “shouters” and all thinking “pick me!” … what T-Bone Walker taught him. … seeing Lonnie Donegan at the Kings Theatre, Southampton, and the absurdity of doing ‘It Takes A Worried Man' in your skiffle band when you're only 15. … Bob Dylan at Earl's Court. … the earth-shifting impact of the Modern Jazz Quartet. … and the early adventures of ‘Blues Boy' Jones.   Tickets for the Manfreds' 60 Anniversary tour here …https://myticket.co.uk/artists/the-manfredsTickets for Word In The Park in London on June 3rd here!: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-happy-return-of-word-in-the-park-tickets-576193870377Subscribe 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.

For two decades, Binky Griptite was the guitarist, emcee and hype man for the Dap-Kings, backing the mighty Sharon Jones. These days he's leading his own band. The Binky Griptite Orchestra is an old school rhythm and blues outfit in the vein of T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan. Their album “Got Up and Walked” will be out soon. So will another album Binky produced, by singer-songwriter Brendan O'Hara. He'll also be at SXSW this month, performing in a tribute concert to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Today he joins us to talk about his current projects, the story behind the Dap-Kings, working with Sharon Jones and the singer Lee Fields, recording with Janet Jackson, growing up in Milwaukee, deejaying and more.   Brooklyn news and views you can use: bkmag.com Email: hello@bkmag.com Follow along on Facebook: Brooklyn Magazine Twitter: @brooklynmag Instagram: @brooklynmagazine Follow Brian Braiker on Twitter: @slarkpope

On this Richard Bennett interview, fantastic stories about working with Mark Knopfler, Neil Diamond, Billy Joel and Marty Stuart… the making of his 7th solo LP, Tall Tale Tunes, and how this got put together, why he doesn't like playing all the instruments on his records, how song ideas come to him. The REAL TRUTH behind how he gets his songs and arrangements to sound so pretty, difference for him being a sideman and playing his own material, most fun he's ever had playing music, and why it's “Never going to be as good as it is in your head…” LOADS of fun and laughs, great convo with a first class guy Cool Guitar, Music & ELG T-Shirts!: http://www.GuitarMerch.com   Richard Bennett has been a studio and touring guitarist with Mark Knopfler, since 1994... and he spent 17 years & 12 LPs before that in the same role with Neil Diamond. He's also produced Neil Diamond, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Jo-El Sonnier, Marty Stuart & others. And here's a very small sample of the people he's played with since his first session in 1968: Ringo Starr, Lonnie Donegan, Conway Twitty, Sammy Davis Jr, Johnny Mathis, Roseanne Cash, Ray Price, Waylon Jennings, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, the Four Tops, Barbara Streisand, Chubby Checker, Glen Campbell, Duane Eddy, T-Bone Walker, Billy Joel, Helen Reddy, Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, hundreds of others, and about a dozen movie soundtracks including The Wrecking Crew documentary and one of my favorite movies, Westworld Richard just released his 7th solo instrumental LP, called Tall Tales Tunes. The record's beautiful with Richard's finely crafted melodies and arrangements, and his ace guitar playing leading the charge but never overpowering the song. Subscribe & Website:  https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe Support this show: http://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support

Today's show features music performed by T-Bone Walker and Steve Cropper

The 40s and 50s post-war migration brought tough working conditions in Chicago which offered stability over the miserable sharecropper existence of the Delta.  Both were fodder for the some of the very best in classic blues. The production lines of Detroit and other cities on the Eastern seaboard were models of a different kind of work that the Industrial Age had to offer. But the West Coast wasn't the place you'd expect to find the blues: shipyards, agriculture, and urban sprawl would aggregate so many different styles that rhythm and blues was a fusion of the many different sensibilities that were brought with both performer and listener alike westward from east of the Mississippi. Having the hub of the world of entertainment in the Southland didn't hurt either. We'll be browsing the sounds of some of the greats: McCracklin, Fulson, Otis, Mayfield, and (of course) T-Bone Walker in the Deeper Roots morning show today. West Coast Blues led to blues-based rock in large part because of the exposure to the many different styles of the mid-century blues bands and solo rockers. West Coast Blues Roots is the name of our show this morning on KOWS-LP Occidental.

Hall of Fame guitarist, singer and songwriter Steve Miller talks about the early lessons he learned from Les Paul and T Bone Walker, sitting in on an impromptu recording session with The Beatles and performing with greats like Chuck Berry, Sly Stone and more.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's show features music performed by Billie Holiday and T-Bone Walker

La cantante y guitarrista Alba Blanco lidera el trío La Perra Blanco. Esta gaditana se ha convertido en la figura emergente más significativa del rocknroll años 50. Baja a presentarnos su último EP, “Won’t you come on” (Folc Records), y a regalarnos una sesión con algunos de sus artistas favoritos, mirando hacia las raíces de la música rockabilly. Playlist; LA PERRA BLANCO “Won’t you come on” LA PERRA BLANCO “Rock me baby” LA PERRA BLANCO “Nothing is worst (than this pain in my heart)” T BONE WALKER “Two bones and a pick” DOC and MERLE WATSON “Honey babe blues” BILL MONROE “Southern flavour” HANK WILLIAMS “My son calls another man daddy” CHARLES MINGUS “Freedom” SAM COOKE and THE SOUL STIRRERS “Just another day” HANK MOBLEY featuring LEE MORGAN “The morning after” BILLIE HOLIDAY “Strange fruit” LOS DESTROZAMITOS y MEI POP “Como una crema” LA PERRA BLANCO “What’s wrong with you” Escuchar audio

T-Bone Walker Today's show features music performed by T-Bone Walker and Bo Diddley

Today's show features music performed by Jimmy Rogers and T-Bone Walker

Welcome to Roadcase!!  We are super psyched to have the extraordinary and multi-faceted artist Seth Walker on the show. Seth is a true veteran of the industry, and his 11th studio effort, I Hope I Know, produced by Jano Rix of The Wood Brothers just came out on May 20. Seth is also an accomplished artist, poet and now a published author with his first book entitled Your Van Is On Fire (The miscellaneous meanderings of a musician),  a memoir of his life as an artist. Filled with his own illustrations and poetic musings, Your Van Is On Fire serves as a roadmap of a life on the road as Seth has successfully followed his Wanderlust muse over the course of his 30-year career.  We talk about Seth's unique upbringing in a communal living situation in North Carolina as well as his philosophy on just what drives this truly unique artist. Seth is a gem of a human and a stellar guest whom we're overjoyed to welcome into the Roadcase community. So hop on the Roadcase bus as we wander about within the creative world of Seth Walker.  It's gonna be a great ride!For more information: https://linktr.ee/roadcasepod and https://www.roadcasepod.comContact: info@roadcasepod.comTheme music:  "Eugene (Instrumental)" by Waltzer

On this episode of Blues In The Basement, Cooki B and Malvin highlight West Coast Blues as we hear from artists like T-Bone Walker and Floyd Dixon. Make sure to tune into this brand new episode on the KUDZUKIAN app and kudzukian.com.  

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of  "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend,  who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a  few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going.  After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style".  This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time  sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech.  He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little

Welcome to Year 2, Episode 1 of Needed Time! This year explores the subject of personal journeys and the lessons and truths they've revealed. Here in week 1 Will and Rob interview Minnesota Gopher basketball legend and Minneapolis community activist and leader Al Nuness. Al's fascinating insights on living a meaning-filled life are accompanied by age-old musical faves from T-Bone Walker and Son House -- served up with much love by the Needed Time House Band! Come join us on this much-needed trek through the season of Lent as we gather around compelling stories, beautiful pieces of writing, and stirring music...

Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm a Fool" by Dino, Desi, and Billy. 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/ NB an early version of this was uploaded, in which I said "episode 136" rather than 137 and "flattened ninth" at one point rather than "ninth". I've fixed that in a new upload, which is otherwise unchanged. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I relied mostly on fur books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. Black and Proud: The Life of James Brown by Geoff Brown is a more traditional objective biography. And Douglas Wolk's 33 1/3 book on Live at the Apollo is a fascinating, detailed, look at that album. This box set is the best collection of Brown's work there is, but is out of print. This two-CD set has all the essential hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Introduction, the opening of Live at the Apollo. "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? [Audience cheers, and gives out another cheer with each musical sting sting] Thank you, and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you in this particular time, national and international known as the hardest working man in showbusiness, Man that sing "I'll Go Crazy"! [sting] "Try Me" [sting] "You've Got the Power" [sting] "Think" [sting], "If You Want Me" [sting] "I Don't Mind" [sting] "Bewildered" [sting] million-dollar seller "Lost Someone" [sting], the very latest release, "Night Train" [sting] Let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" [sting] Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames"] In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely soundproofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor, and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made. It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence. When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard -- just total silence. Instead, he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one. Cage was confused by this -- why hadn't he heard the silence? The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself -- the high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system. Cage later said about this, "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece, 4'33, in which a performer attempts not to make any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is usually described as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but it actually isn't -- the whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music. Here is where I would normally excerpt the piece, but of course for 4'33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing. But I can excerpt another piece Cage wrote. Because on October the twenty-fourth 1962 he wrote a sequel to 4'33, a piece he titled 0'00, but which is sometimes credited as "4'33 no. 2". He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichiyanagi and his estranged wife Yoko Ono, reads as follows: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening. But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action performed with maximum amplification and no feedback: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] When we left James Brown, almost a hundred episodes ago, he had just had his first R&B number one, with "Try Me", and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, the Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child. But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a doo-wop group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that, nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and are still remembered more than sixty years later, but mostly as a footnote. Today we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time and in the next episode on Brown are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would be unimaginably different. And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of "Try Me" in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organisation. The first was that this was -- at least according to Brown -- when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency run by a man named Ben Bart, who before starting his own company had spent much of the 1940s working for Moe Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom and manager of the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast. Bart had started his own agency in 1945, and had taken the Ink Spots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens, one of the first bird groups: [Excerpt: The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long"] In the fifties, Bart had become closely associated with King Records, the label to which Brown and the Famous Flames were signed. A quick aside here -- Brown's early records were released on Federal Records, and later they switched to being released on King, but Federal was a subsidiary label for King, and in the same way that I don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamla and Motown, or Phillips and Sun, I'll just refer to King throughout. Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R&B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, the "5" Royales, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to some sources, the Famous Flames signed with Universal Attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place. Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they'd proved themselves on the charts. But everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority and taking an active interest in his career. Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner, to devote himself full-time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost father-son relationship. With Bart behind them, the Famous Flames started getting better gigs, and a much higher profile on the chitlin circuit. But around this time there was another change that would have an even more profound effect. Up to this point, the Famous Flames had been like almost every other vocal group playing the chitlin' circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians. There were exceptions, but in general vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other act on a bill -- either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour, or a house band at the venue they were playing at who would perform with every act that played that venue. There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material. This was, for the most part, how the Famous Flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days. But now they got their own backing band, centred on J.C. Davis as sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odum on bass. Musicians would come and go, but this was the core original lineup of what became the James Brown Band. Other musicians who played with them in the late fifties were horn players Alfred Corley and Roscoe Patrick, guitarist Les Buie, and bass player Hubert Perry, while keyboard duties would be taken on by Fats Gonder, although James Brown and Bobby Byrd would both sometimes play keyboards on stage. At this point, as well, the lineup of the Famous Flames became more or less stable. As we discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original lineup of the Famous Flames had left en masse when it became clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the Famous Flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group. Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after "Try Me" had come out, but before they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them. He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the Fabulous Flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like "Do You Remember", are quite good examples of their type: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember?"] Brown pulled together a new lineup of Famous Flames, featuring two of the originals. Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier, and stayed when Brown sacked the rest of the second lineup of Flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stallworth. And making his second return to the group was Bobby Byrd, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again. Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these lineup changes was not with the Famous Flames, or even under his own name. Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick. Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a band leader and arranger. He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands, and musicians he'd admired growing up like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition. Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact that he was one of the few R&B musicians with his own tight band. The story goes that Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the R&B audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold. Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown -- it seems that at every point in Brown's career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value, Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong. This is such a pattern -- it apparently happened with "Please Please Please", Brown's first hit, *and* "Try Me", Brown's first R&B number one, and we'll see it happen again later in this episode -- that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Syd Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over twenty years, putting out some of the best R&B and country records from everyone from Moon Mullican to Wynonie Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed he was consistently making the most boneheaded, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable. But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" was released on Dade Records as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown's so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes"] That made the R&B top ten,  and I've seen reports that Brown and his band even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans, before Syd Nathan realised his mistake, and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name "James Brown presents HIS BAND", starting with a cover of Bill Doggett's "Hold It": [Excerpt: James Brown Presents HIS BAND, "Hold It"] After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the Famous Flames also came back from another mini dry spell for hits, with the first top twenty R&B hit for the new lineup, "I'll Go Crazy", which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top forty hit, "Think!": [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think!"] The success of "Think!" is at least in part down to Bobby Byrd, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and (often uncredited) co-writer and co-producer until the mid-seventies. After leaving the Flames, and before rejoining them, Byrd had toured for a while with his own group, but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown. King Records' pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less-than-ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Byrd to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip. While working there, Byrd also worked as a song doctor. His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos, and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists, to make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the "5" Royales or Little Willie John or whoever, and Byrd had done this for "Think", which had originally been recorded by the "5" Royales, whose leader, Lowman Pauling, had written it: [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Think"] Byrd had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona. It's notable for example that the Royales sing "How much of all your happiness have I really claimed?/How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember which was my fault/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” But in Brown's version this becomes “How much of your happiness can I really claim?/How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember just what is wrong/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think"] In Brown's version, nothing is his fault, he's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand, but she needs to think about it and she'll see that he's right, while in the Royales' version they're acknowledging that they're at fault, that they've done wrong, but they didn't *only* do wrong and maybe she should think about that too. It's only a couple of words' difference, but it changes the whole tenor of the song. "Think" would become the Famous Flames' first top forty hit on the pop charts, reaching number thirty-three. It went top ten on the R&B charts, and between 1959 and 1963 Brown and the Flames would have fifteen top-thirty R&B hits, going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits to being consistent hit-makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R&B charts, and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R&B band in the world. This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band. Many band-leaders in the R&B world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing. As Bobby Byrd put it, "Many band leaders do it but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us and we were all for it ‘cos we didn't want to miss nothing. We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise and everything. Originally, the fines was only between James and us, The Famous Flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troupe. It was still a good idea because anybody joining The James Brown Revue had to know that they couldn't be messing up, and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had." But Brown went much further with these fines than any other band leader, and would also impose them arbitrarily, and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music. One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage. If a band member missed a note, or a dance step, or missed a cue, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second. To the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined five dollars. Multiple flashes meant multiples of five dollars fined. Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band, which they had to learn, To quote Bobby Byrd again: "James didn't want anybody else to know what we was doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins. There was a certain spin he'd do and if he didn't do the complete spin you'd know it was time to go over here. Certain screams would instigate chord changes, but mostly it was numbers. James would call out football numbers, that's where we got that from. Thirty-nine — Sixteen —Fourteen — Two — Five — Three — Ninety-eight, that kind of thing. Number thirty-nine was always the change into ‘Please, Please, Please'. Sixteen is into a scream and an immediate change, not bam-bam but straight into something else. If he spins around and calls thirty-six, that means we're going back to the top again. And the forty-two, OK, we're going to do this verse and then bow out, we're leaving now. It was amazing." This, or something like this, is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders, a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader, and Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system. It requires the players to subordinate themselves utterly to the whim of the band leader, but also requires a band leader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member and how they are likely to respond to a cue. When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show. The Famous Flames shows soon became a full-on revue, with other artists joining the bill and performing with Brown's band. From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer. The first of these was Sugar Pie DeSanto, a blues singer who had been discovered (and given her stage name) by Johnny Otis, but DeSanto soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on Chess records, with hits like "Soulful Dress": [Excerpt: Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress"] After DeSanto left, she was replaced by  Bea Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing. Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like "You Got the Power": [Excerpt: James Brown and Bea Ford, "You Got the Power"] However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back. Tex's response was to record this: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "You Keep Her"] Ford's replacement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry in the Chantels for touring purposes when Landry had quit touring to have a baby. Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later rerecord himself with some success: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "I Found You"] Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band. The last shows she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown into the next level of stardom. Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them. Syd Nathan, as usual, disagreed. In his view the market for R&B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles they could play in one place. Nobody would buy a James Brown live album. So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre, and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money. This was a week-long engagement, with shows running all day every day -- Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show. This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the sixties started -- the month the Beatles released their first single, the Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month. By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run where it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62. Douglas Wolk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted, which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October the twenty-fourth, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances. The album only records the headline performance, but Wolk describes what a full show by the James Brown Revue at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes. The show would start with the "James Brown Orchestra" -- the backing band. They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them: [Excerpt: James Brown Presents His Band, "Night Flying"] At various points during the set, Brown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums. After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs. This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cooke, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows, but the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released "Lookin' For a Love": [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love"] Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss' child, to sing her few numbers: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try"] Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels who'd had a run of R&B hits the previous year, promoting his new single "I'm On My Way to Atlanta": [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta"] After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] After Burke came a change of pace -- the vaudeville comedian Pigmeat Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches. We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week, and Markham's album "The World's Greatest Clown" was a result of these shows and released on Chess Records: [Excerpt: Pigmeat Markham, "Go Ahead and Sing"] And after Markham would come the main event. Fats Gonder, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode -- and backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week (according to Wolk -- I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown's organisation in 1960), was listening closely. He would soon go on to take over the role of MC, and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonder had at every show until Brown's death forty-four years later. The live album is an astonishing tour de force, showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal. It's even more astonishing when you realise two things. The first is that this was *before* any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown -- before "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "Sex Machine", or "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" or "Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" or "Funky Drummer" or "Get Up Offa That Thing". It's still an *unformed* James Brown, only six years into a fifty-year career, and still without most of what made him famous. The other thing is, as Wolk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from this time, the microphone distorts all the time, because Brown is singing so loud. Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded. This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself: [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] The album was released a few months later, and proved Syd Nathan's judgement utterly, utterly, wrong. It became the thirty-second biggest selling album of 1963 -- an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market. The album spent sixty-six weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts -- the pop album charts, not R&B charts. There wasn't an R&B albums chart until 1965, and Live at the Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the R&B albums market. It was such a popular album in 1963 that DJs took to playing the whole album -- breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it. It turned Brown from merely a relatively big R&B star into a megastar. But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful than they had been in the previous few years -- possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career. Johnny Terry quit the Famous Flames, to join the Drifters, becoming part of the lineup that recorded "Under the Boardwalk" and "Saturday Night at the Movies". Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite!, which is generally considered a little lacklustre in comparison to the Apollo album. There were other changes to the lineup as well as Terry leaving. Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band, but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother, Maceo, along with him. Maceo soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band, and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits. The first big hit that the Parkers played on was released as by James Brown and his Orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Out of Sight"] The Famous Flames did sing on the B-side of that, a song called "Maybe the Last Time", which was ripped off from the same Pops Staples song that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single. But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio -- from that point on, the Famous Flames were purely a live act, although Bobby Byrd, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records. The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that "Out of Sight" was released on Smash Records, to which Brown -- but not the Flames -- had signed a little while earlier. Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records' incompetence, and had found what he and his advisors thought was a loophole in his contract. Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury, as a musician. He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his new label by recording "Caldonia", a cover of a song by his idol Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Caldonia"] Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash -- but by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label. The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time. While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience -- the TAMI Show: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)"] We've mentioned the TAMI show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail. It was a filmed concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Lesley Gore, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, the Supremes, and, as the two top acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Rather oddly, the point of the TAMI Show wasn't the music as such. Rather it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process. Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive. The way they used to be recorded was a process known as telerecording in the UK and kinescoping in the US, and that was about as crude as it's possible to get -- you'd get a film camera, point it at a TV showing the programme you wanted to record, and film the TV screen. There was specialist equipment to do this, but that was all it actually did. Almost all surviving TV from the fifties and sixties -- and even some from the seventies -- was preserved by this method rather than by videotape. Even after videotape started being used to make the programmes, there were differing standards and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a programme in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a telerecording. But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens? If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen, you get a blurry, low-resolution, mess -- or at least you did with the 525-line TV screens that were used in the US at the time. So a company named Electronovision came into the picture, for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema. Rather than shoot in 525-line resolution, their cameras shot in 819-line resolution -- super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape with appropriate modifications for the equipment. But that meant that when you kinescoped the production, it was nearly twice the resolution that a standard US TV broadcast would be, and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema. The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process -- TV cameras were much more useful for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful. And so Bill Roden, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen show, one of the big variety shows, second only to Ed Sullivan, and who would soon go on to direct Hullaballoo. Roden asked Binder to make a concert film, shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures (the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often). Binder had contacts with West Coast record labels, and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation, which managed Jan and Dean. He also had been in touch with a promoter who was putting on a package tour of British musicians. So they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from "all over the world", as the theme song put it -- by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities. For those acts who didn't have their own bands -- or whose bands needed augmenting -- there was an orchestra, centred around members of the Wrecking Crew, conducted by Jack Nitzsche, and the Blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required. Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song. James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show except for the Barbarians, who are now best-known for their appearances on the Nuggets collection of relatively obscure garage rock singles, and whose biggest hit, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" only went to number fifty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] The Barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line "You're either a girl or you come from Liverpool" -- which was where the Rolling Stones came from. Or at least, it was where Americans seemed to think they came from given both that song, and the theme song of the TAMI show, written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, which sang about “the Rolling Stones from Liverpool”, and also referred to Brown as "the king of the blues": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World"] But other than the Barbarians, the TAMI show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late fifties and early sixties could be found in one place -- there was the Merseybeat of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakotas, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it, the fifties rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Gerry and the Pacemakers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry and Gerry and the Pacemakers: "Maybellene"] And there was the Brill Building pop of Lesley Gore, the British R&B of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motown acts, with Brown the other representative of soul on the bill. But the billing was a sore point. James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him -- though other accounts say that the Stones were equally insistent that they *must* be the headliners. It was a difficult decision, because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last. Most people talking about the event, including most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the Stones didn't have to follow Brown, as there was a recording break between acts and they weren't even playing to the same audience -- though others have disputed that quite vigorously. But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras. I say its capture was miraculous because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand. But according to Steve Binder -- though all the accounts of the show are contradictory -- Brown refused to do a rehearsal -- so even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use. This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance -- Brown is a whirlwind of activity, moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson, one of his big influences, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels. The full performance is easily findable online, and is well worth seeking out. But still, just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show)] The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, unable to imagine following that -- though when they did, the audience response was fine: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around"] Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with his payday from the TAMI Show, given that as well as his own performance the Stones did one of his songs, as did Gerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier, and the Beach Boys did "Surfin' USA" for which he had won sole songwriting credit. After the TAMI Show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing, and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style. He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly sixty years later. Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in early 1965 a court reached a ruling -- yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records. As an instrumentalist. But Brown *was* signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for them, and only for them. So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material -- he had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records. His first new record, released as by "James Brown" rather than the earlier billings of "James Brown and his Orchestra" or "James Brown and the Famous Flames", was for King, and was almost a remake of "Out of Sight", his hit for Smash Records. But even so, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" was a major step forward, and is often cited as the first true funk record. This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band. Jimmy Nolen had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker, and had switched to playing guitar. He was discovered as a guitarist by the bluesman Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with "Tin Pan Alley": [Excerpt: Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley"] Wilson had brought Nolen to LA, where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety of bandleaders. His first recording came with Monte Easter on Aladdin Records: [Excerpt: Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening"] After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself. At this point, Nolen was just one of many West Coast blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by T-Bone Walker -- he was competing with Pete "Guitar" Lewis, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them. But he was still making some influential records. His version of "After Hours", for example, released under his own name on Federal Records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolen's arrangement: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours"] Nolen had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release. In the mid-fifties, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolen, for Otis' Dig Records label, but they weren't released until decades later: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive"] But when Otis had a falling out with his longtime guitar player Pete "Guitar" Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolen to replace him. It's Nolen who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late fifties, like "Casting My Spell": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell"] And of course Otis' biggest hit "Willie and the Hand Jive": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] Nolen left Otis after a few years, and spent the early sixties mostly playing in scratch bands backing blues singers, and not recording. It was during this time that Nolen developed the style that would revolutionise music. The style he developed was unique in several different ways. The first was in Nolen's choice of chords. We talked last week about how Pete Townshend's guitar playing became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords. Nolen went the other way -- while his voicings often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with *more* notes than a standard chord. As we discussed last week, in most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads -- the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale, so you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G sharp, and B: [Excerpt: E major chord] It's also fairly common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh, so an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B, and D: [Excerpt: E7 chord] But Nolen built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords. Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant. They consist of the first, third, fifth, flattened seventh, *and* ninth of a scale, so an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D, and F sharp: [Excerpt: E9 chord] Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord *and* at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note, so an E major and B minor chord at the same time: [Demonstrates Emajor, B minor, E9] It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare. Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967 Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song "Ode to Billie Joe" around a D9 chord, barely ever moving off it: [Excerpt: Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe"] That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for -- because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it. The record we're looking at, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", actually has three chords in it -- it's basically a twelve-bar blues, like "Out of Sight" was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords -- but as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs with no chord changes at all, just with Nolen playing a single ninth chord throughout. There's a possibly-apocryphal story, told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolen's replacement many years later, Brown asked "Can you play an E ninth chord?" "Yes, of course" came the reply. "But can you play an E ninth chord *all night*?" The reason Brown asked this, if he did, is that playing like Nolen is *extremely* physically demanding. Because the other thing about Nolen's style is that he was an extremely percussive player. In his years backing blues musicians, he'd had to play with many different drummers, and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers. So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken-scratching, based on the Bo Diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent, semiquaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to. Other times he'd just play single, jagged-sounding, chords to accentuate the beat. He used guitars with single-coil pickups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the midrange, so the sound would cut through no matter what. As well as playing full-voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed, giving a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring. In short, the sound he got was this: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] And that is the sound that became funk guitar. If you listen to Jimmy Nolen's playing on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", that guitar sound -- chicken scratched ninth chords -- is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on. It's not Nolen's guitar playing in its actual final form -- that wouldn't come until he started using wah wah pedals, which weren't mass produced until early 1967 -- but it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk. The original studio recording of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" actually sounds odd if you listen to it now -- it's slower than the single, and lasts almost seven minutes: [Excerpt: James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)"] But for release as a single, it was sped up a semitone, a ton of reverb was added, and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes. The result was an obvious hit single: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Syd Nathan, who as you'll have already predicted by now didn't like the song. Indeed according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor. But Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point, not only giving him his first R&B number one since "Try Me" seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before. He'd had the odd top thirty or even top twenty pop single in the past, but now he was in the top ten, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier. Brown's audience went from being medium-sized crowds of almost exclusively Black people with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated, audience. Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector and the whole Motown stable were overlooked in favour of the big winners for that year Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Kerr Singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees "In the Midnight Hour", "My Girl", "Shotgun" by Junior Walker, and "Shake" by Sam Cooke. From this point on, Syd Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released. After nine years of being the hardest working man in showbusiness, James Brown had now become the Godfather of Soul, and his real career had just begun.

Steve Miller didn't expect to become a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer with hit songs that stand the test of time, like The Joker and Fly Like An Eagle. He was just a kid from Wisconsin who loved the Blues and wound up with teachers like T-Bone Walker and his godfather Les Paul. Steve tells Marc how he got his first breaks in clubs run by the Chicago Mafia, how he learned an important lesson from Paul McCartney, and how he discovered a lost 1977 concert performance which he's finally releasing.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast.