Podcast appearances and mentions of Tom Paxton

For a half dozen years beginning in the late 1990s, The Flood always greeted March's arrival with an annual road trip into the mountains. Providing an evening of music, jokes and stories, the band would entertain a roomful of visiting volunteers, kindly students who had come more than 600 miles from Milwaukee's Marquette University to use their spring break helping with assorted post-winter chores around the little mining town of Rhodell on Tams Mountain about 20 miles south of Beckley.As reported here earlier, from 1997 to 2002 The Flood's original three amigos — Joe Dobbs, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen — shared this weird, wonderful way to celebrate the coming of spring. To read more about these Tams Mountain adventures, click here.But, Hey, This is About a Song…Each year, party hostess Martha Thaxton never failed to ask the guys to play one particular tune before they left for their two-hour journey back to Huntington. It was a song that seemed to speak to Martha's own rambling soul as a die-hard folkie, a beloved Tom Paxton composition from his 1964 debut album for Elektra Records.“I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound” was a song Dave and Charlie knew well — they had played it with Roger Samples back in the old Bowen Bash days — so they were happy to dust it off for Martha and her visiting good samaritans.In the past 60 years Paxton's song has been recorded by everyone from The Mitchell Trio and The Kingston Trio to Tiny Tim and Dion (no, really!), from The Country Gentlemen and Country Joe to Doc Watson and Nanci Griffith.But surely the most touching rendition was Johnny Cash's recording of the song in his final session in February 2010.In a recent interview, Paxton noted that Cash used to come in The Gaslight back in the early 60s “in what we now know was his worst period. “He was skinny as a rail because of all the pills he was doing. He had not had his renaissance yet. But he was a gentle man. He was a direct man and he took you as you were. I just liked this man.”Paxton said he was “absolutely thrilled … to hear him sing the song. That's just a once in a lifetime kind of thrill.”Elijah Wald Blazed the TrailSpeaking of being thrilled, members of The Flood's crack research department are always overjoyed whenever they discover the blazed trails and rambling footprints of the incomparable Elijah Wald on some musical terrain they've come to explore.For nine years now, Wald's online “Songbiography” has been his musical memoir, giving history and personal reflection on some of his favorite songs, which often turn out to be Flood favorites too. Elijah's site was barely a month old when he took up “I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound.”It is a tune he loved as a young man, but, he writes, he couldn't “help noticing that Paxton himself got married back when he was writing these songs, and the marriage lasted, and he moved out to the country and raised a family, and all in all has had one of the most settled and stable lives of anyone on the folk scene.“It's as if he actually meant the last verse, where he sings that anyone who sees the ramblin' boy goin' by and wants to be like him should just ‘nail your shoes to the kitchen floor, lace 'em up and bar the door/Thank your stars for the roof that's over you.'”In retrospect, Wald said, “I think it's a nice touch that the singer keeps bemoaning his sad ‘n' ramblin' ways, but it's the girl, rather than him, who leaves on the morning train.”Our Take on the TuneSo this is an evergreen song, and that word has special meaning in The Flood band room. It is reserved for tunes that are timeless. This Tom Paxton classic might be 60 years old, but it feels it could have been written last week — or, well, a century ago. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

 LEE GLICKSTEIN, author, BE SEEN NOW,  Inspiring Insights into Being a Fearless Speaker how to take your communication skills to a much deeper and higher level   TOM PAXTON, singer songwriter,   Tom wrote, The Last Thing On My Mind, Bottle OfWine, The Marvelous Toy Tom's songs have been recorded by, BOB DYLAN, PETE SEEGER, JUDY COLLINS, DOLLY PARTON, JOHNNY CASH,  WILLIE NELSON  and MARIANNE FAITHFUL  

This is our unabridged interview with Tom Paxton. In the 1960s, during the folk music revival in a neighborhood of New York City called Greenwich Village, a small cafe called the Gaslight hosted many singer-songwriters who were up-and-coming at the time. You might know some of their names, like Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Among the regulars there was Tom Paxton, who, 60 years and 50 albums later, is still writing and performing folk songs that bear witness to profound societal truths. In this episode, hear from Tom what it was like to perform during those days, what role folk music plays in stirring up the status quo, and thoughts on vulnerability, notoriety, grief, an Show Notes Resources mentioned this episode: Tom's Website Doc Watson and Dolly Parton - Merlefest 2001 Similar NSE episodes: Amy Grant: Fame, Vulnerability, and Staying Grounded Martin Sheen: Actor and Activist Drew Holcomb and Audrey Assad: Vulnerable Art Transcript of Abridged Interview Want more NSE? JOIN NSE+ Today! Our subscriber only community with bonus episodes designed specifically to help you live a good life, ad-free listening, and discounts on live shows Subscribe to episodes: Apple | Spotify | Amazon | Google | YouTubeFollow Us: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTubeFollow Lee: Instagram | TwitterJoin our Email List: nosmallendeavor.com See Privacy Policy: Privacy Policy Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: Tokens Media, LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

In the 1960s, during the folk music revival in a neighborhood of New York City called Greenwich Village, a small cafe called the Gaslight hosted many singer-songwriters who were up-and-coming at the time. You might know some of their names, like Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Among the regulars there was Tom Paxton, who, 60 years and 50 albums later, is still writing and performing folk songs that bear witness to profound societal truths. In this episode, hear from Tom what it was like to perform during those days, what role folk music plays in stirring up the status quo, and thoughts on vulnerability, notoriety, grief, an Show Notes Resources mentioned this episode: Tom's Website Similar NSE episodes: Amy Grant: Fame, Vulnerability, and Staying Grounded Martin Sheen: Actor and Activist Drew Holcomb and Audrey Assad: Vulnerable Art Transcription Link This episode of No Small Endeavor is sponsored by Dwell—the audio bible app. To get 25% off your subscription visit dwellbible.com/nse Want more NSE? JOIN NSE+ Today! Our subscriber only community with bonus episodes designed specifically to help you live a good life, ad-free listening, and discounts on live shows Subscribe to episodes: Apple | Spotify | Amazon | Google | YouTubeFollow Us: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTubeFollow Lee: Instagram | TwitterJoin our Email List: nosmallendeavor.com See Privacy Policy: Privacy Policy Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: Tokens Media, LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

A parody of Tom Paxton's "The Marvelous Toy", just in time for Christmas, or something.

Three tribes in the Southwest are hoping federal lawmakers will pass a water rights deal in the remaining weeks of the year. The agreement would allow many communities to bring piped water to the Navajo Nation, where about a third of households do not have clean water. We hear about the deal from Ethel Branch, attorney general of the Navajo Nation. And, think twice before getting sucked down the rabbit hole of Black Friday madness. Maurie Backman of Motley Fool Money reveals the secret marketing tactics that make holiday sales deceiving. Then, American songwriter Tom Paxton is preparing to give his final public performances next year. The 87-year-old musician reflects on his life and career.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The band does a lot of time traveling at its rehearsals. In those two hours each week, the guys might start with a rock classic like “Hey Baby,” as they do in this track from last week's get-together.Then in the next moment The Flood Time Machine Lab might transport the lads back to, say, the Roarin' Twenties.There they can sample a song or two of the day, maybe “Dinah” or “Lady Be Good” or “My Blue Heaven.”Then switching gears again, they swoop down into the Thirties or the Forties to toy with tunes from the greats like Hoagy Carmichael (“Georgia on My Mind,” maybe) or Fats Waller (“Honeysuckle Rose”) or Duke Ellington (“Don't Get Around Much Any More”).Then it's back to the Sixties or the Seventies for a bit of Bob Dylan, John Prine or Tom Paxton, Jackson Browne or Neal Young. It's all about rocking the room.This Week's SongThe featured tune this week demonstrates the best part of all that temporal tramping, because it so often lets the guys revisit music of their youth. As reported earlier, “Hey Baby” was a 1961 chart-topper that 17-year-old Bruce Channel wrote with his friend Margaret Cobb. Over the past six decades, the song has brought joy to audiences ranging from the fledgling Beatles when they were starting out back in Liverpool to movie goers years later who packed theaters for films like Dirty Dancing. For more of the song's long history, click here.The Flood started revisiting “Hey Baby” a few years ago when the band was invited to perform it at a very special occasion: the wedding of Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge; she and Rich Hoge married on May 21, 2022, and The Flood was there for the festivities. Since then, “Hey Baby” has lingered in the repertoire, as you'll hear in this track that started last week's rehearsal at the Bowen House.Want to Do Your Own Time Traveling?If you'd like ride shotgun in The Flood time machine, a new department in the newsletter helps you take your own dash through the decades.Called “Flood Tunes on the Timeline,” the page sorts dozens of the band's performances by the date of the songs' composition. Here's how to use it.Suppose you're in the mood for a little sumpin sumpin from the period that folksinger Dave Van Ronk once wryly called “The Great Folk Scare.” You could visit the tune timeline by clicking here, then scrolling down to “The Sixties” section, where you'll find songs grouped by individual years.For instance, Dylan's “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” is tucked in under 1962. There's Bob Gibson's “Abilene” in the 1963 list. Paxton's “Ramblin' Boy” comes along in 1964, Eric Andersen's “Dusty Boxcar Wall” is in 1965, and Michael Peter Smith's “The Dutchman” shows up in 1968.Each listed song on the timeline is hyperlinked, so clicking its title takes you to a recent Flood performance. Each entry also has a little (or a lot) of the history of that particular song.The timeline indexes more than a century of music and is regularly updated as new songs and stories are added. Enjoy the ride! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In this episode, Jeremy Cordeaux covers a range of topics from global trust trends and social media influencers to political controversies and environmental issues. Topics include a discussion on the Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Index, with doctors ranking as the most trusted profession and politicians as the least. He also addresses issues with Section 18C, Pauline Hanson's recent legal troubles, debates over renewable energy's environmental impact, and reflections on the recent U.S. election and historical events. Topics Discussed  Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Index: Most and least trusted professions (00:00) Public trust in social media influencers and politicians (02:23) Jeremy's reflection on pharmacists as a historically trusted profession (06:15) Elder Fine Art and Rising Sun Inn as show sponsors (06:15)​ Reflections on musician Tom Paxton and his contributions to music (08:28)​ Criticism of renewables and environmental concerns over wind farms (10:39)​ Pauline Hanson's legal issues over remarks to Senator Faruqi (13:06)​ Section 18C and its implications on freedom of speech (15:42)​ Join Jeremy Cordeaux for The Court of Public Opinion LIVE every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., streaming round the dining room table at jeremycordeaux.com and via Auscast Radio at auscastnetwork.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Politico's Kyle Cheney talks about his reporting that former President Donald Trump will declare himself the winner on Tuesday night no matter what, and what kind of legal paths he might exploit to regain the White House. Then, mega-donors have contributed more than $2.5 billion in this election — more than twice the amount they gave in 2020. The Washington Post's Clara Ence Morse explains who the top donors are and how big money is changing elections. And, singer-songwriter Tom Paxton is playing his final tour. Here & Now's Robin Young caught up with Paxton at Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to hear more about his life and career.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

MPF Discussion with Gary & Cathy ScarpelloCan You Feel It: Music, Healing, and Unity with Gary & Cathy Scarpello  In this thought-provoking episode of My Perfect Failure, I sit down with Gary and Cathy Scarpello, the creative duo behind the powerful record "Can You Feel It." Gary shares his musical journey, from growing up in a home filled with music to recording alongside legends like Stevie Wonder. Cathy opens up about the magical role music has played in her life and how it has helped her navigate difficult times. Together, we discuss the impact of their song, which calls for positivity and unity in a world facing deep divisions. Whether you're a music lover or simply searching for inspiration, this episode will leave you feeling uplifted and motivated to make a difference.  About GaryGary Scarpello is a seasoned musician with a rich career spanning various genres like folk, rock, blues, country, and jazz. Starting out as a guitar teacher, he performed across the Philly tri-state area as a solo act, in duos, and with bands. His performances have taken place in coffeehouses, colleges, clubs, and more, with features on WHYY and WMMR radio stations.Gary co-produced and mixed the album Swords Into Plowshares: Songs of Freedom and Struggle with Pete Seeger and Tom Paxton. He also worked as an assistant engineer at Alpha Studios, collaborating with Stevie Wonder, Harold Melvin, and Al Martino.His past bands include A.O.K. and Moonrise, with Moonrise opening for Essra Mohawk and scheduled to open for Mississippi Fred McDowell. A.O.K. headlined prominent venues like Ambler Cabaret and Empire Rock Club. He's also been a volunteer at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and served as a college radio DJ.  About CathyI work in healing. I have been a massage therapist and Reiki Master/Teacher for 32 years. Music has always been a saving grace for me, what carried me through troubled times and celebrated the joys and victories. I love to sing.  Key Takeaways:Music's profound role in helping us overcome personal challenges.How "Can You Feel It" became a message of unity after January 6th.How music can shift our mindset and encourage positive change.The origins and deeper meaning behind "Can You Feel It."The emotional strength that music can bring to individuals and communities.  Gary & Cathy Social linksCathy's Website: https://www.garyscarpellomusic.com/ Listen to “can You Feel it”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpmqxLaNEDY   Please Leave A Review Like this show? Please leave us a review here, even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!   Paul: Contact DetailsWork with me: paul@myperfectfailure.comMPF Website: https://www.myperfectfailure.com/ Subscribe to MPF YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paulpadmore8275

Doug Yeager joins me for a special Folk Music Extravaganza. He has had a long affiliation with American folk music and folk artists. He has produced television shows and concerts including the PBS Concert Special “Woody & Me” about Woody Guthrie, and he serves on the board of the Folk-Americana-Roots Hall of Fame. He has worked with and managed a number of iconic folk artists including Odetta, Richie Havens, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Tom Paxton and Oscar Brand.My featured song is “I'm Falling Off Of The World” from the album East Side Sessions by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here .To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“THE GIFT” is Robert's new single featuring his song arranged by Grammy winning arranger Michael Abene. Praised by David Amram, John Helliwell, Joe La Barbera, Tony Carey, Fay Claassen, Antonio Farao, Danny Gottlieb and Leslie Mandoki.Click HERE for all links.—-------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's recent single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

Welcome to Season 04 Episode 01 - the "Back in the Saddle" edition - of Notes from the Aisle Seat, the podcast featuring news and information about the arts in northern Chautauqua County NY, sponsored by the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. Your host is Tom Loughlin, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair Emeritus of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia. Guests on this episode include: Mr. Rick Davis, Executive Director, 1891 Fredonia Opera House; Mr. Max Walters, Curator, Darwin R. Barker Museum, Fredonia NY; Mr. Tom Briscoe, comedian. Notes from the Aisle Seat is available from most of your favorite podcast sites, as well as on the Opera House YouTube Channel. If you enjoy this podcast, please spread the word through your social media feeds, give us a link on your website, and consider becoming a follower by clicking the "Follow" button in the upper right-hand corner of our home page. If you have an arts event you'd like to publicize, hit us up at operahouse@fredopera.org and let us know what you have! Please give us at least one month's notice to facilitate timely scheduling. Thanks for listening! Time Stamps Mr. Rick Davis - 1:35 Mr. Max Walters - 20:05 Arts Calendar - 40:40 Mr. Tom Briscoe - 43:24 Media "Back in the Saddle Again", Gene Autry and Ray Whitley, composers; performed by Gene Autry; September 1939, American Record Corporation/Vocalion 5080 Records "Bottle of Wine", Tom Paxton, composer, performed by Doc and Merle Watson for the album Then and Now, 1973 "Theme from The Endless Summer"; Gaston Georgis and John Blakeley, composers; performed by The Surf Riders, from the album Remember Malibu, 1966 "Margaritaville"; Jimmy Buffett, composer (1977), performed by Robert Greenidge, from the album A Lovely Cruise: The Steel Drum Music of Jimmy Buffett, February 2013 Artist Links Rick Davis Max Walters Grape Belt Digital Collection Tom Briscoe BECOME AN OPERA HOUSE MEMBER!      

00:00-15:28 — Антивоенная VS провоенная американская музыка15:28-23:54 — «Никогда бы не подумал, что могу написать текст песни с пожеланием смерти»23:54-25:48 — Байка про антивоенность Леонарда Коэна25:48-28:39 — «Мы — американцы, с нами — Бог»28:39-36:04 — Как от Джими Хендрикс отказалась армия из-за музыки36:04-39:39 — Песня о стариках, которые ведут молодых на смерть 39:39-43:58 — Сатира над американскими властями43:58-50:27 — «Это было похоже на смертную казнь»50:27-53:43 — Самая страшная песня о войне во Вьетнаме 53:43-01:04:42 — Исполнительница, которая блокировала вход в призывные пункты 01:04:42-01:14:36 — «Он обращается к своим родственникам. Убеждает их, что война — это не средство достижения целей» «Первый отдел» в соцсетях:телеграминстаграмтвиттерютубАнна Виленская в соцсетях:инстаграмютубЮлия Накарякова в соцсетях:инстаграм

Interview begins at :45 Follow John and learn more about him at www.folkmusic.com Learn about FARHOF and the Boch Center at www.farhof.org.

"We had no home front, we had no soft soapThey sent us Playboy, they gave us Bob HopeWe dug in deep and shot on sightAnd prayed to Jesus Christ with all of our mightWe had no cameras to shoot the landscapeWe passed the hash pipe and played our Doors tapesAnd it was dark, so dark at nightAnd we held on to each other, like brother to brotherWe promised our mothers we'd write...Join me this afternoon, I'll be paying tribute to those that serve and served to protect our freedoms in ou r 4PM hour. Joining us are Earth Opera. Tim Buckley, Richie Havens, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, Beatles, Doors, Procol Harum, Peter Paul & Mary, Grass Roots, The McCoys, Shangri-Las, Johnny Rivers, Mamas & Papas, Rolling Stones, John Mellencamp, Tom Paxton, Orpheus, Spanky & Our Gang, The Monkees, Tommy James, Aaron Lewis, Barry McGuire and Billy Joel.

Marc Valentine "Opening Chase Theme" - Basement Sparks www.marcvalentine.co.uk Laurie Morvan "Gotta Dig Deep" - Gravity www.lauriemorvan.com Michele D'Amour & The Love Dealers "Plum Crazy" - Hot Mess www.micheedamour.com Denise La Grassa "Lucy Mae Blues" - The Flame www.deniselagrassa.com Patty Reese "Lift Us Up" www.pattyreese.com Blue Dogs "Big Dreamers" - Big Dreamers www.bluedogs.com Jay Stott "Stuck In Love" - Wreckage Of Now www.jgstott.com ******************************** ALBUM FOCUS: Paradiddle Records presents Uncovering Dylan 4, part of their Bob Dylan Uncovered Series, performed by Long Island (NY) Americana/Roots artists. www.paradiddlerecords.com Tom Moran "Nobody 'Cept You" The Belle Curves "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" Revolver "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" The Lucky Ones "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" ****************** Mary Battiata & Little Pink "Sun That I Could Count On" - The Heart, Regardless www.littlepinktheband.com Cormac O Cairmh "Believe (If You Feel)" - 1999-2012 Volume 1 www.cormacocairmh.com Fred Gillen Jr "When The Ravens Came" - Birds www.fredgillenjr.com Ben Bedford "Leaping" - Valley Of Stars www.benbedford.com Vanessa Lively "Canaries" - www.vanessalively.com Jon McCutcheon & Tom Paxton "Complete" - Together www.folkmusic.com Mike Agranoff "First Kiss" - Ain't Never Been Plugged www.mikeagranoff.com Joel Styzens "Ascendance III" - Resonance www.relax-your-ears.com ********************** Closing music: Geoffrey Armes "Seascape" - Music For Yoga www.geoffreyarmes.com Running time: 3 hours 54 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Our Hockey East correspondent and guru John Leahy made a rare in studio appearance Wednesday to entertain us with his musical talent. John and his ukulele treated us to some live tunes written by Jimmy Buffett, Jonathan Edwards, Tom Paxton and more.

Part 2 starts right here: *********** ALBUM FOCUS: BREAKIN' NEWS TEN YEARS OF BLUES http://www.nola-blue.com NOLA BLUE celebrates 10 years as an independent blues label with this compilation. I aired these: Cash MacCall "One Who's Got A Lot" Clarence Spady "If Only We Could" Trudy Lynn "Golden Girl Blues" ********************************* Brainstory "Hanging On" - Sounds Good www.brainstorymusic.com Kee Avil "At His Hands" - Spine www.keeavil.com Attic Theory "Violent Delight" - What We Fear The Most www.attictheory.co.uk '92 "Brick By Brick" - s/t https://www.facebook.com/ninexdeuce Gypsy's Kiss "We've Comme To Play" - https://www.gypsyskiss.net/ Nervous Eaters "Vampire" - www.facebook.com/nervouseate Marc Valentine "Eve Of Distraction" - Basement Sparks ************************************ Shari Puorto "Workin' The Room" - My Obsession www.sharipuorto.com Kelly's Lot "That Fool" - Where And When www.kellyslot.com Danielle Miraglia "Meet Me In The Morning" - Bright Shining Stars www.daniellem.com Bison Hip "The One That Got Aawy" - www.bisonhip.com Burr Island "Our Home" - "Older Stronger Better www.burrisland.com Eliane Amherd "Cornalin" - La Degustation www.elianeperforms.com Mouths Of Babes "Pictures Of You" - World Brand New www.mouthsofbabes.com Girlyman "I Wonder Where You've Gone" - Little Star www.girlyman.com John McCutcheon & Tom Paxton "Life Before You" - Together www.folkmusic.com Closing music: Coyote Oldman "Home World" - Under An Ancient Sky Running time: 4 hours, 42 minutes. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

PINKIE SINGS "The Marvelous Toy" Written by Tom Paxton 1962Producer Renee: Vocals/ Piano/ Guitar/ Percussion http://PinkieThePigPodcast.com

John goes back to an old Tom Paxton song to describe the news of the week. Mary Jo tolerates his singing.

ALBUM FOCUS Tropical Party www.putumayo.com The Putumayo Discovery digital series continues with the digital album, Tropical Party by Putumayo, a collection of 10 upbeat and festive songs by rising musical stars from Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, Angola, Haiti and more. Putumayo Discovery is a digital series that highlights exceptional songs by contemporary artists from around the world. Zezinho Noy (Angola) - Minha Amiga Teodora RAM (Haiti) - Tout Pitit (Se Pitit) Pâmela Amaro (Brazil) - Negro Amaro Chopteeth Afrofunk Big Band (Nigeria / USA) - Upendo Telek (Papau New Guinea) - Lus Lo Solwara *********************** Robert Jon & The Wreck "Ballad of a Broken Hearted Man" www.robertjonandthewreck.com Anthony Gomes "Blues-A-Fied" - High Voltage Blues www.anthonygomes.com Eric Johanson "Beyond The Sky" - The Deep & The Dirty www.ericjohanson.com Cedar County Cobras "Walkin' Blues" - Homesick Blues www.cedarcountycobras.com Mol Sullivan "Like This Now" - Goose www.molsullivan.com Helene Cronin "What Do You Lean On" - Landmarks www.helenecronin.com Scott Sean White "People" - Even Better On The Bad Days www.scottseanwhite.com Claudia Gibson "The Night Visiting Song" - The Fields Of Chazy www.claudiagibson.com Keith Kallina "To Get To You" - Etta Place www.keithmichaelkallina.com ************************* Mizu "Rinse" - Forest Scenes www.iammizu.com Danielle Miragllia "Sounds Like Home" - Bright Shining Stars www.daniellem.com Gus Glynn "Rollin' " - Paint It Blue www.gusglynn.com John McCutcheon with Tom Paxton "Invisible Man" - Together www.folkmusic.com Noah Derksen "Maybe Next Year" - Sanctity Of Silence www.noahderksen.com Johnsmith "Where's The World Goin' To - Backroads www.johnsmithmusic.com Closing music: MFSB "My Mood" Running time: 4 hours 16 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Interview begins at 6:18.  To support FARHOF and learn more visit - www.farhof.org

We interviewed Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon back before Christmas about their jointly written and performed album called Together. We're talking about an overabundance of music creation skills by two folk musicians who have released over 100 albums between them.

Two of folk music's most celebrated songwriters, Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon delve into their vibrant songwriting partnership. The post Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon appeared first on The Strange Brew .

Cris Cohen interviews John McCutcheon. They discussed:His new album with Tom Paxton, "Together"Co-writing songs via ZoomIntertwining hope and heartbreak in the song "Ukrainian Now"Writing lighter tunes like "Same Old Crap"And morebandstofans.com

ALBUM FOCUS Putumayo World Music www.putumayo.com The groundbreaking world music label debuts a fourth full-length digital album "Global Reggae." This collection features songs by ten artists from around the world who have embraced this beloved music genre. Dobet Gnahoré, Kajeem (Côte d'Ivoire) - "Lagô" Angam (France) - "Wala Liam" Nina Ogot (Kenya) - "Pole Pole" Youthie, Kino Doscun (France) - "Inna Ud" Mista Savona, Havana Meets Kingston, Beatriz Márquez (Cuba/Jamaica/Australia) - "Lágrimas Negras" ********************** Black Heart Drifters "Santa Fe" - Under A Western Sky https://www.facebook.com/BlackHeartDrifters/ Izzy Ded & The Existential Dread "All The Good Horses" - What Hurts Most www.izzyded.com Cocktail Slippers "123" - www.cocktailslippers.com Dmitry Wild "Rock-n-Roll Is My Business" - www.dmitrywild.com Michele D'Amour & The Love Dealers "Plum Crazy" - Hot Mess www.micheledamourandthelovedealers.com Laurie Morvan "Gotta Dig Deep" - Gravity www.lauriemorvan.com Goldpine "Scarecrow" - Two www.goldpinemusic.com Jon Shain "Woodsmoke" - Never Found A Way To Tame The Blues www.jonshain.com Katie Curley "Buring The Midnight Oil" - Penny For My Heartbreak www.katiecurley.com ************************ Avi Wisnia "It's Gonna Rain Today" - Catching Leaves www.aviwisnia.com Janie Barnett "Gibbous Moon" - But Longing Is Primal www.janiebarnett.com Ynana Rose "Let Go The Day" - Under A Cathedral Sky www.ynanarose.com Jeff Plankehorn "Bluer Skies" - Alone At Sea www.jeffplankenhorn.com Dan Whitaker "Every Now And Then" - I Won't Play By Your Rules www.danwhitaker.com Terry Klein "Shimmers and Hums" - Leave The Light On www.terykleinmusic.com Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon "Prairie Star" - Together www.folkmusic.com Tret Fure "Waiting All My Life" - Lavender Moonshine www.tretfure.com Closing music: MFSB "My Mood" Running time: 4 hours, 15 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

If you don't know Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon, you should. And their new album (the first one they've done together) is called 'Together.' It was written over weekly Zoom calls where they would talk and hang out and, occasionally break out the instruments. 'Together' is available now and the two are doing several dates on the east coast of the US to support the record- they are definitely worth checking out.For more information, check out Tom's website, or check in on John's website.

Joy Division "Dead Souls" We Are Parasols "Body Horror' - Body Horror https://nomovementrecords.com/we-are-parasols Golden Shoals "Jimmy Beam Ain't My Friend" www.goldenshoals.com Krashkarma "Voodoo Devil Drum" www.krashkarma.com Hologramme "Unfold" SOLEDAD opus 32 no.1, https://www.hologramme.mu/ Surprise Chef 'Spiky Boi" - Friendship www.bigcrownrecords.com Brokof "Postcard Of Rome" Blind Spot On The Bright Side Of Life www.brokof.net Crowes Pasture "The Night We Met" - Don't Blink https://crowespastureduo.com/ ********************* Mississippi McDonald "The Devil Wants Repayment" - Heavy State Lovin' Blues https://mississippimacdonald.com/ Danielle Miraglia "Pick Up The Gun" - Bright Shining Stars www.daniellem.com Katie Dahl "Jericho" - Seven Stones https://katiedahlmusic.com/ Claudia Schmidt "Broken Glass" - Reimagining www.claudiaschmidt.com Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon "Invisibe Man" - Together www.folkmusic.com Joselyn & Don "Wayfarer's Son" - Soar https://joselynanddon.com/ Michele Hannan & One Blue Night "Blue Days & Lonely Nights" www.onebluenight.com Terry Klein "Blue Hill Bay" - Leave The Light On https://terrykleinmusic.com Slaid Cleaves "Nature's Darker Laws" - Together Through Th Dark www.slaidcleaves.com Ed Sweeney with Cathy Clasper-Torch "Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie" - A Sunday Drive https://edsweeneymusic.com/ Closing music: Lou Reed "Halloween Parade" - New York Daniel Johnston "Grievances" - Songs Of Pain Running time: 4 hours, 42 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon/In America/ TogetherTom Paxton & John McCutcheon/Ukrainian Now/TogetherTom Paxton & John McCutcheon/Same Old Crap/TogetherTom Paxton & John McCutcheon/Together/TogetherTom Paxton & John McCutcheon/Letters From Joe/TogetherTom Paxton & John McCutcheon/The Fan/TogetherTom Paxton & John McCutcheon/ Everything/TogetherSupport the show

--{ "The Dilemma of Individualism in Stormy Seas"}-- Conformity within Groups - Darin from South Africa, Conformity and Invisibility of the Individual - Original Talk on 27 July 2007 - Global "Climate Change" - Al Gore's "Goring" - "The sky is falling" - Aerial Spraying and HAARP pulsation. The Sphere of Our Lives and What Reality is - Projections of Reality - Effects and Forces - Laws of Nature - Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis - Life in Middle Ages - Feudal System of Kings, Queens, Aristocracy, Learned Class - Illiterate Populace - World Run by All-Seeing Deity - Protestant Revolution - Reaction against Suppressive Old System - Protestant "work ethic" - Beginnings of Trade Guilds - Price and Wage Fixing - Monopolies - Ownership of Resources. Goldsmith - Gold - Money Lending - Views of Life and Death in Ancient Times - In Greece, Egypt - Judaism - Christianity - Fear of Death in Western world - Money Spent on Funerals - Looting and Plundering Buccaneers - Capitalism - Piracy - Monopoly Making - Fads, Fashion, Education, Indoctrination - Conformity to a Group and Its Standards - Maintaining Elite and System - Animalistic Traits vs. Self-Expression - Suppression of Emotion - Neurosis in Society - Commercialization and Exploitation - Expensive Placebos for "Happiness" - Psychological Warfare in Media and Advertising - Strength and Happiness Within - KNOW THY SELF. (Song: "Whose Garden Was This" by Tom Paxton).

On this episode of 'Why We Write with Kim Ruehl,' Tim O'Brien talks about collaborating with Darrell Scott, Tom Paxton, and how writing songs can be like watching grass grow.

This is the most recent playlist from Radio Crystal Blue. The shows were published on 7/2/23. Next shows should be published around 7/11/23. **************** RADIO CRYSTAL BLUE 7/2/23 Death Cab For Cutie "Coney Island" The Photo Album Luna "Sideshow By The Seashore" Penthouse Pet Shop Boys "Luna Park" Fundamental Blue Oyster Cult "Fireworks" - Spectres Arcade Fire "The Suburbs" - The Suburbs Guided By Voices "The Official Ironmen Rally Song - Under The Bushes Under Thew Stars The Velvet Underground "Coney Island Steeplechase" - Another View Fountains Of Wayne "Red Dragon Tattoo" - Utopia Parkway ************************* These artists are sharing billing in the upcoming Mile Of Music Festival www.mileofmusi.com Sirsy "Stand" - Death Of Me www.sirsy.com The Altered Five Blues Band "I Got All I Need" Holler If You Hear Me www.alteredfive.com Buffalo Rose & Tom Paxton "Jennifer's Rabbit" Rabbit www.buffalorosemusic.com Ordinary Elephant "Jenny & James" - Honest www.ordinaryelephant.com ******************************* Ellis Paul "Tattoo Lady" - 55 www.ellispaul.com Jaimee Harris "Boomerang Town" - Boomerang Town www.jaimeeharris.com Meghan Cary "Drive" - Sing Louder www.meghancary.com Rachael Sage "The Other Side" - The Other Side www.rachaelsage.com Mary Jennings "Catch 22" - Metamorphosis www.maryjennings.com Kevin Daniel "Go Out"- The Life & Adventures Of Kevin Daniel www.thekevindaniel.com ******************* Anthony Gomes "I Believe" - High Voltage Blues www.anthonygomes.com Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate "Burn The World" - www.hatsoffgentlemen.com The Dirty Nil "Nicer Guy" - 'Free Rein to Passions' www.thedirtynil.com The Tearaways "Married And Single" - And Now For Our Next Trick www.facebook.com/thetearawaysusa Soraia "Every Motion" www.soraia.com Crushed By Waves "Won't Get Out Alive" www.crushedbywaves.com Love Is Enough "Breathe" www.loveisenoughband.com The Trews "Enemy" - Wanderer www.thetrewsmusic.com Feral Vices "Lock & Key" www.feralvices.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Hey there, cowpokes, and happy Pride! We are in a real treat this month with our conversation with Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, old time music legends. In our interview, Cathy and Marcy said they haven't done much -- but they're just being modest. They have performed with Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, Tom Paxton, Patsy Montana, Riders in the Sky, and a wide range of musical luminaries. They have entertained the Queen of Thailand, been keynote singers for the AFL-CIO, appeared on the “Today Show” and on National Public Radio. Cathy & Marcy earned GRAMMY Awards for their recordings “cELLAbration: a Tribute to Ella Jenkins”, and “Bon Appétit!: Musical Food Fun”. Their CD's “Postcards” and “Banjo Talkin'” were GRAMMY Fnalists in the Best Traditional Folk Album category. Since we discuss it later in the episode, we'll kick things off with the song they co-wrote with Tom Paxton, "Don't Say Gay."  "Don't Say Gay" Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjme3usL-0 Subscribe to the Rainbow Rodeo Patreon to get your copy of Rainbow Rodeo Issue 3 and more swag! Listen to Rachel this month on Sirius XM's Country Pride -- Channel 105 Advertise on Rainbow Rodeo!

This week we feature Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer.  After battling breast cancer Marcy, along with her partner Cathy, have produced a released a new film titled All Wigged Out.  The film takes the viewer through a musical journey of the trials and tribulations of cancer diagnosis and treatment.  Tom Paxton says of the film, “All Wigged Out is heartwarming, touching, hilarious and so relatable.”  We talk with Cathy and Marcy about their careers in music and about the making of the new film.

You might need some milk with this one. We're burning our mouths on some food that's just too dang spicy. This Week's Picks "Hardwired" by MSPAINT "Attitude" by Buggin "Simmer" by Hayley Williams Related Links Hot Ones Why We Write with Kim Ruehl #45: Tom Paxton and Cathy Fink The Playlist No Repeat Playlist on Spotify No Repeat Playlist on Apple Music B-Sides Unofficial B-Sides Playlist Support the Show No Repeat on Patreon Submit a Challenge No Repeat on Twitter Email us: norepeatpod[at]gmail[dot]com Follow Us Follow Tyler on Twitter Follow Shaun on Instagram Follow Taylor on Instagram

Our SONG TO CHEW this week is PEACEFUL FEET, from my 'Grow It At Home' album.  I wrote it as part of a challenge sent out from Rounder Kids Records asking some of the best artists in children's and family music to create a one-minute song for an album called "HEAR AND GONE IN 60 SECONDS" It included my friends Bill Harley, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Justin Roberts, Kim and Reggie Harris, Tom Paxton, Beethoven's Wig, Dan Crow, Dave Kinnoin, Parachute Express and Joanie Bartels, just to name a few!  I wrote a song that was silly, but also had larger themes of world peace, and we'll talk about that process. Thanks for stopping by.  I'll be back next week, with another ‘Song to Chew'! ~ Listen and subscribe to my Songs To Chew podcast = anywhere you get podcasts, or https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/peter-alsop-s-songs-to-chew/id1446179156 ~ CAMPING WITH DADS = https://www.amazon.com/Camping-Dads-Peter-Alsop/dp/B08CS871QW/ref=sr_1_1 ~ www.FaceBook.com/WeLikePeterAlsop ~ www.Youtube.com/peteralsop  = videos ~ www.Patreon.com/peteralsop  = support my music & other artistic endeavors ~ www.peteralsop.com/music  = CDs & downloads

This episode was recorded on March 26thth, 2023, at Keith Albee Theater in Huntington, WV. The lineup includes The High Kings, Tom Paxton, Catherine Russell, The Don Juans, and Kindred Valley. https://bit.ly/3OgUOHR

On this episode of 'Why We Write with Kim Ruehl,' Tom Paxton and Cathy Fink discuss topical songs, personal songs, and what they've learned from each other.

Dark Fantasy was a short series with tales of the weird, adventures of the supernatural, created for you by Scott Bishop. The series aired as a horror drama on NBC between 1941 and 1942. Dark Fantasy was a series dedicated to dealings with the unknown. Originating from radio station WKY, Oklahoma City, it was written by Scott Bishop and was heard Fridays over stations. Tom Paxton served as announcer. The shows covered horror, science fiction and murder mysteries. Although a short series, the shows are excellent with some stories way ahead of their time. This is a production of the Old Time Radio Researchers (OTRR) Group located at Old Time Radio Researchers Website (www.otrr.org), Old Time Radio Researchers Facebook Group, and Old Time Radio Researchers Group. It contains the most complete and accurate version of this series in the best sound possible at the time of creation. An updated version will be issued if more episodes or better sounding ones become available.

Jackson Emmer is an award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer from Carbondale, Colorado. His work blends humor with heartache, and tradition with exploration. Emmer's writing is often compared to that of John Prine and Guy Clark. He has toured the US since 2009, collaborated with Grammy-winners, and co-written 40+ songs with folk music legend, Tom Paxton. Emmer has opened for Robert Earl Keen, Sierra Ferrell, and Tim McGraw. His work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Billboard, 1200+ Spotify playlists, and 200+ radio stations worldwide. (jacksonemmer.com) If you enjoy the podcast, please let others know, subscribe or write a review. 5 star ratings and reviews on Apple Music as well as subscribing to my YouTube Channel help out the most! IF YOU'D LIKE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST IN A MONETARY WAY, I'M NOW ON PATREON! www.patreon.com/andysydow Guest Links: Website: www.jacksonemmer.com Episode Music: Original music by Andy Sydow Sponsors: A huge thanks to our sponsor, Narrator Music. For any sponsorship inquiries, shoot me an email at middleclassrockstar@gmail.com narratormusic.com

This week on Beale Street Caravan is the Concert to Protect our Aquifer. The annual fundraiser features appearances from Tom Paxton, The Accidentals, and Terry "Harmonica" Bean, live from First Congregational Church in Cooper-Young, Memphis, TN. Grammy nominated blues man, Guy Davis, will be with us to deliver an installment of the Blues Hall of Fame, an exploration of the lives of the pioneers and innovators enshrined in the Blues Hall of Fame, here in Memphis, TN, brought to you by the Blues Foundation.

This weeks guests are Sav Buist and Katie Larson from The Accidentals. It's hard to know where to start when talking about the 3-piece Nashville based (by way of Traverse City, MI) punk-folk outfit. They've made an album and toured with a full orchestra, scored a film, received acclaim from NPR and Billboard, and collaborated with the likes of Tom Paxton, Mary Gauthier, Kim Richey, and Dar Williams. On top of that, Sav just won the overall grand prize in the USA Songwriting Competition. I think you'll enjoy our conversation! IF YOU'D LIKE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST IN A MONETARY WAY, I'M NOW ON PATREON! www.patreon.com/andysydow Guest Links: Website: www.theaccidentalsmusic.com/about YouTube: www.patreon.com/theaccidentals Episode Music: Original music by Andy Sydow Sponsors: A huge thanks to our sponsor, Narrator Music. For any sponsorship inquiries, shoot me an email at middleclassrockstar@gmail.com narratormusic.com

I met Shane McLaughlin at FARM (Folk Alliance Midwest) just outside of Chicago back in October. I was blown away by the performance of his band, Buffalo Rose. Reminiscent of Nickel Creek or Punch Brothers, the 6-piece group is a feel good, high energy group that puts on a theatrical live performance. On top of releasing a group of songs as a collaboration with Tom Paxton back in February, Buffalo Rose just released their newest full length effort, "Again Again Again" on November 18. You can find it in all the usual places. In our conversation, we chat about growing up in Virginia, how Buffalo Rose came to be, music conferences, and of course their new album. If you enjoy the podcast, please let others know, subscribe or write a review. 5 star ratings and reviews on Apple Music as well as subscribing to my YouTube Channel help out the most! IF YOU'D LIKE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST IN A MONETARY WAY, I'M NOW ON PATREON! www.patreon.com/andysydow Guest Links: https://linktr.ee/buffalorosemusic?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=d5c1efe5-8869-40b7-afac-a8d88d02554d Episode Music: Original music by Andy Sydow Sponsors: A huge thanks to our sponsor, Narrator Music. For any sponsorship inquiries, shoot me an email at middleclassrockstar@gmail.com narratormusic.com

We're closing out 2022 with a real treat. The legendary Tom Paxton joins Dan over the phone, and Dan is truly starstruck. We talk about Tom's favorite Randy songs, plus Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Chad Mitchell, and a whole lot of Pete Seeger. Then friend-of-the-show Mary from Lansdale joins us for an after-show, where we talk Inside Llewyn Davis, and help separate fact from fiction regarding the NYC Folk Scene. Plus Dan makes fun of Suzanne Vega. If you don't know Tom's work, here's a primer for you: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0mzkM10DEn5LKhvMhbdPTK?si=PvsrkBP2R9-SiSkoG8zRwA See you next year, wheelies!

The Sundilla Radio Hour for the week of 09/19/2022 featuring: Austin MacRae “Last of the Hollers” Better Devil (2019 Austin MacRae) 5:02 Tom Paxton, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer “Dreams of Home” All New (2022 Community Music) 4:04 Emily Barnes “Hey Carmen” Rare Birds (2019 1585152 Records) 4:32 David LaMotte “Here For You” Still (2022 Dryad Publishing) 3:05 Happy Traum “There's a Bright Side Somewhere” There's a Bright Side Somewhere (2022 Happy Traum) 2:58 Kelly Bosworth & Libby Weitnauer “Free Little Bird” Pocket Full of Candy (2020 Kelly Bosworth & Libby Weitnauer) 2:54 Peter Mulvey & SistaStrings “Shenandoah” Love Is the Only Thing (2022 Peter Mulvey) 5:21 Lissa Schneckenburger “Bedlam Blues” Single (2021 Lissa Schneckenburger) 2:56 Jake Blount “The Man Was Burning” Single (2022 Jake Blount) 2:35 Jim Photoglo “Back to You Again” Fly Straight Home (2000 Grifftone) 3:44 Caroline Marie Brooks “Night Drive” Everything at the Same Time (2021 Caroline Marie Brooks) 3:25 Darden Smith “Perfect For a Little While” Western Skies (2021 Bull By The Horns) 4:05 Amythyst Kiah “Wild Turkey” Single (2022 Rounder) 4:38

Banned Books Week: Let's celebrate and safeguard, come hell or highwater, our freedom to read! Bestselling novelist Colm Tóibín on Salman Rushdie's work and activism, the history of censorship in Ireland, and the slippery slope that is book banning. PLUS: Ariel Schrag, whose YA anthology Stuck in the Middle made the list of “Top 100 Most Banned Books of the Decade.” Contributing artists: Amitava Kumar, Joseph Keckler; Billy Bragg & Wilco; Tom Paxton, Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer.

Noel Paul Stookey is perhaps better known as Paul of the legendary trio “Peter, Paul And Mary”. They blazed a path in the 1960s and beyond blending folk music and social activism with memorable songs and wonderful harmonies, setting a level of accomplishment that has rarely been equaled. They earned six Top 10 hits - including "Blowin In The Wind" and "Leaving On A Jet Plane" - and 8 Gold albums, quite remarkable for a folk group.Noel and I discuss the folk scene in Greenwich Village in the early 60s and all the remarkable future stars who were there including Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton, how PP&M burst on the scene with their first album, their participation in the 1963 March On Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King, and much more including Noel's long and highly regarded solo career post-PP&M. And of course we do a Songfest.My featured song in this episode is “Cousins”. Spotify link here. “Dream With Robert Miller”. Click here.---------------------------------------------   In this episode Noel and I discuss:The Folk Music scene in the early 60sGreenwich VillageThe formation of Peter, Paul and MaryThe 1963 March On Washington with Dr. Martin Luther KingTheir first albumFinding songs Songfest:“Blowin' In The Wind”“Leavin' On A Jet Plane”“I Dig Rock And Roll Music”“The Wedding Song (There Is Love)”“In These Times”“America The Beautiful” If you enjoyed the show, please Subscribe, Rate, and Review. Just Click Here. “All Of The Time” is Robert's new single by his band Project Grand Slam. It's a playful, whimsical love song. It's light and airy and exudes the happiness and joy of being in love. The reviewers agree. Melody Maker gives it 5 Stars and calls it “Pure bliss…An intimate sound with abundant melodic riches!”. Pop Icon also gives it 5 Stars and calls it “Ecstasy…One of the best all-around bands working today!”. And Mob York City says simply “Excellence…A band in full command of their powers!” Watch the video here. You can stream “All Of The Time” on Spotify, Apple, Amazon or any of the other streaming platforms. And you can download it here. “The Shakespeare Concert” is the latest album by Robert's band, Project Grand Slam. It's been praised by famous musicians including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Jim Peterik of the Ides Of March, Joey Dee of Peppermint Twist fame, legendary guitarist Elliott Randall, and celebrated British composer Sarah Class. The music reviewers have called it “Perfection!”, “5 Stars!”, “Thrilling!”, and “A Masterpiece!”. The album can be streamed on Spotify, Apple and all the other streaming services. You can watch the Highlight Reel HERE. And you can purchase a digital download or autographed CD of the album HERE.  “The Fall Of Winter” is Robert's single in collaboration with legendary rocker Jim Peterik of the Ides Of March and formerly with Survivor. Also featuring renowned guitarist Elliott Randall (Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers) and keyboard ace Tony Carey (Joe Cocker/Eric Burden). “A triumph!” (The Indie Source). “Flexes Real Rock Muscle!” (Celebrity Zone). Stream it on Spotify or Apple. Watch the lyric video here. Download it here. Robert's “Follow Your Dream Handbook” is an Amazon #1 Bestseller. It's a combination memoir of his unique musical journey and a step by step how-to follow and succeed at your dream. Available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Connect with Noel at:https://www.noelpaulstookey.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:WebsiteFacebookLinkedInEmail RobertYouTube Listen to the Follow Your Dream Podcast on these podcast platforms:CastBoxSpotifyApple Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:WebsiteInstagramPGS StoreYouTubeFacebookSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail

Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. 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, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts.  Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne.  Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin.  He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars  of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties  -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the  Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and  Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller,  because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch

For this particularly special episode, we are joined by Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, folk music legend and prolific songwriter Tom Paxton; along with Shane McLaughlin and Lucy Clabby, principal songwriters for the band Buffalo Rose. Tom tells us how he discovered the music of Buffalo Rose and was so taken by it that he reached out to Lucy and Shane to suggest they work together writing songs. The fabulous EP Rabbit, released earlier in 2022, was the result of this collaboration. We talk with Tom about his creative process, and how at age 84 he continues to write songs almost every day. Lucy and Shane share the insights they have gleaned from working with Tom. And we get one bonus Bob Dylan anecdote from Tom as he relives a bit of the early 60's NYC folk scene in which he was a central figure. Also, I get to talk about my Dad-the original music nerd. “How can a band be loose and tight at the same time? Listen to Buffalo Rose for the answer. I flat love them.” — Tom Paxton, folk music legend and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient

Join us for a tour of Bob Dylan's professional life in May and June of 1962 as we travel "A Highway of Diamonds" back 60 years ago to the month and visit Dylan as he records a Broadside show on topical songwriting on WBAI in New York along with Cynthia Gooding, Pete Seeger, Izzy Young, Gil Turner, and Sis Cunningham and as he bids adieu to his love from a New York ship dock. A 60th anniversary is a diamond anniversary, so this week, and throughout the year, we periodically take a trip on "a highway of diamonds," exploring the events of Bob Dylan's career sixty years ago. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we bring you news from the world of Bob Dylan, both in May and June of 1962 and May and June of 2022, including a special airing of three songs from the past week from Dylan's touring of the Pacific Northwest. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to vote and tell us who did "The Death of Emmett Till" better: Bob Dylan as performed on WBAI in May of 1962 or Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint as recorded ten years later in 1972? Listen to the episode, then go to our Twitter page @RainTrains to vote!