Podcast appearances and mentions of tommy boyce

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2023

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

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Episode 152: “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2022

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

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Episode 151: “San Francisco” by Scott McKenzie

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2022

We start season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs with an extra-long look at "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, and at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the careers of the Mamas and the Papas and P.F. Sloan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Up, Up, and Away" by the 5th Dimension. 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, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Scott McKenzie's first album is available here. There are many compilations of the Mamas and the Papas' music, but sadly none that are in print in the UK have the original mono mixes. This set is about as good as you're going to find, though, for the stereo versions. Information on the Mamas and the Papas came from Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and the Papas by Matthew Greenwald, California Dreamin': The True Story Of The Mamas and Papas by Michelle Phillips, and Papa John by John Phillips and Jim Jerome. Information on P.F. Sloan came from PF - TRAVELLING BAREFOOT ON A ROCKY ROAD by Stephen McParland and What's Exactly the Matter With Me? by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. The film of the Monterey Pop Festival is available on this Criterion Blu-Ray set. Sadly the CD of the performances seems to be deleted. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. It's good to be back. Before we start this episode, I just want to say one thing. I get a lot of credit at times for the way I don't shy away from dealing with the more unsavoury elements of the people being covered in my podcast -- particularly the more awful men. But as I said very early on, I only cover those aspects of their life when they're relevant to the music, because this is a music podcast and not a true crime podcast. But also I worry that in some cases this might mean I'm giving a false impression of some people. In the case of this episode, one of the central figures is John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Now, Phillips has posthumously been accused of some truly monstrous acts, the kind of thing that is truly unforgivable, and I believe those accusations. But those acts didn't take place during the time period covered by most of this episode, so I won't be covering them here -- but they're easily googlable if you want to know. I thought it best to get that out of the way at the start, so no-one's either anxiously waiting for the penny to drop or upset that I didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room. Separately, this episode will have some discussion of fatphobia and diet culture, and of a death that is at least in part attributable to those things. Those of you affected by that may want to skip this one or read the transcript. There are also some mentions of drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things that causes problems with rock history is the tendency of people to have selective memories, and that's never more true than when it comes to the Summer of Love, summer of 1967. In the mythology that's built up around it, that was a golden time, the greatest time ever, a period of peace and love where everything was possible, and the world looked like it was going to just keep on getting better. But what that means, of course, is that the people remembering it that way do so because it was the best time of their lives. And what happens when the best time of your life is over in one summer? When you have one hit and never have a second, or when your band splits up after only eighteen months, and you have to cope with the reality that your best years are not only behind you, but they weren't even best years, but just best months? What stories would you tell about that time? Would you remember it as the eve of destruction, the last great moment before everything went to hell, or would you remember it as a golden summer, full of people with flowers in their hair? And would either really be true? [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco"] Other than the city in which they worked, there are a few things that seem to characterise almost all the important figures on the LA music scene in the middle part of the 1960s. They almost all seem to be incredibly ambitious, as one might imagine. There seem to be a huge number of fantasists among them -- people who will not only choose the legend over reality when it suits them, but who will choose the legend over reality even when it doesn't suit them. And they almost all seem to have a story about being turned down in a rude and arrogant manner by Lou Adler, usually more or less the same story. To give an example, I'm going to read out a bit of Ray Manzarek's autobiography here. Now, Manzarek uses a few words that I can't use on this podcast and keep a clean rating, so I'm just going to do slight pauses when I get to them, but I'll leave the words in the transcript for those who aren't offended by them: "Sometimes Jim and Dorothy and I went alone. The three of us tried Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was the head man. He was shrewd and he was hip. He had the Mamas and the Papas and a big single with Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction.' He was flush. We were ushered into his office. He looked cool. He was California casually disheveled and had the look of a stoner, but his eyes were as cold as a shark's. He took the twelve-inch acetate demo from me and we all sat down. He put the disc on his turntable and played each cut…for ten seconds. Ten seconds! You can't tell jack [shit] from ten seconds. At least listen to one of the songs all the way through. I wanted to rage at him. 'How dare you! We're the Doors! This is [fucking] Jim Morrison! He's going to be a [fucking] star! Can't you see that? Can't you see how [fucking] handsome he is? Can't you hear how groovy the music is? Don't you [fucking] get it? Listen to the words, man!' My brain was a boiling, lava-filled Jell-O mold of rage. I wanted to eviscerate that shark. The songs he so casually dismissed were 'Moonlight Drive,' 'Hello, I Love You,' 'Summer's Almost Gone,' 'End of the Night,' 'I Looked at You,' 'Go Insane.' He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song—maybe twenty seconds on 'Hello, I Love You' (I took that as an omen of potential airplay)—and we were dismissed out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked. We stood up, the three of us, and Jim, with a wry and knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and coolly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man. We don't want to be *used*, anyway.'" Now, as you may have gathered from the episode on the Doors, Ray Manzarek was one of those print-the-legend types, and that's true of everyone who tells similar stories about Lou Alder. But... there are a *lot* of people who tell similar stories about Lou Adler. One of those was Phil Sloan. You can get an idea of Sloan's attitude to storytelling from a story he always used to tell. Shortly after he and his family moved to LA from New York, he got a job selling newspapers on a street corner on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Schwab's Drug Store. One day James Dean drove up in his Porsche and made an unusual request. He wanted to buy every copy of the newspaper that Sloan had -- around a hundred and fifty copies in total. But he only wanted one article, something in the entertainment section. Sloan didn't remember what the article was, but he did remember that one of the headlines was on the final illness of Oliver Hardy, who died shortly afterwards, and thought it might have been something to do with that. Dean was going to just clip that article from every copy he bought, and then he was going to give all the newspapers back to Sloan to sell again, so Sloan ended up making a lot of extra money that day. There is one rather big problem with that story. Oliver Hardy died in August 1957, just after the Sloan family moved to LA. But James Dean died in September 1955, two years earlier. Sloan admitted that, and said he couldn't explain it, but he was insistent. He sold a hundred and fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after Dean's death. When not selling newspapers to dead celebrities, Sloan went to Fairfax High School, and developed an interest in music which was mostly oriented around the kind of white pop vocal groups that were popular at the time, groups like the Kingston Trio, the Four Lads, and the Four Aces. But the record that made Sloan decide he wanted to make music himself was "Just Goofed" by the Teen Queens: [Excerpt: The Teen Queens, "Just Goofed"] In 1959, when he was fourteen, he saw an advert for an open audition with Aladdin Records, a label he liked because of Thurston Harris. He went along to the audition, and was successful. His first single, released as by Flip Sloan -- Flip was a nickname, a corruption of "Philip" -- was produced by Bumps Blackwell and featured several of the musicians who played with Sam Cooke, plus Larry Knechtel on piano and Mike Deasey on guitar, but Aladdin shut down shortly after releasing it, and it may not even have had a general release, just promo copies. I've not been able to find a copy online anywhere. After that, he tried Arwin Records, the label that Jan and Arnie recorded for, which was owned by Marty Melcher (Doris Day's husband and Terry Melcher's stepfather). Melcher signed him, and put out a single, "She's My Girl", on Mart Records, a subsidiary of Arwin, on which Sloan was backed by a group of session players including Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston: [Excerpt: Philip Sloan, "She's My Girl"] That record didn't have any success, and Sloan was soon dropped by Mart Records. He went on to sign with Blue Bird Records, which was as far as can be ascertained essentially a scam organisation that would record demos for songwriters, but tell the performers that they were making a real record, so that they would record it for the royalties they would never get, rather than for a decent fee as a professional demo singer would get. But Steve Venet -- the brother of Nik Venet, and occasional songwriting collaborator with Tommy Boyce -- happened to come to Blue Bird one day, and hear one of Sloan's original songs. He thought Sloan would make a good songwriter, and took him to see Lou Adler at Columbia-Screen Gems music publishing. This was shortly after the merger between Columbia-Screen Gems and Aldon Music, and Adler was at this point the West Coast head of operations, subservient to Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, but largely left to do what he wanted. The way Sloan always told the story, Venet tried to get Adler to sign Sloan, but Adler said his songs stunk and had no commercial potential. But Sloan persisted in trying to get a contract there, and eventually Al Nevins happened to be in the office and overruled Adler, much to Adler's disgust. Sloan was signed to Columbia-Screen Gems as a songwriter, though he wasn't put on a salary like the Brill Building songwriters, just told that he could bring in songs and they would publish them. Shortly after this, Adler suggested to Sloan that he might want to form a writing team with another songwriter, Steve Barri, who had had a similar non-career non-trajectory, but was very slightly further ahead in his career, having done some work with Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears. Barri had co-written a couple of flop singles for Connors, before the two of them had formed a vocal group, the Storytellers, with Connors' sister. The Storytellers had released a single, "When Two People (Are in Love)" , which was put out on a local independent label and which Adler had licensed to be released on Dimension Records, the label associated with Aldon Music: [Excerpt: The Storytellers "When Two People (Are in Love)"] That record didn't sell, but it was enough to get Barri into the Columbia-Screen Gems circle, and Adler set him and Sloan up as a songwriting team -- although the way Sloan told it, it wasn't so much a songwriting team as Sloan writing songs while Barri was also there. Sloan would later claim "it was mostly a collaboration of spirit, and it seemed that I was writing most of the music and the lyric, but it couldn't possibly have ever happened unless both of us were present at the same time". One suspects that Barri might have a different recollection of how it went... Sloan and Barri's first collaboration was a song that Sloan had half-written before they met, called "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann", which was recorded by a West Coast Chubby Checker knockoff who went under the name Round Robin, and who had his own dance craze, the Slauson, which was much less successful than the Twist: [Excerpt: Round Robin, "Kick that Little Foot Sally Ann"] That track was produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche, and Nitzsche asked Sloan to be one of the rhythm guitarists on the track, apparently liking Sloan's feel. Sloan would end up playing rhythm guitar or singing backing vocals on many of the records made of songs he and Barri wrote together. "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" only made number sixty-one nationally, but it was a regional hit, and it meant that Sloan and Barri soon became what Sloan later described as "the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups." According to Sloan "We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with thirty names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hit." They'd then write the songs to order, and they started to specialise in dance craze songs. For example, when the Swim looked like it might be the next big dance, they wrote "Swim Swim Swim", "She Only Wants to Swim", "Let's Swim Baby", "Big Boss Swimmer", "Swim Party" and "My Swimmin' Girl" (the last a collaboration with Jan Berry and Roger Christian). These songs were exactly as good as they needed to be, in order to provide album filler for mid-tier artists, and while Sloan and Barri weren't writing any massive hits, they were doing very well as mid-tier writers. According to Sloan's biographer Stephen McParland, there was a three-year period in the mid-sixties where at least one song written or co-written by Sloan was on the national charts at any given time. Most of these songs weren't for Columbia-Screen Gems though. In early 1964 Lou Adler had a falling out with Don Kirshner, and decided to start up his own company, Dunhill, which was equal parts production company, music publishers, and management -- doing for West Coast pop singers what Motown was doing for Detroit soul singers, and putting everything into one basket. Dunhill's early clients included Jan and Dean and the rockabilly singer Johnny Rivers, and Dunhill also signed Sloan and Barri as songwriters. Because of this connection, Sloan and Barri soon became an important part of Jan and Dean's hit-making process. The Matadors, the vocal group that had provided most of the backing vocals on the duo's hits, had started asking for more money than Jan Berry was willing to pay, and Jan and Dean couldn't do the vocals themselves -- as Bones Howe put it "As a singer, Dean is a wonderful graphic artist" -- and so Sloan and Barri stepped in, doing session vocals without payment in the hope that Jan and Dean would record a few of their songs. For example, on the big hit "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", Dean Torrence is not present at all on the record -- Jan Berry sings the lead vocal, with Sloan doubling him for much of it, Sloan sings "Dean"'s falsetto, with the engineer Bones Howe helping out, and the rest of the backing vocals are sung by Sloan, Barri, and Howe: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] For these recordings, Sloan and Barri were known as The Fantastic Baggys, a name which came from the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham and Mick Jagger, when the two were visiting California. Oldham had been commenting on baggys, the kind of shorts worn by surfers, and had asked Jagger what he thought of The Baggys as a group name. Jagger had replied "Fantastic!" and so the Fantastic Baggys had been born. As part of this, Sloan and Barri moved hard into surf and hot-rod music from the dance songs they had been writing previously. The Fantastic Baggys recorded their own album, Tell 'Em I'm Surfin', as a quickie album suggested by Adler: [Excerpt: The Fantastic Baggys, "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"] And under the name The Rally Packs they recorded a version of Jan and Dean's "Move Out Little Mustang" which featured Berry's girlfriend Jill Gibson doing a spoken section: [Excerpt: The Rally Packs, "Move Out Little Mustang"] They also wrote several album tracks for Jan and Dean, and wrote "Summer Means Fun" for Bruce and Terry -- Bruce Johnston, later of the Beach Boys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] And they wrote the very surf-flavoured "Secret Agent Man" for fellow Dunhill artist Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But of course, when you're chasing trends, you're chasing trends, and soon the craze for twangy guitars and falsetto harmonies had ended, replaced by a craze for jangly twelve-string guitars and closer harmonies. According to Sloan, he was in at the very beginning of the folk-rock trend -- the way he told the story, he was involved in the mastering of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man". He later talked about Terry Melcher getting him to help out, saying "He had produced a record called 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and had sent it into the head office, and it had been rejected. He called me up and said 'I've got three more hours in the studio before I'm being kicked out of Columbia. Can you come over and help me with this new record?' I did. I went over there. It was under lock and key. There were two guards outside the door. Terry asked me something about 'Summer Means Fun'. "He said 'Do you remember the guitar that we worked on with that? How we put in that double reverb?' "And I said 'yes' "And he said 'What do you think if we did something like that with the Byrds?' "And I said 'That sounds good. Let's see what it sounds like.' So we patched into all the reverb centres in Columbia Music, and mastered the record in three hours." Whether Sloan really was there at the birth of folk rock, he and Barri jumped on the folk-rock craze just as they had the surf and hot-rod craze, and wrote a string of jangly hits including "You Baby" for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] and "I Found a Girl" for Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "I Found a Girl"] That song was later included on Jan and Dean's Folk 'n' Roll album, which also included... a song I'm not even going to name, but long-time listeners will know the one I mean. It was also notable in that "I Found a Girl" was the first song on which Sloan was credited not as Phil Sloan, but as P.F. Sloan -- he didn't have a middle name beginning with F, but rather the F stood for his nickname "Flip". Sloan would later talk of Phil Sloan and P.F. Sloan as almost being two different people, with P.F. being a far more serious, intense, songwriter. Folk 'n' Roll also contained another Sloan song, this one credited solely to Sloan. And that song is the one for which he became best known. There are two very different stories about how "Eve of Destruction" came to be written. To tell Sloan's version, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography: "By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,' ‘The Sins Of A Family,' ‘This Mornin',' ‘Ain't No Way I'm Gonna Change My Mind,' and ‘What's Exactly The Matter With Me?' They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously. ‘Eve Of Destruction' came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel's. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice. The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,' so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!' I didn't understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China. I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,' I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer." Lou Adler's story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said "It was a natural feel for him. He's a great mimic." As one other data point, both Steve Barri and Bones Howe, the engineer who worked on most of the sessions we're looking at today, have often talked in interviews about "Eve of Destruction" as being a Sloan/Barri collaboration, as if to them it's common knowledge that it wasn't written alone, although Sloan's is the only name on the credits. The song was given to a new signing to Dunhill Records, Barry McGuire. McGuire was someone who had been part of the folk scene for years, He'd been playing folk clubs in LA while also acting in a TV show from 1961. When the TV show had finished, he'd formed a duo, Barry and Barry, with Barry Kane, and they performed much the same repertoire as all the other early-sixties folkies: [Excerpt: Barry and Barry, "If I Had a Hammer"] After recording their one album, both Barrys joined the New Christy Minstrels. We've talked about the Christys before, but they were -- and are to this day -- an ultra-commercial folk group, led by Randy Sparks, with a revolving membership of usually eight or nine singers which included several other people who've come up in this podcast, like Gene Clark and Jerry Yester. McGuire became one of the principal lead singers of the Christys, singing lead on their version of the novelty cowboy song "Three Wheels on My Wagon", which was later released as a single in the UK and became a perennial children's favourite (though it has a problematic attitude towards Native Americans): [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Three Wheels on My Wagon"] And he also sang lead on their big hit "Green Green", which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] But by 1965 McGuire had left the New Christy Minstrels. As he said later "I'd sung 'Green Green' a thousand times and I didn't want to sing it again. This is January of 1965. I went back to LA to meet some producers, and I was broke. Nobody had the time of day for me. I was walking down street one time to see Dr. Strangelove and I walked by the music store, and I heard "Green Green" comin' out of the store, ya know, on Hollywood Boulevard. And I heard my voice, and I thought, 'I got four dollars in my pocket!' I couldn't believe it, my voice is comin' out on Hollywood Boulevard, and I'm broke. And right at that moment, a car pulls up, and the radio is playing 'Chim Chim Cherie" also by the Minstrels. So I got my voice comin' at me in stereo, standin' on the sidewalk there, and I'm broke, and I can't get anyone to sign me!" But McGuire had a lot of friends who he'd met on the folk scene, some of whom were now in the new folk-rock scene that was just starting to spring up. One of them was Roger McGuinn, who told him that his band, the Byrds, were just about to put out a new single, "Mr. Tambourine Man", and that they were about to start a residency at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. McGuinn invited McGuire to the opening night of that residency, where a lot of other people from the scene were there to see the new group. Bob Dylan was there, as was Phil Sloan, and the actor Jack Nicholson, who was still at the time a minor bit-part player in low-budget films made by people like American International Pictures (the cinematographer on many of Nicholson's early films was Floyd Crosby, David Crosby's father, which may be why he was there). Someone else who was there was Lou Adler, who according to McGuire recognised him instantly. According to Adler, he actually asked Terry Melcher who the long-haired dancer wearing furs was, because "he looked like the leader of a movement", and Melcher told him that he was the former lead singer of the New Christy Minstrels. Either way, Adler approached McGuire and asked if he was currently signed -- Dunhill Records was just starting up, and getting someone like McGuire, who had a proven ability to sing lead on hit records, would be a good start for the label. As McGuire didn't have a contract, he was signed to Dunhill, and he was given some of Sloan's new songs to pick from, and chose "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?" as his single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?"] McGuire described what happened next: "It was like, a three-hour session. We did two songs, and then the third one wasn't turning out. We only had about a half hour left in the session, so I said 'Let's do this tune', and I pulled 'Eve of Destruction' out of my pocket, and it just had Phil's words scrawled on a piece of paper, all wrinkled up. Phil worked the chords out with the musicians, who were Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass." There were actually more musicians than that at the session -- apparently both Knechtel and Joe Osborn were there, so I'm not entirely sure who's playing bass -- Knechtel was a keyboard player as well as a bass player, but I don't hear any keyboards on the track. And Tommy Tedesco was playing lead guitar, and Steve Barri added percussion, along with Sloan on rhythm guitar and harmonica. The chords were apparently scribbled down for the musicians on bits of greasy paper that had been used to wrap some takeaway chicken, and they got through the track in a single take. According to McGuire "I'm reading the words off this piece of wrinkled paper, and I'm singing 'My blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'", that part that goes 'Ahhh you can't twist the truth', and the reason I'm going 'Ahhh' is because I lost my place on the page. People said 'Man, you really sounded frustrated when you were singing.' I was. I couldn't see the words!" [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] With a few overdubs -- the female backing singers in the chorus, and possibly the kettledrums, which I've seen differing claims about, with some saying that Hal Blaine played them during the basic track and others saying that Lou Adler suggested them as an overdub, the track was complete. McGuire wasn't happy with his vocal, and a session was scheduled for him to redo it, but then a record promoter working with Adler was DJing a birthday party for the head of programming at KFWB, the big top forty radio station in LA at the time, and he played a few acetates he'd picked up from Adler. Most went down OK with the crowd, but when he played "Eve of Destruction", the crowd went wild and insisted he play it three times in a row. The head of programming called Adler up and told him that "Eve of Destruction" was going to be put into rotation on the station from Monday, so he'd better get the record out. As McGuire was away for the weekend, Adler just released the track as it was, and what had been intended to be a B-side became Barry McGuire's first and only number one record: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] Sloan would later claim that that song was a major reason why the twenty-sixth amendment to the US Constitution was passed six years later, because the line "you're old enough to kill but not for votin'" shamed Congress into changing the constitution to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. If so, that would make "Eve of Destruction" arguably the single most impactful rock record in history, though Sloan is the only person I've ever seen saying that As well as going to number one in McGuire's version, the song was also covered by the other artists who regularly performed Sloan and Barri songs, like the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Eve of Destruction"] And Jan and Dean, whose version on Folk & Roll used the same backing track as McGuire, but had a few lyrical changes to make it fit with Jan Berry's right-wing politics, most notably changing "Selma, Alabama" to "Watts, California", thus changing a reference to peaceful civil rights protestors being brutally attacked and murdered by white supremacist state troopers to a reference to what was seen, in the popular imaginary, as Black people rioting for no reason: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Eve of Destruction"] According to Sloan, he worked on the Folk & Roll album as a favour to Berry, even though he thought Berry was being cynical and exploitative in making the record, but those changes caused a rift in their friendship. Sloan said in his autobiography "Where I was completely wrong was in helping him capitalize on something in which he didn't believe. Jan wanted the public to perceive him as a person who was deeply concerned and who embraced the values of the progressive politics of the day. But he wasn't that person. That's how I was being pulled. It was when he recorded my actual song ‘Eve Of Destruction' and changed a number of lines to reflect his own ideals that my principles demanded that I leave Folk City and never return." It's true that Sloan gave no more songs to Jan and Dean after that point -- but it's also true that the duo would record only one more album, the comedy concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman, before Jan's accident. Incidentally, the reference to Selma, Alabama in the lyric might help people decide on which story about the writing of "Eve of Destruction" they think is more plausible. Remember that Lou Adler said that it was written after Adler gave Sloan a copy of Bringing it All Back Home and told him to write a bunch of knock-offs, while Sloan said it was written after a supernatural force gave him access to all the events that would happen in the world for the next sixty years. Sloan claimed the song was written in late 1964. Selma, Alabama, became national news in late February and early March 1965. Bringing it All Back Home was released in late March 1965. So either Adler was telling the truth, or Sloan really *was* given a supernatural insight into the events of the future. Now, as it turned out, while "Eve of Destruction" went to number one, that would be McGuire's only hit as a solo artist. His next couple of singles would reach the very low end of the Hot One Hundred, and that would be it -- he'd release several more albums, before appearing in the Broadway musical Hair, most famous for its nude scenes, and getting a small part in the cinematic masterpiece Werewolves on Wheels: [Excerpt: Werewolves on Wheels trailer] P.F. Sloan would later tell various stories about why McGuire never had another hit. Sometimes he would say that Dunhill Records had received death threats because of "Eve of Destruction" and so deliberately tried to bury McGuire's career, other times he would say that Lou Adler had told him that Billboard had said they were never going to put McGuire's records on the charts no matter how well they sold, because "Eve of Destruction" had just been too powerful and upset the advertisers. But of course at this time Dunhill were still trying for a follow-up to "Eve of Destruction", and they thought they might have one when Barry McGuire brought in a few friends of his to sing backing vocals on his second album. Now, we've covered some of the history of the Mamas and the Papas already, because they were intimately tied up with other groups like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful, and with the folk scene that led to songs like "Hey Joe", so some of this will be more like a recap than a totally new story, but I'm going to recap those parts of the story anyway, so it's fresh in everyone's heads. John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, and Cass Elliot all grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington DC. Elliot was a few years younger than Phillips and McKenzie, and so as is the way with young men they never really noticed her, and as McKenzie later said "She lived like a quarter of a mile from me and I never met her until New York". While they didn't know who Elliot was, though, she was aware who they were, as Phillips and McKenzie sang together in a vocal group called The Smoothies. The Smoothies were a modern jazz harmony group, influenced by groups like the Modernaires, the Hi-Los, and the Four Freshmen. John Phillips later said "We were drawn to jazz, because we were sort of beatniks, really, rather than hippies, or whatever, flower children. So we used to sing modern harmonies, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Dave Lambert did a lot of our arrangements for us as a matter of fact." Now, I've not seen any evidence other than Phillips' claim that Dave Lambert ever arranged for the Smoothies, but that does tell you a lot about the kind of music that they were doing. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were a vocalese trio whose main star was Annie Ross, who had a career worthy of an episode in itself -- she sang with Paul Whiteman, appeared in a Little Rascals film when she was seven, had an affair with Lenny Bruce, dubbed Britt Ekland's voice in The Wicker Man, played the villain's sister in Superman III, and much more. Vocalese, you'll remember, was a style of jazz vocal where a singer would take a jazz instrumental, often an improvised one, and add lyrics which they would sing, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' version of "Cloudburst": [Excerpt: Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Cloudburst"] Whether Dave Lambert ever really did arrange for the Smoothies or not, it's very clear that the trio had a huge influence on John Phillips' ideas about vocal arrangement, as you can hear on Mamas and Papas records like "Once Was a Time I Thought": [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Once Was a Time I Thought"] While the Smoothies thought of themselves as a jazz group, when they signed to Decca they started out making the standard teen pop of the era, with songs like "Softly": [Excerpt, The Smoothies, "Softly"] When the folk boom started, Phillips realised that this was music that he could do easily, because the level of musicianship among the pop-folk musicians was so much lower than in the jazz world. The Smoothies made some recordings in the style of the Kingston Trio, like "Ride Ride Ride": [Excerpt: The Smoothies, "Ride Ride Ride"] Then when the Smoothies split, Phillips and McKenzie formed a trio with a banjo player, Dick Weissman, who they met through Izzy Young's Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village after Phillips asked Young to name some musicians who could make a folk record with him. Weissman was often considered the best banjo player on the scene, and was a friend of Pete Seeger's, to whom Seeger sometimes turned for banjo tips. The trio, who called themselves the Journeymen, quickly established themselves on the folk scene. Weissman later said "we had this interesting balance. John had all of this charisma -- they didn't know about the writing thing yet -- John had the personality, Scott had the voice, and I could play. If you think about it, all of those bands like the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, nobody could really *sing* and nobody could really *play*, relatively speaking." This is the take that most people seemed to have about John Phillips, in any band he was ever in. Nobody thought he was a particularly good singer or instrumentalist -- he could sing on key and play adequate rhythm guitar, but nobody would actually pay money to listen to him do those things. Mark Volman of the Turtles, for example, said of him "John wasn't the kind of guy who was going to be able to go up on stage and sing his songs as a singer-songwriter. He had to put himself in the context of a group." But he was charismatic, he had presence, and he also had a great musical mind. He would surround himself with the best players and best singers he could, and then he would organise and arrange them in ways that made the most of their talents. He would work out the arrangements, in a manner that was far more professional than the quick head arrangements that other folk groups used, and he instigated a level of professionalism in his groups that was not at all common on the scene. Phillips' friend Jim Mason talked about the first time he saw the Journeymen -- "They were warming up backstage, and John had all of them doing vocal exercises; one thing in particular that's pretty famous called 'Seiber Syllables' -- it's a series of vocal exercises where you enunciate different vowel and consonant sounds. It had the effect of clearing your head, and it's something that really good operetta singers do." The group were soon signed by Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, who signed them as an insurance policy. Dave Guard, the Kingston Trio's banjo player, was increasingly having trouble with the other members, and Werber knew it was only a matter of time before he left the group. Werber wanted the Journeymen as a sort of farm team -- he had the idea that when Guard left, Phillips would join the Kingston Trio in his place as the third singer. Weissman would become the Trio's accompanist on banjo, and Scott McKenzie, who everyone agreed had a remarkable voice, would be spun off as a solo artist. But until that happened, they might as well make records by themselves. The Journeymen signed to MGM records, but were dropped before they recorded anything. They instead signed to Capitol, for whom they recorded their first album: [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "500 Miles"] After recording that album, the Journeymen moved out to California, with Phillips' wife and children. But soon Phillips' marriage was to collapse, as he met and fell in love with Michelle Gilliam. Gilliam was nine years younger than him -- he was twenty-six and she was seventeen -- and she had the kind of appearance which meant that in every interview with an older heterosexual man who knew her, that man will spend half the interview talking about how attractive he found her. Phillips soon left his wife and children, but before he did, the group had a turntable hit with "River Come Down", the B-side to "500 Miles": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "River Come Down"] Around the same time, Dave Guard *did* leave the Kingston Trio, but the plan to split the Journeymen never happened. Instead Phillips' friend John Stewart replaced Guard -- and this soon became a new source of income for Phillips. Both Phillips and Stewart were aspiring songwriters, and they collaborated together on several songs for the Trio, including "Chilly Winds": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Chilly Winds"] Phillips became particularly good at writing songs that sounded like they could be old traditional folk songs, sometimes taking odd lines from older songs to jump-start new ones, as in "Oh Miss Mary", which he and Stewart wrote after hearing someone sing the first line of a song she couldn't remember the rest of: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Oh Miss Mary"] Phillips and Stewart became so close that Phillips actually suggested to Stewart that he quit the Kingston Trio and replace Dick Weissman in the Journeymen. Stewart did quit the Trio -- but then the next day Phillips suggested that maybe it was a bad idea and he should stay where he was. Stewart went back to the Trio, claimed he had only pretended to quit because he wanted a pay-rise, and got his raise, so everyone ended up happy. The Journeymen moved back to New York with Michelle in place of Phillips' first wife (and Michelle's sister Russell also coming along, as she was dating Scott McKenzie) and on New Year's Eve 1962 John and Michelle married -- so from this point on I will refer to them by their first names, because they both had the surname Phillips. The group continued having success through 1963, including making appearances on "Hootenanny": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "Stack O'Lee (live on Hootenanny)"] By the time of the Journeymen's third album, though, John and Scott McKenzie were on bad terms. Weissman said "They had been the closest of friends and now they were the worst of enemies. They talked through me like I was a medium. It got to the point where we'd be standing in the dressing room and John would say to me 'Tell Scott that his right sock doesn't match his left sock...' Things like that, when they were standing five feet away from each other." Eventually, the group split up. Weissman was always going to be able to find employment given his banjo ability, and he was about to get married and didn't need the hassle of dealing with the other two. McKenzie was planning on a solo career -- everyone was agreed that he had the vocal ability. But John was another matter. He needed to be in a group. And not only that, the Journeymen had bookings they needed to complete. He quickly pulled together a group he called the New Journeymen. The core of the lineup was himself, Michelle on vocals, and banjo player Marshall Brickman. Brickman had previously been a member of a folk group called the Tarriers, who had had a revolving lineup, and had played on most of their early-sixties recordings: [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Quinto (My Little Pony)"] We've met the Tarriers before in the podcast -- they had been formed by Erik Darling, who later replaced Pete Seeger in the Weavers after Seeger's socialist principles wouldn't let him do advertising, and Alan Arkin, later to go on to be a film star, and had had hits with "Cindy, O Cindy", with lead vocals from Vince Martin, who would later go on to be a major performer in the Greenwich Village scene, and with "The Banana Boat Song". By the time Brickman had joined, though, Darling, Arkin, and Martin had all left the group to go on to bigger things, and while he played with them for several years, it was after their commercial peak. Brickman would, though, also go on to a surprising amount of success, but as a writer rather than a musician -- he had a successful collaboration with Woody Allen in the 1970s, co-writing four of Allen's most highly regarded films -- Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- and with another collaborator he later co-wrote the books for the stage musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Both John and Michelle were decent singers, and both have their admirers as vocalists -- P.F. Sloan always said that Michelle was the best singer in the group they eventually formed, and that it was her voice that gave the group its sound -- but for the most part they were not considered as particularly astonishing lead vocalists. Certainly, neither had a voice that stood out the way that Scott McKenzie's had. They needed a strong lead singer, and they found one in Denny Doherty. Now, we covered Denny Doherty's early career in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, because he was intimately involved in the formation of that group, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I'll give a very abbreviated version of what I said there. Doherty was a Canadian performer who had been a member of the Halifax Three with Zal Yanovsky: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Land"] After the Halifax Three had split up, Doherty and Yanovsky had performed as a duo for a while, before joining up with Cass Elliot and her husband Jim Hendricks, who both had previously been in the Big Three with Tim Rose: [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] Elliot, Hendricks, Yanovsky, and Doherty had formed The Mugwumps, sometimes joined by John Sebastian, and had tried to go in more of a rock direction after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They recorded one album together before splitting up: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] Part of the reason they split up was that interpersonal relationships within the group were put under some strain -- Elliot and Hendricks split up, though they would remain friends and remain married for several years even though they were living apart, and Elliot had an unrequited crush on Doherty. But since they'd split up, and Yanovsky and Sebastian had gone off to form the Lovin' Spoonful, that meant that Doherty was free, and he was regarded as possibly the best male lead vocalist on the circuit, so the group snapped him up. The only problem was that the Journeymen still had gigs booked that needed to be played, one of them was in just three days, and Doherty didn't know the repertoire. This was a problem with an easy solution for people in their twenties though -- they took a huge amount of amphetamines, and stayed awake for three days straight rehearsing. They made the gig, and Doherty was now the lead singer of the New Journeymen: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "The Last Thing on My Mind"] But the New Journeymen didn't last in that form for very long, because even before joining the group, Denny Doherty had been going in a more folk-rock direction with the Mugwumps. At the time, John Phillips thought rock and roll was kids' music, and he was far more interested in folk and jazz, but he was also very interested in making money, and he soon decided it was an idea to start listening to the Beatles. There's some dispute as to who first played the Beatles for John in early 1965 -- some claim it was Doherty, others claim it was Cass Elliot, but everyone agrees it was after Denny Doherty had introduced Phillips to something else -- he brought round some LSD for John and Michelle, and Michelle's sister Rusty, to try. And then he told them he'd invited round a friend. Michelle Phillips later remembered, "I remember saying to the guys "I don't know about you guys, but this drug does nothing for me." At that point there was a knock on the door, and as I opened the door and saw Cass, the acid hit me *over the head*. I saw her standing there in a pleated skirt, a pink Angora sweater with great big eyelashes on and her hair in a flip. And all of a sudden I thought 'This is really *quite* a drug!' It was an image I will have securely fixed in my brain for the rest of my life. I said 'Hi, I'm Michelle. We just took some LSD-25, do you wanna join us?' And she said 'Sure...'" Rusty Gilliam's description matches this -- "It was mind-boggling. She had on a white pleated skirt, false eyelashes. These were the kind of eyelashes that when you put them on you were supposed to trim them to an appropriate length, which she didn't, and when she blinked she looked like a cow, or those dolls you get when you're little and the eyes open and close. And we're on acid. Oh my God! It was a sight! And everything she was wearing were things that you weren't supposed to be wearing if you were heavy -- white pleated skirt, mohair sweater. You know, until she became famous, she suffered so much, and was poked fun at." This gets to an important point about Elliot, and one which sadly affected everything about her life. Elliot was *very* fat -- I've seen her weight listed at about three hundred pounds, and she was only five foot five tall -- and she also didn't have the kind of face that gets thought of as conventionally attractive. Her appearance would be cruelly mocked by pretty much everyone for the rest of her life, in ways that it's genuinely hurtful to read about, and which I will avoid discussing in detail in order to avoid hurting fat listeners. But the two *other* things that defined Elliot in the minds of those who knew her were her voice -- every single person who knew her talks about what a wonderful singer she was -- and her personality. I've read a lot of things about Cass Elliot, and I have never read a single negative word about her as a person, but have read many people going into raptures about what a charming, loving, friendly, understanding person she was. Michelle later said of her "From the time I left Los Angeles, I hadn't had a friend, a buddy. I was married, and John and I did not hang out with women, we just hung out with men, and especially not with women my age. John was nine years older than I was. And here was a fun-loving, intelligent woman. She captivated me. I was as close to in love with Cass as I could be to any woman in my life at that point. She also represented something to me: freedom. Everything she did was because she wanted to do it. She was completely independent and I admired her and was in awe of her. And later on, Cass would be the one to tell me not to let John run my life. And John hated her for that." Either Elliot had brought round Meet The Beatles, the Beatles' first Capitol album, for everyone to listen to, or Denny Doherty already had it, but either way Elliot and Doherty were by this time already Beatles fans. Michelle, being younger than the rest and not part of the folk scene until she met John, was much more interested in rock and roll than any of them, but because she'd been married to John for a couple of years and been part of his musical world she hadn't really encountered the Beatles music, though she had a vague memory that she might have heard a track or two on the radio. John was hesitant -- he didn't want to listen to any rock and roll, but eventually he was persuaded, and the record was put on while he was on his first acid trip: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"] Within a month, John Phillips had written thirty songs that he thought of as inspired by the Beatles. The New Journeymen were going to go rock and roll. By this time Marshall Brickman was out of the band, and instead John, Michelle, and Denny recruited a new lead guitarist, Eric Hord. Denny started playing bass, with John on rhythm guitar, and a violinist friend of theirs, Peter Pilafian, knew a bit of drums and took on that role. The new lineup of the group used the Journeymen's credit card, which hadn't been stopped even though the Journeymen were no more, to go down to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, along with Michelle's sister, John's daughter Mackenzie (from whose name Scott McKenzie had taken his stage name, as he was born Philip Blondheim), a pet dog, and sundry band members' girlfriends. They stayed there for several months, living in tents on the beach, taking acid, and rehearsing. While they were there, Michelle and Denny started an affair which would have important ramifications for the group later. They got a gig playing at a club called Duffy's, whose address was on Creeque Alley, and soon after they started playing there Cass Elliot travelled down as well -- she was in love with Denny, and wanted to be around him. She wasn't in the group, but she got a job working at Duffy's as a waitress, and she would often sing harmony with the group while waiting at tables. Depending on who was telling the story, either she didn't want to be in the group because she didn't want her appearance to be compared to Michelle's, or John wouldn't *let* her be in the group because she was so fat. Later a story would be made up to cover for this, saying that she hadn't been in the group at first because she couldn't sing the highest notes that were needed, until she got hit on the head with a metal pipe and discovered that it had increased her range by three notes, but that seems to be a lie. One of the songs the New Journeymen were performing at this time was "Mr. Tambourine Man". They'd heard that their old friend Roger McGuinn had recorded it with his new band, but they hadn't yet heard his version, and they'd come up with their own arrangement: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Denny later said "We were doing three-part harmony on 'Mr Tambourine Man', but a lot slower... like a polka or something! And I tell John, 'No John, we gotta slow it down and give it a backbeat.' Finally we get the Byrds 45 down here, and we put it on and turn it up to ten, and John says 'Oh, like that?' Well, as you can tell, it had already been done. So John goes 'Oh, ah... that's it...' a light went on. So we started doing Beatles stuff. We dropped 'Mr Tambourine Man' after hearing the Byrds version, because there was no point." Eventually they had to leave the island -- they had completely run out of money, and were down to fifty dollars. The credit card had been cut up, and the governor of the island had a personal vendetta against them because they gave his son acid, and they were likely to get arrested if they didn't leave the island. Elliot and her then-partner had round-trip tickets, so they just left, but the rest of them were in trouble. By this point they were unwashed, they were homeless, and they'd spent their last money on stage costumes. They got to the airport, and John Phillips tried to write a cheque for eight air fares back to the mainland, which the person at the check-in desk just laughed at. So they took their last fifty dollars and went to a casino. There Michelle played craps, and she rolled seventeen straight passes, something which should be statistically impossible. She turned their fifty dollars into six thousand dollars, which they scooped up, took to the airport, and paid for their flights out in cash. The New Journeymen arrived back in New York, but quickly decided that they were going to try their luck in California. They rented a car, using Scott McKenzie's credit card, and drove out to LA. There they met up with Hoyt Axton, who you may remember as the son of Mae Axton, the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel", and as the performer who had inspired Michael Nesmith to go into folk music: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] Axton knew the group, and fed them and put them up for a night, but they needed somewhere else to stay. They went to stay with one of Michelle's friends, but after one night their rented car was stolen, with all their possessions in it. They needed somewhere else to stay, so they went to ask Jim Hendricks if they could crash at his place -- and they were surprised to find that Cass Elliot was there already. Hendricks had another partner -- though he and Elliot wouldn't have their marriage annulled until 1968 and were still technically married -- but he'd happily invited her to stay with them. And now all her friends had turned up, he invited them to stay as well, taking apart the beds in his one-bedroom apartment so he could put down a load of mattresses in the space for everyone to sleep on. The next part becomes difficult, because pretty much everyone in the LA music scene of the sixties was a liar who liked to embellish their own roles in things, so it's quite difficult to unpick what actually happened. What seems to have happened though is that first this new rock-oriented version of the New Journeymen went to see Frank Werber, on the recommendation of John Stewart. Werber was the manager of the Kingston Trio, and had also managed the Journeymen. He, however, was not interested -- not because he didn't think they had talent, but because he had experience of working with John Phillips previously. When Phillips came into his office Werber picked up a tape that he'd been given of the group, and said "I have not had a chance to listen to this tape. I believe that you are a most talented individual, and that's why we took you on in the first place. But I also believe that you're also a drag to work with. A pain in the ass. So I'll tell you what, before whatever you have on here sways me, I'm gonna give it back to you and say that we're not interested." Meanwhile -- and this part of the story comes from Kim Fowley, who was never one to let the truth get in the way of him taking claim for everything, but parts of it at least are corroborated by other people -- Cass Elliot had called Fowley, and told him that her friends' new group sounded pretty good and he should sign them. Fowley was at that time working as a talent scout for a label, but according to him the label wouldn't give the group the money they wanted. So instead, Fowley got in touch with Nik Venet, who had just produced the Leaves' hit version of "Hey Joe" on Mira Records: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Fowley suggested to Venet that Venet should sign the group to Mira Records, and Fowley would sign them to a publishing contract, and they could both get rich. The trio went to audition for Venet, and Elliot drove them over -- and Venet thought the group had a great look as a quartet. He wanted to sign them to a record contract, but only if Elliot was in the group as well. They agreed, he gave them a one hundred and fifty dollar advance, and told them to come back the next day to see his boss at Mira. But Barry McGuire was also hanging round with Elliot and Hendricks, and decided that he wanted to have Lou Adler hear the four of them. He thought they might be useful both as backing vocalists on his second album and as a source of new songs. He got them to go and see Lou Adler, and according to McGuire Phillips didn't want Elliot to go with them, but as Elliot was the one who was friends with McGuire, Phillips worried that they'd lose the chance with Adler if she didn't. Adler was amazed, and decided to sign the group right then and there -- both Bones Howe and P.F. Sloan claimed to have been there when the group auditioned for him and have said "if you won't sign them, I will", though exactly what Sloan would have signed them to I'm not sure. Adler paid them three thousand dollars in cash and told them not to bother with Nik Venet, so they just didn't turn up for the Mira Records audition the next day. Instead, they went into the studio with McGuire and cut backing vocals on about half of his new album: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire with the Mamas and the Papas, "Hide Your Love Away"] While the group were excellent vocalists, there were two main reasons that Adler wanted to sign them. The first was that he found Michelle Phillips extremely attractive, and the second is a song that John and Michelle had written which he thought might be very suitable for McGuire's album. Most people who knew John Phillips think of "California Dreamin'" as a solo composition, and he would later claim that he gave Michelle fifty percent just for transcribing his lyric, saying he got inspired in the middle of the night, woke her up, and got her to write the song down as he came up with it. But Michelle, who is a credited co-writer on the song, has been very insistent that she wrote the lyrics to the second verse, and that it's about her own real experiences, saying that she would often go into churches and light candles even though she was "at best an agnostic, and possibly an atheist" in her words, and this would annoy John, who had also been raised Catholic, but who had become aggressively opposed to expressions of religion, rather than still having nostalgia for the aesthetics of the church as Michelle did. They were out walking on a particularly cold winter's day in 1963, and Michelle wanted to go into St Patrick's Cathedral and John very much did not want to. A couple of nights later, John woke her up, having written the first verse of the song, starting "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter's day", and insisting she collaborate with him. She liked the song, and came up with the lines "Stopped into a church, I passed along the way/I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray/The preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm going to stay", which John would later apparently dislike, but which stayed in the song. Most sources I've seen for the recording of "California Dreamin'" say that the lineup of musicians was the standard set of players who had played on McGuire's other records, with the addition of John Phillips on twelve-string guitar -- P.F. Sloan on guitar and harmonica, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Hal Blaine on drums, but for some reason Stephen McParland's book on Sloan has Bones Howe down as playing drums on the track while engineering -- a detail so weird, and from such a respectable researcher, that I have to wonder if it might be true. In his autobiography, Sloan claims to have rewritten the chord sequence to "California Dreamin'". He says "Barry Mann had unintentionally showed me a suspended chord back at Screen Gems. I was so impressed by this beautiful, simple chord that I called Brian Wilson and played it for him over the phone. The next thing I knew, Brian had written ‘Don't Worry Baby,' which had within it a number suspended chords. And then the chord heard 'round the world, two months later, was the opening suspended chord of ‘A Hard Day's Night.' I used these chords throughout ‘California Dreamin',' and more specifically as a bridge to get back and forth from the verse to the chorus." Now, nobody else corroborates this story, and both Brian Wilson and John Phillips had the kind of background in modern harmony that means they would have been very aware of suspended chords before either ever encountered Sloan, but I thought I should mention it. Rather more plausible is Sloan's other claim, that he came up with the intro to the song. According to Sloan, he was inspired by "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "Walk Don't Run"] And you can easily see how this: [plays "Walk Don't Run"] Can lead to this: [plays "California Dreamin'"] And I'm fairly certain that if that was the inspiration, it was Sloan who was the one who thought it up. John Phillips had been paying no attention to the world of surf music when "Walk Don't Run" had been a hit -- that had been at the point when he was very firmly in the folk world, while Sloan of course had been recording "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'", and it had been his job to know surf music intimately. So Sloan's intro became the start of what was intended to be Barry McGuire's next single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] Sloan also provided the harmonica solo on the track: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] The Mamas and the Papas -- the new name that was now given to the former New Journeymen, now they were a quartet -- were also signed to Dunhill as an act on their own, and recorded their own first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song apparently written by John about Michelle, in late 1963, after she had briefly left him to have an affair with Russ Titelman, the record producer and songwriter, before coming back to him: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] But while that was put out, they quickly decided to scrap it and go with another song. The "Go Where You Wanna Go" single was pulled after only selling a handful of copies, though its commercial potential was later proved when in 1967 a new vocal group, the 5th Dimension, released a soundalike version as their second single. The track was produced by Lou Adler's client Johnny Rivers, and used the exact same musicians as the Mamas and the Papas version, with the exception of Phillips. It became their first hit, reaching number sixteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The 5th Dimension, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] The reason the Mamas and the Papas version of "Go Where You Wanna Go" was pulled was because everyone became convinced that their first single should instead be their own version of "California Dreamin'". This is the exact same track as McGuire's track, with just two changes. The first is that McGuire's lead vocal was replaced with Denny Doherty: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Though if you listen to the stereo mix of the song and isolate the left channel, you can hear McGuire singing the lead on the first line, and occasional leakage from him elsewhere on the backing vocal track: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] The other change made was to replace Sloan's harmonica solo with an alto flute solo by Bud Shank, a jazz musician who we heard about in the episode on "Light My Fire", when he collaborated with Ravi Shankar on "Improvisations on the Theme From Pather Panchali": [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] Shank was working on another session in Western Studios, where they were recording the Mamas and Papas track, and Bones Howe approached him while he was packing his instrument and asked if he'd be interested in doing another session. Shank agreed, though the track caused problems for him. According to Shank "What had happened was that whe

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Instagram Reels It In

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 8, 2022 20:46

Instagram walks back its controversial platform changes, Facebook reports a drop in revenue for the first time, TikTok is planning a TikTok Music app and more on this week's #5Things! The Things: Facebook reports drop in revenue for the first time Snapchat announces Snapchat Sounds Creator Fund TikTok reportedly to develop TikTok Music app Instagram walks back platform changes YouTube's making it easier for creators to turn longer content into Shorts Sources: Platformer, The Verge, Snap.com Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce, Jourdain Patrick To subscribe to our newsletter, please enter your email HERE

Influencing Instagram

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2022 18:26

Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri responds to backlash over the platform's shift to video, Meta launches an updated Facebook feed format, Gen-Z becomes the first generation to see a decreasing use of social media and more on this week's #5Things! The Things: Instagram's Chief Details App's Shift to Video Meta Launches Updated Facebook Feed Format TikTok Is the Fastest Growing Source of News for Adults in the UK Twitter Shares New Insights Into the Rise of Health and Wellness Discussion Gen Z Shapes New Social Media Era Sources: The Verge, Social Media Today, Axios Hosts: Amanda Davis, Tommy Boyce, Khaila Sloan To subscribe to our newsletter, please enter your email HERE

The TikTok Tapes

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2022 22:33

Buzzfeed releases “The TikTok Tapes,” Elon Musk Outlines his final steps needed to finish the Twitter acquisition deal, Snapchat is developing a “Snapchat+” subscription service and more on this week's #5Things! The Things: The TikTok Tapes Elon Musk Outlines Final Steps Required to Finish Twitter Deal Snapchat Developing a New ‘Snapchat+' Subscription Service Offering Exclusive New Features Instagram Testing Full-Screen Video Viewing Meta Launches New Creator Monetization Initiatives, Including More Reels Payments and NFTs Sources: Buzzfeed, Social Media Week, The Verge Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce, Julie Bentley To subscribe to our newsletter, please enter your email HERE! Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com Choice.crd.co

Pride Edition 2022

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2022 38:34

Pride has grown and evolved considerably since its origin as a riot against Police brutality at The Stonewall Inn in 1969 New York. It's the time when the queer community as at its most visible, a monthly focal point for us to come together and celebrate the accomplishments that we have made as well as the found family we have forged. But our fight is not over. Queer and especially trans people are under attack both in the U.S. where 240+ anti-queer bills have been passed in 2022 alone, and in the U.K. where trans people are continually fighting for equal rights and healthcare. That is why this week we are bringing you a special #5Things episode that dives into the meaning of Pride, how we can practice allyship to the queer community, and where Pride evolves from now. Tommy Boyce speaks with Graham Nolan, Bee Pahnke and Asad Shaykh about #5Things you should be thinking about during Pride month this year: Why do we have Pride campaigns? How has Pride changed? How do we discuss and practice allyship? How should Pride evolve? What does Pride mean to you? Host: Tommy Boyce (Grey NY) Panel: Graham Nolan (Do the WeRQ), Bee Pahnke (Grey London) and Asad Shaykh (Grey London and Pride in London) Resources: The History of Pride in America, Anti LGBT+ Legislation in America, Anti-Trans Legislation in the U.K. To subscribe to our newsletter, please enter your email HERE! Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com

Tik Tok Toe

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2022 24:28

Tik Tok Toe, it's three in a row! TikTok launches a creator crediting tool, Instagram tests new reaction tools to stories, Twitter adds Super Follower exclusive spaces to their existing feature and more on this week's #5Things! The Things: TikTok announces plans for celebrating LGBTQIA+ community for pride month TikTok launches creator crediting tool TikTok Publishes New Report on the Benefits of an Integrated Media Strategy to Boost Brand Messaging Instagram tests new reaction tools to reels and stories Twitter Launches Super Follower Only Spaces as it Builds on its Creator Monetization Options Sources: TikTok, Social Media Today Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce, Jourdain Patrick To subscribe to our newsletter, please enter your email HERE! Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com

5 Takeaways from Social Media Week

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Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2022 23:33

This week, we introduce Julie Bentley, as she provides her five biggest takeaways from Social Media Week: A huge focus on creators NFTs as it relates to social media The idea of DAOs as frameworks for content ownership Shift community, and what that means for brands today A focus on creators points of view of authenticity Hosts: Amanda Davis, Tommy Boyce and Julie Bentley Note: There will be no show next week, but feel free to recap while you're at the beach or on the road while headed out of town. Email: Podcasts@Grey.com

The Sun Sets on Facebook Podcasts

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Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2022 23:00

Facebook unfriends its podcast platform, Instagram expands Reels to 90 seconds, Twitter tests a “close-friends” feature and more on this week's #5Things! The Things: Facebook Shutting Down Podcast Platform After Less Than One Year Twitter Testing “Close-Friends" Twitter Circle Feature Snapchat Shares New Insights into the Potential for Brands to Connect with Audiences in the App Instagram Expands Live Testing of 90 Second Reels YouTube Live Introduces LiveRedirect Feature Sources: The Verge, Social Media Today, and Snapchat Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce and Jourdain Patrick Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com

Twitter SOLD

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Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2022 19:11

Elon Musk turned his sights from Mars to Twitter, purchasing the platform for $44 billion! Find out about this development as well as LinkedIn's engagement growth, Reddit Ads' potential and more on this week's #5Things! The Things: Elon Musk Buys Twitter for $44 Billion Reddit Shares New Insights into the Potential of Reddit Ads Twitter Reportedly Working on a Vibe Check Feature LinkedIn Continues to See ‘Record Levels' of Engagement, Revenue Up 34% Snapchat Adds 13 Million Users in Q1 with Steady Revenue Increase Sources: The Verge, Reddit and Social Media Today Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Amanda Davis and Tommy Boyce

5 Takeaways from SXSW

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2022 28:16

This week is our first ever LIVE episode in front of an audience! Our resident emerging tech expert, Amanda Davis, spent 5 days in Austin, TX at SXSW and brought back the biggest takeaways: Digital events will supplement physical events, not cannibalize them. Mixed Reality is (finally) finding its stride. NFT's have officially moved beyond "speculative value propositions." Web3 is deeply impacting the future of brand-building. Gaming and Social are merging to create an un-ignorable Metaverse. Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Amanda Davis, Tommy Boyce and introducing Khaila Sloan

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(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2022 124:15

Back to the mean stuff this week: a quartet of versions of "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone"! Step one: we can have lots of fun with Paul Revere & the Raiders' 1966 original (2:13) Grave-digger riffs galore, FUZZ bass, crucial organ, snappy snare sounds, and vocals by the Human Exclamation Mark! - Mark Lindsay - make this one a winner. There's so much to do with Step 2 - another version from '66 by The Liverpool Five (49:12). The guitar produces volume swells and squalls, a "Green Onions" riff emerges out of the sonic stew - and riffs, reverb, and R&B a-plenty. It's a little bit you and a little bit me with Step 3 - The Monkees and their well-known hit version from 1967 (1:12:56). No fuzz? Dolenz's dulcet tones? This one gets its mean genes from some Boyce-terous backing vocals by the song's co-writer, Tommy Boyce. And one more with Step 4 - another '66er from British freakbeat merchants The Flies (1:41:18). This one's slooooooow, heavy, and loud - with shades of "Purple Haze"?!?! Check out the weird jazz-scat section, and the snaky sibliance from the singer. You'll be walkin' round like you're front page news!!

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Introducing "Famously Online"

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2022 13:28

We have a special mid-week drop in the feed because Grey is launching a new podcast with #5Things' very own, Tommy Boyce called Famously Online. Today we are featuring the pilot episode, Caught a Vibe Shift: Trend Forecasting & Gen-Z Versus Millennials In this week's Famously Online Tommy is joined by Brandon Solis, the Director of Social & Communications at Grey, to discuss ideas put forth in the article “A Vibe Shift Is Coming Will any of us survive it?” The two talk all things indie-sleaze, tensions between Gen-Z and Millennials, and the importance of keeping up cultural trends and wavelengths. All this and more on Famously Online, the show that makes micro culture matter. We'll be back on Monday with a regularly scheduled, and equally special episode of the #5Things.

The White House Taps TikTok

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2022 18:19

The White House briefs TikTok users on the war in Ukraine, Instagram launches a new moderator option for live streams, Pinterest allows pinners to share Idea Pins on other platforms and more on this week's #5Things! The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine Twitter Reverses Decision to Put Users in Algorithmic Timeline Automatically Instagram Launches New Moderator Option for IG Live Streams TikTok Shares Tips on how to Maximize Branded Content on their Platform - Link to Study Pinterest Now Allows Users to Share Idea Pins on Other Platforms Sources: WaPo, The Verge, Social Media Today Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce, Amanda Davis

Episode 144: “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2022

Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville" and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a seventeen-minute bonus episode available, on "These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra, which I mispronounce at the end of this episode as "These Boots Were Made For Walking", so no need to correct me here. 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, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, the only one of those that is still in print is More of the Monkees. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book last year, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters -- Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've obviously talked in this podcast about several of the biggest hits of 1966 already, but we haven't mentioned the biggest hit of the year, one of the strangest records ever to make number one in the US -- "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by Sgt Barry Sadler: [Excerpt: Barry Sadler, "The Ballad of the Green Berets"] Barry Sadler was an altogether odd man, and just as a brief warning his story, which will last a minute or so, involves gun violence. At the time he wrote and recorded that song, he was on active duty in the military -- he was a combat medic who'd been fighting in the Vietnam War when he'd got a wound that had meant he had to be shipped back to the USA, and while at Fort Bragg he decided to write and record a song about his experiences, with the help of Robin Moore, a right-wing author of military books, both fiction and nonfiction, who wrote the books on which the films The Green Berets and The French Connection were based. Sadler's record became one of those massive fluke hits, selling over nine million copies and getting him appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, but other than one top thirty hit, he never had another hit single. Instead, he tried and failed to have a TV career, then became a writer of pulp fiction himself, writing a series of twenty-one novels about the centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus' side when Jesus was being crucified, and is thus cursed to be a soldier until the second coming. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived until he shot Lee Emerson, a country songwriter who had written songs for Marty Robbins, in the head, killing him, in an argument over a woman. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail for this misdemeanour, of which he served twenty-eight. Later he moved to Guatemala City, where he was himself shot in the head. The nearest Army base to Nashville, where Sadler lived after his discharge, is Fort Campbell, in Clarksville: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The Vietnam War was a long and complicated war, one which affected nearly everything we're going to see in the next year or so of this podcast, and we're going to talk about it a lot, so it's worth giving a little bit of background here. In doing so, I'm going to use quite a flippant tone, but I want to make it clear that I'm not mocking the very real horrors that people suffered in the wars I'm talking about -- it's just that to sum up multiple decades of unimaginable horrors in a few sentences requires glossing over so much that you have to either laugh or cry. The origin of the Vietnam War, as in so many things in twentieth century history, can be found in European colonialism. France had invaded much of Southeast Asia in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and created a territory known as French Indo-China, which became part of the French colonial Empire. But in 1940 France was taken over by Germany, and Japan was at war with China. Germany and Japan were allies, and the Japanese were worried that French Indo-China would be used to import fuel and arms to China -- plus, they quite fancied the idea of having a Japanese empire. So Vichy France let Japan take control of French Indo-China. But of course the *reason* that France had been taken over by Germany was that pretty much the whole world was at war in 1940, and obviously the countries that were fighting Germany and Japan -- the bloc led by Britain, soon to be joined by America and Russia -- weren't very keen on the idea of Japan getting more territory. But they were also busy with the whole "fighting a world war" thing, so they did what governments in this situation always do -- they funded local guerilla insurgent fighters on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", something that has luckily never had any negative consequences whatsoever, except for occasionally. Those local guerilla fighters were an anti-imperialist popular front, the Việt Minh, led by Hồ Chí Minh, a revolutionary Communist. They were dedicated to overthrowing foreign imperialist occupiers and gaining independence for Vietnam, and Hồ Chí Minh further wanted to establish a Soviet-style Communist government in the newly-independent country. The Allies funded the Việt Minh in their fight against the Japanese occupiers until the end of the Second World War, at which point France was liberated from German occupation, Vietnam was liberated from Japanese occupation, and the French basically said "Hooray! We get our Empire back!", to which Hồ Chí Minh's response was, more or less, "what part of anti-imperialist Marxist dedicated to overthrowing foreign occupation of Vietnam did you not understand, exactly?" Obviously, the French weren't best pleased with this, and so began what was the first of a series of wars in the region. The First Indochina War lasted for years and ended in a negotiated peace of a sort. Of course, this led to the favoured tactic of the time, partition -- splitting a formerly-occupied country into two, at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried. Apart from Ireland, India, Korea, and a few other places, but surely it wouldn't be a problem in Vietnam, right? North Vietnam was controlled by the Communists, led by Hồ Chí Minh, and recognised by China and the USSR but not by the Western states. South Vietnam was nominally independent but led by the former puppet emperor who owed his position to France, soon replaced by a right-wing dictatorship. And both the right-wing dictatorship and the left-wing dictatorship were soon busily oppressing their own citizens and funding military opposition groups in the other country. This soon escalated into full-blown war, with the North backed by China and Russia and the South backed by America. This was one of a whole series of wars in small countries which were really proxy wars between the two major powers, the USA and the USSR, both of which were vying for control, but which couldn't confront each other directly because either country had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world multiple times over. But the Vietnam War quickly became more than a small proxy war. The US started sending its own troops over, and more and more of them. The US had never ended the draft after World War II, and by the mid sixties significant numbers of young men were being called up and sent over to fight in a war that had by that point lasted a decade (depending on exactly when you count the war as starting from) between two countries they didn't care about, over things few of them understood, and at an exorbitant cost in lives. As you might imagine, this started to become unpopular among those likely to be drafted, and as the people most affected (other, of course, than the Vietnamese people, whose opinions on being bombed and shot at by foreigners supporting one of other of the dictators vying to rule over them nobody else was much interested in) were also of the generation who were the main audience for popular music, slowly this started to seep into the lyrics of songs -- a seepage which had already been prompted by the appearance in the folk and soul worlds of many songs against other horrors, like segregation. This started to hit the pop charts with songs like "The Universal Soldier" by Buffy Saint-Marie, which made the UK top five in a version by Donovan: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Universal Soldier"] That charted in the lower regions of the US charts, and a cover version by Glen Campbell did slightly better: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "The Universal Soldier"] That was even though Campbell himself was a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and rather pro-military. Meanwhile, as we've seen a couple of times, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean recorded a pro-war answer song to that, "The Universal Coward": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] This, of course, was even though Berry was himself avoiding the draft. And I've not been able to find the credits for that track, but Glen Campbell regularly played guitar on Berry's sessions, so it's entirely possible that he played guitar on that record made by a coward, attacking his own record, which he disagreed with, for its cowardice. This is, of course, what happens when popular culture tries to engage with social and political issues -- pop culture is motivated by money, not ideological consistency, and so if there's money to be made from anti-war songs or from pro-war songs, someone will take that money. And so on October the ninth 1965, Billboard magazine ran a report: "Colpix Enters Protest Field HOLLYWOOD -Colpix has secured its first protest lyric disk, "The Willing Conscript,"as General Manager Bud Katzel initiates relationships with independent producers. The single features Lauren St. Davis. Katzel says the song was written during the Civil War, rewritten during World War I and most recently updated by Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe. Screen Gems Music, the company's publishing wing, is tracing the song's history, Katzel said. Katzel's second single is "(You Got the Gamma Goochee" by an artist with that unusual stage name. The record is a Screen Gems production and was in the house when Katzel arrived one month ago. The executive said he was expressly looking for material for two contract artists, David Jones and Hoyt Axton. The company is also working on getting Axton a role in a television series, "Camp Runamuck." " To unpack this a little, Colpix was a record label, owned by Columbia Pictures, and we talked about that a little bit in the episode on "The Loco-Motion" -- the film and TV companies were getting into music, and Columbia had recently bought up Don Kirshner's Aldon publishing and Dimension Records as part of their strategy of tying in music with their TV shows. This is a company trying desperately to jump on a bandwagon -- Colpix at this time was not exactly having huge amounts of success with its records. Hoyt Axton, meanwhile, was a successful country singer and songwriter. We met his mother many episodes back -- Mae Axton was the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel". Axton himself is now best known as the dad in the 80s film Gremlins. David Jones will be coming up shortly. Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe were record executives then at Kama Sutra records, but soon to move on -- we'll be hearing about Krasnow more in future episodes. Neither of them were songwriters, and while I have no real reason to disbelieve the claim that "The Willing Conscript" dates back to the Civil War, the earliest version *I* have been able to track down was its publication in issue 28 of Broadside Magazine in June 1963 -- nearly a hundred years after the American Civil War -- with the credit "by Tom Paxton" -- Paxton was a popular singer-songwriter of the time, and it certainly sounds like his writing. The first recording of it I know of was by Pete Seeger: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger, "The Willing Conscript"] But the odd thing is that by the time this was printed, the single had already been released the previous month, and it was not released under the name Lauren St Davis, or under the title "The Willing Conscript" -- there are precisely two differences between the song copyrighted as by Krasnow and Ashe and the one copyrighted two years earlier as by Paxton. One is that verses three and four are swapped round, the other is that it's now titled "The New Recruit". And presumably because they realised that the pseudonym "Lauren St. Davis" was trying just a bit too hard to sound cool and drug culture, they reverted to another stage name the performer had been using, Michael Blessing: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "The New Recruit"] Blessing's name was actually Michael Nesmith, and before we go any further, yes his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, did invent the product that later became marketed in the US as Liquid Paper. At this time, though, that company wasn't anywhere near as successful as it later became, and was still a tiny company. I only mention it to forestall the ten thousand comments and tweets I would otherwise get asking why I didn't mention it. In Nesmith's autobiography, while he talks a lot about his mother, he barely mentions her business and says he was uninterested in it -- he talks far more about the love of art she instilled in him, as well as her interest in the deep questions of philosophy and religion, to which in her case and his they found answers in Christian Science, but both were interested in conversations about ideas, in a way that few other people in Nesmith's early environment were. Nesmith's mother was also responsible for his music career. He had spent two years in the Air Force in his late teens, and the year he got out, his mother and stepfather bought him a guitar for Christmas, after he was inspired by seeing Hoyt Axton performing live and thinking he could do that himself: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] As he put it in his autobiography, "What did it matter that I couldn't play the guitar, couldn't sing very well, and didn't know any folk songs? I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs. They would like me. I might even figure out a way to get a cool car." This is, of course, the thought process that pretty much every young man to pick up a guitar goes through, but Nesmith was more dedicated than most. He gave his first performance as a folk singer ten days after he first got a guitar, after practising the few chords in most folk songs for twelve hours a day every day in that time. He soon started performing as a folk singer, performing around Dallas both on his own and with his friend John London, performing the standard folk repertoire of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, things like "Pick a Bale of Cotton": [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "Pick a Bale of Cotton"] He also started writing his own songs, and put out a vanity record of one of them in 1963: [Excerpt: Mike Nesmith, "Wanderin'"] London moved to California, and Nesmith soon followed, with his first wife Phyllis and their son Christian. There Nesmith and London had the good fortune to be neighbours with someone who was a business associate of Frankie Laine, and they were signed to Laine's management company as a folk duo. However, Nesmith's real love was rock and roll, especially the heavier R&B end of the genre -- he was particularly inspired by Bo Diddley, and would always credit seeing Diddley live as a teenager as being his biggest musical influence. Soon Nesmith and London had formed a folk-rock trio with their friend Bill Sleeper. As Mike & John & Bill, they put out a single, "How Can You Kiss Me?", written by Nesmith: [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, "How Can You Kiss Me?"] They also recorded more of Nesmith's songs, like "All the King's Horses": [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, "All the King's Horses"] But that was left unreleased, as Bill was drafted, and Nesmith and London soon found themselves in The Survivors, one of several big folk groups run by Randy Sparks, the founder of the New Christie Minstrels. Nesmith was also writing songs throughout 1964 and 1965, and a few of those songs would be recorded by other people in 1966, like "Different Drum", which was recorded by the bluegrass band The Greenbriar Boys: [Excerpt: The Greenbriar Boys, "Different Drum"] That would more successfully be recorded by the Stone Poneys later of course. And Nesmith's "Mary Mary" was also picked up by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] But while Nesmith had written these songs by late 1965, he wasn't able to record them himself. He was signed by Bob Krasnow, who insisted he change his name to Michael Blessing, and recorded two singles for Colpix -- "The New Recruit", which we heard earlier, and a version of Buffy Saint-Marie's "Until It's Time For You To Go", sung in a high tenor range very far from Nesmith's normal singing voice: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "Until It's Time For You To Go"] But to my mind by far the best thing Nesmith recorded in this period is the unissued third Michael Blessing single, where Nesmith seems to have been given a chance to make the record he really wanted to make. The B-side, a version of Allen Toussaint's swamp-rocker "Get Out of My Life, Woman", is merely a quite good version of the song, but the A-side, a version of his idol Bo Diddley's classic "Who Do You Love?" is utterly extraordinary, and it's astonishing that it was never released at the time: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "Who Do You Love?"] But the Michael Blessing records did no better than anything else Colpix were putting out. Indeed, the only record they got onto the hot one hundred at all in a three and a half year period was a single by one David Jones, which reached the heady heights of number ninety-eight: [Excerpt: David Jones, "What Are We Going to Do?"] Jones had been brought up in extreme poverty in Openshaw in Manchester, but had been encouraged by his mother, who died when he was fourteen, to go into acting. He'd had a few parts on local radio, and had appeared as a child actor on TV shows made in Manchester, like appearing in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street (still on today) as Ena Sharples' grandson Colin: [Excerpt: Coronation St https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FDEvOs1imc , 13:30] He also had small roles in Z-Cars and Bill Naughton's TV play "June Evening", and a larger role in Keith Waterhouse's radio play "There is a Happy Land". But when he left school, he decided he was going to become a jockey rather than an actor -- he was always athletic, he loved horses, and he was short -- I've seen his height variously cited as five foot three and five foot four. But it turned out that the owner of the stables in which he was training had showbusiness connections, and got him the audition that changed his life, for the part of the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart's West End musical Oliver! We've encountered Lionel Bart before a couple of times, but if you don't remember him, he was the songwriter who co-wrote Tommy Steele's hits, and who wrote "Living Doll" for Cliff Richard. He also discovered both Steele and Marty Wilde, and was one of the major figures in early British rock and roll. But after the Tommy Steele records, he'd turned his attention to stage musicals, writing book, music, and lyrics for a string of hits, and more-or-less singlehandedly inventing the modern British stage musical form -- something Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, always credits him with. Oliver!, based on Oliver Twist, was his biggest success, and they were looking for a new Artful Dodger. This was *the* best role for a teenage boy in the UK at the time -- later performers to take the role on the London stage include Steve Marriott and Phil Collins, both of whom we'll no doubt encounter in future episodes -- and Jones got the job, although they were a bit worried at first about his Manchester vowels. He assured them though that he could learn to do a Cockney accent, and they took him on. Jones not having a natural Cockney accent ended up doing him the biggest favour of his career. While he could put on a relatively convincing one, he articulated quite carefully because it wasn't his natural accent. And so when the North American version found in previews that their real Cockney Dodger wasn't being understood perfectly, the fake Cockney Jones was brought over to join the show on Broadway, and was there from opening night on. On February the ninth, 1964, Jones found himself, as part of the Broadway cast of Oliver!, on the Ed Sullivan Show: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Georgia Brown, "I'd Do Anything"] That same night, there were some other British people, who got a little bit more attention than Jones did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on Ed Sullivan)"] Davy Jones wasn't a particular fan of pop music at that point, but he knew he liked what he saw, and he wanted some of the same reaction. Shortly after this, Jones was picked up for management by Ward Sylvester, of Columbia Pictures, who was going to groom Jones for stardom. Jones continued in Oliver! for a while, and also had a brief run in a touring version of Pickwick, another musical based on a Dickens novel, this time starring Harry Secombe, the British comedian and singer who had made his name with the Goon Show. Jones' first single, "Dream Girl", came out in early 1965: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "Dream Girl"] It was unsuccessful, as was his one album, David Jones, which seemed to be aiming at the teen idol market, but failing miserably. The second single, "What Are We Going to Do?" did make the very lowest regions of the Hot One Hundred, but the rest of the album was mostly attempts to sound a bit like Herman's Hermits -- a band whose lead singer, coincidentally, also came from Manchester, had appeared in Coronation Street, and was performing with a fake Cockney accent. Herman's Hermits had had a massive US hit with the old music hall song "I'm Henry VIII I Am": [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] So of course Davy had his own old music-hall song, "Any Old Iron": [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "Any Old Iron"] Also, the Turtles had recently had a hit with a folk-rock version of Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe", and Davy cut his own version of their arrangement, in the one concession to rock music on the album: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The album was, unsurprisingly, completely unsuccessful, but Ward Sylvester was not disheartened. He had the perfect job for a young British teen idol who could sing and act. The Monkees was the brainchild of two young TV producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who had come up with the idea of doing a TV show very loosely based on the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night (though Rafelson would later claim that he'd had the idea many years before A Hard Day's Night and was inspired by his youth touring with folk bands -- Schneider always admitted the true inspiration though). This was not a particularly original idea -- there were a whole bunch of people trying to make TV shows based in some way around bands. Jan and Dean were working on a possible TV series, there was talk of a TV series starring The Who, there was a Beatles cartoon series, Hanna-Barbera were working on a cartoon series about a band called The Bats, and there was even another show proposed to Screen Gems, Columbia's TV department, titled Liverpool USA, which was meant to star Davy Jones, another British performer, and two American musicians, and to have songs provided by Don Kirshner's songwriters. That The Monkees, rather than these other series, was the one that made it to the TV (though obviously the Beatles cartoon series did too) is largely because Rafelson and Schneider's independent production company, Raybert, which they had started after leaving Screen Gems, was given two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to develop the series by their former colleague, Screen Gems' vice president in charge of programme development, the former child star Jackie Cooper. Of course, as well as being their former colleague, Cooper may have had some more incentive to give Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider that money in that the head of Columbia Pictures, and thus Cooper's boss' boss, was one Abe Schneider. The original idea for the show was to use the Lovin' Spoonful, but as we heard last week they weren't too keen, and it was quickly decided instead that the production team would put together a group of performers. Davy Jones was immediately attached to the project, although Rafelson was uncomfortable with Jones, thinking he wasn't as rock and roll as Rafelson was hoping for -- he later conceded, though, that Jones was absolutely right for the group. As for everyone else, to start with Rafelson and Schneider placed an ad in a couple of the trade papers which read "Madness!! Auditions Folk and Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys ages 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank's types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview" There were a couple of dogwhistles in there, to appeal to the hip crowd -- Ben Frank's was a twenty-four-hour restaurant on the Sunset Strip, where people including Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison used to hang out, and which was very much associated with the freak scene we've looked at in episodes on Zappa and the Byrds. Meanwhile "Must come down for interview" was meant to emphasise that you couldn't actually be high when you turned up -- but you were expected to be the kind of person who would at least at some points have been high. A lot of people answered that ad -- including Paul Williams, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, and many more we'll be seeing along the way. But oddly, the only person actually signed up for the show because of that ad was Michael Nesmith -- who was already signed to Colpix Records anyway. According to Davy Jones, who was sitting in at the auditions, Schneider and Rafelson were deliberately trying to disorient the auditioners with provocative behaviour like just ignoring them, to see how they'd react. Nesmith was completely unfazed by this, and apparently walked in wearing a green wool hat and carrying a bag of laundry, saying that he needed to get this over with quickly so he could go and do his washing. John London, who came along to the audition as well, talked later about seeing Nesmith fill in a questionnaire that everyone had to fill in -- in a space asking about previous experience Nesmith just wrote "Life" and drew a big diagonal line across the rest of the page. That attitude certainly comes across in Nesmith's screen test: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith screen test] Meanwhile, Rafelson and Schneider were also scouring the clubs for performers who might be useful, and put together a shortlist of people including Jerry Yester and Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, Bill Chadwick, who was in the Survivors with Nesmith and London, and one Micky Braddock, whose agent they got in touch with and who was soon signed up. Braddock was the stage name of Micky Dolenz, who soon reverted to his birth surname, and it's the name by which he went in his first bout of fame. Dolenz was the son of two moderately successful Hollywood actors, George Dolenz and Janelle Johnson, and their connections had led to Dolenz, as Braddock, getting the lead role in the 1958 TV series Circus Boy, about a child named Corky who works in a circus looking after an elephant after his parents, the Flying Falcons, were killed in a trapeze accident. [Excerpt: Circus Boy, "I can't play a drum"] Oddly, one of the other people who had been considered for that role was Paul Williams, who was also considered for the Monkees but ultimately turned down, and would later write one of the Monkees' last singles. Dolenz had had a few minor TV appearances after that series had ended, including a recurring role on Peyton Place, but he had also started to get interested in music. He'd performed a bit as a folk duo with his sister Coco, and had also been the lead singer of a band called Micky and the One-Nighters, who later changed their name to the Missing Links, who'd played mostly covers of Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs and later British Invasion hits. He'd also recorded two tracks with Wrecking Crew backing, although neither track got released until after his later fame -- "Don't Do It": [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Don't Do It"] and "Huff Puff": [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Huff Puff"] Dolenz had a great singing voice, an irrepressible personality, and plenty of TV experience. He was obviously in. Rafelson and Schneider took quite a while whittling down the shortlist to the final four, and they *were* still considering people who'd applied through the ads. One they actually offered the role to was Stephen Stills, but he decided not to take the role. When he turned the role down, they asked if he knew anyone else who had a similar appearance to him, and as it happened he did. Steve Stills and Peter Tork had known of each other before they actually met on the streets of Greenwich Village -- the way they both told the story, on their first meeting they'd each approached the other and said "You must be the guy everyone says looks like me!" The two had become fast friends, and had played around the Greenwich Village folk scene together for a while, before going their separate ways -- Stills moving to California while Tork joined another of those big folk ensembles of the New Christie Minstrels type, this one called the Phoenix Singers. Tork had later moved to California himself, and reconnected with his old friend, and they had performed together for a while in a trio called the Buffalo Fish, with Tork playing various instruments, singing, and doing comedy bits. Oddly, while Tork was the member of the Monkees with the most experience as a musician, he was the only one who hadn't made a record when the TV show was put together. But he was by far the most skilled instrumentalist of the group -- as distinct from best musician, a distinction Tork was always scrupulous about making -- and could play guitar, bass, and keyboards, all to a high standard -- and I've also seen him in more recent years play French horn live. His great love, though, was the banjo, and you can hear how he must have sounded on the Greenwich Village folk scene in his solo spots on Monkees shows, where he would show off his banjo skills: [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Cripple Creek"] Tork wouldn't get to use his instrumental skills much at first though, as most of the backing tracks for the group's records were going to be performed by other people. More impressive for the TV series producers was his gift for comedy, especially physical comedy -- having seen Tork perform live a few times, the only comparison I can make to his physical presence is to Harpo Marx, which is about as high a compliment as one can give. Indeed, Micky Dolenz has often pointed out that while there were intentional parallels to the Beatles in the casting of the group, the Marx Brothers are a far better parallel, and it's certainly easy to see Tork as Harpo, Dolenz as Chico, Nesmith as Groucho, and Jones as Zeppo. (This sounds like an insult to Jones, unless you're aware of how much the Marx Brothers films actually depended on Zeppo as the connective tissue between the more outrageous brothers and the more normal environment they were operating in, and how much the later films suffered for the lack of Zeppo). The new cast worked well together, even though there were obvious disagreements between them right from the start. Dolenz, at least at this point, seems to have been the gel that held the four together -- he had the experience of being a child star in common with Jones, he was a habitue of the Sunset Strip clubs where Nesmith and Tork had been hanging out, and he had personality traits in common with all of them. Notably, in later years, Dolenz would do duo tours with each of his three bandmates without the participation of the others. The others, though, didn't get on so well with each other. Jones and Tork seem to have got on OK, but they were very different people -- Jones was a showbiz entertainer, whose primary concern was that none of the other stars of the show be better looking than him, while Tork was later self-diagnosed as neurodivergent, a folkie proto-hippie who wanted to drift from town to town playing his banjo. Tork and Nesmith had similar backgrounds and attitudes in some respects -- and were united in their desire to have more musical input into the show than was originally intended -- but they were such different personalities in every aspect of their lives from their religious views to their politics to their taste in music they came into conflict. Nesmith would later say of Tork "I never liked Peter, he never liked me. So we had an uneasy truce between the two of us. As clear as I could tell, among his peers he was very well liked. But we rarely had a civil word to say to each other". Nesmith also didn't get on well with Jones, both of them seeming to view themselves as the natural leader of the group, with all the clashes that entails. The four Monkees were assigned instruments for their characters based not on instrumental skill, but on what suited their roles better. Jones was the teen idol character, so he was made the maraca-playing frontman who could dance without having to play an instrument, though Dolenz took far more of the lead vocals. Nesmith was made the guitarist, while Tork was put on bass, though Tork was by far the better guitarist of the two. And Dolenz was put on drums, even though he didn't play the drums -- Tork would always say later that if the roles had been allocated by actual playing ability, Jones would have been the drummer. Dolenz did, though, become a good drummer, if a rather idiosyncratic one. Tork would later say "Micky played the drums but Mike kept time, on that one record we all made, Headquarters. Mike was the timekeeper. I don't know that Micky relied on him but Mike had a much stronger sense of time. And Davy too, Davy has a much stronger sense of time. Micky played the drums like they were a musical instrument, as a colour. He played the drum colour.... as a band, there was a drummer and there was a timekeeper and they were different people." But at first, while the group were practising their instruments so they could mime convincingly on the TV and make personal appearances, they didn't need to play on their records. Indeed, on the initial pilot, they didn't even sing -- the recordings had been made before the cast had been finalised: [Excerpt: Boyce & Hart, "Monkees Theme (pilot version)"] The music was instead performed by two songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who would become hugely important in the Monkees project. Boyce and Hart were not the first choice for the project. Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems Music, had initially suggested Roger Atkins, a Brill Building songwriter working for his company, as the main songwriter for The Monkees. Atkins is best known for writing "It's My Life", a hit for the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "It's My Life"] But Atkins didn't work out, though he would collaborate later on one song with Nesmith, and reading between the lines, it seems that there was some corporate infighting going on, though I've not seen it stated in so many words. There seems to have been a turf war between Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems' music publishing, who was based in the Brill Building, and Lester Sill, the West Coast executive we've seen so many times before, the mentor to Leiber and Stoller, Duane Eddy, and Phil Spector, who was now the head of Screen Gems music on the West Coast. It also seems to be the case that none of the top Brill Building songwriters were all that keen on being involved at this point -- writing songs for an unsold TV pilot wasn't exactly a plum gig. Sill ended up working closely with the TV people, and it seems to have been him who put forward Boyce and Hart, a songwriting team he was mentoring. Boyce and Hart had been working in the music industry for years, both together and separately, and had had some success, though they weren't one of the top-tier songwriting teams like Goffin and King. They'd both started as performers -- Boyce's first single, "Betty Jean", had come out in 1958: [Excerpt: Tommy Boyce, "Betty Jean"] And Hart's, "Love Whatcha Doin' to Me", under his birth name Robert Harshman, a year later: [Excerpt: Robert Harshman, "Love Whatcha Doin' to Me"] Boyce had been the first one to have real songwriting success, writing Fats Domino's top ten hit "Be My Guest" in 1959: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Be My Guest"] and cowriting two songs with singer Curtis Lee, both of which became singles produced by Phil Spector -- "Under the Moon of Love" and the top ten hit "Pretty Little Angel Eyes": [Excerpt: Curtis Lee, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes"] Boyce and Hart together, along with Wes Farrell, who had co-written "Twist and Shout" with Bert Berns, wrote "Lazy Elsie Molly" for Chubby Checker, and the number three hit "Come a Little Bit Closer" for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Come a Little Bit Closer"] At this point they were both working in the Brill Building, but then Boyce moved to the West Coast, where he was paired with Steve Venet, the brother of Nik Venet, and they co-wrote and produced "Peaches and Cream" for the Ikettes: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches and Cream"] Hart, meanwhile, was playing in the band of Teddy Randazzo, the accordion-playing singer who had appeared in The Girl Can't Help It, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein he wrote "Hurts So Bad", which became a big hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Hurts So Bad"] But Hart soon moved over to the West Coast, where he joined his old partner Boyce, who had been busy writing TV themes with Venet for shows like "Where the Action Is". Hart soon replaced Venet in the team, and the two soon wrote what would become undoubtedly their most famous piece of music ever, a theme tune that generations of TV viewers would grow to remember: [Excerpt: "Theme from Days of Our Lives"] Well, what did you *think* I meant? Yes, just as Davy Jones had starred in an early episode of Britain's longest-running soap opera, one that's still running today, so Boyce and Hart wrote the theme music for *America's* longest-running soap opera, which has been running every weekday since 1965, and has so far aired well in excess of fourteen thousand episodes. Meanwhile, Hart had started performing in a band called the Candy Store Prophets, with Larry Taylor -- who we last saw with the Gamblers, playing on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" -- on bass, Gerry McGee on guitar, and Billy Lewis on drums. It was this band that Boyce and Hart used -- augmented by session guitarists Wayne Erwin and Louie Shelton and Wrecking Crew percussionist Gene Estes on tambourine, plus Boyce and session singer Ron Hicklin on backing vocals, to record first the demos and then the actual tracks that would become the Monkees hits. They had a couple of songs already that would be suitable for the pilot episode, but they needed something that would be usable as a theme song for the TV show. Boyce and Hart's usual working method was to write off another hit -- they'd try to replicate the hook or the feel or the basic sound of something that was already popular. In this case, they took inspiration from the song "Catch Us If You Can", the theme from the film that was the Dave Clark Five's attempt at their own A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Catch Us If You Can"] Boyce and Hart turned that idea into what would become the Monkees theme. We heard their performance of it earlier of course, but when the TV show finally came out, it was rerecorded with Dolenz singing: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Monkees Theme"] For a while, Boyce and Hart hoped that they would get to perform all the music for the TV show, and there was even apparently some vague talk of them being cast in it, but it was quickly decided that they would just be songwriters. Originally, the intent was that they wouldn't even produce the records, that instead the production would be done by a name producer. Micky Most, the Animals' producer, was sounded out for the role but wasn't interested. Snuff Garrett was brought in, but quickly discovered he didn't get on with the group at all -- in particular, they were all annoyed at the idea that Davy would be the sole lead vocalist, and the tracks Garrett cut with Davy on lead and the Wrecking Crew backing were scrapped. Instead, it was decided that Boyce and Hart would produce most of the tracks, initially with the help of the more experienced Jack Keller, and that they would only work with one Monkee at a time to minimise disruption -- usually Micky and sometimes Davy. These records would be made the same way as the demos had been, by the same set of musicians, just with one of the Monkees taking the lead. Meanwhile, as Nesmith was seriously interested in writing and production, and Rafelson and Schneider wanted to encourage the cast members, he was also assigned to write and produce songs for the show. Unlike Boyce and Hart, Nesmith wanted to use his bandmates' talents -- partly as a way of winning them over, as it was already becoming clear that the show would involve several competing factions. Nesmith's songs were mostly country-rock tracks that weren't considered suitable as singles, but they would be used on the TV show and as album tracks, and on Nesmith's songs Dolenz and Tork would sing backing vocals, and Tork would join the Wrecking Crew as an extra guitarist -- though he was well aware that his part on records like "Sweet Young Thing" wasn't strictly necessary when Glen Campbell, James Burton, Al Casey and Mike Deasy were also playing guitar: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Sweet Young Thing"] That track was written by Nesmith with Goffin and King, and there seems to have been some effort to pair Nesmith, early on, with more commercial songwriters, though this soon fell by the wayside and Nesmith was allowed to keep making his own idiosyncratic records off to the side while Boyce and Hart got on with making the more commercial records. This was not, incidentally, something that most of the stars of the show objected to or even thought was a problem at the time. Tork was rather upset that he wasn't getting to have much involvement with the direction of the music, as he'd thought he was being employed as a musician, but Dolenz and Jones were actors first and foremost, while Nesmith was happily making his own tracks. They'd all known going in that most of the music for the show would be created by other people -- there were going to be two songs every episode, and there was no way that four people could write and record that much material themselves while also performing in a half-hour comedy show every week. Assuming, of course, that the show even aired. Initial audience response to the pilot was tepid at best, and it looked for a while like the show wasn't going to be green-lit. But Rafelson and Schneider -- and director James Frawley who played a crucial role in developing the show -- recut the pilot, cutting out one character altogether -- a manager who acted as an adult supervisor -- and adding in excerpts of the audition tapes, showing the real characters of some of the actors. As three of the four were playing characters loosely based on themselves -- Peter's "dummy" character wasn't anything like he was in real life, but was like the comedy character he'd developed in his folk-club performances -- this helped draw the audience in. It also, though, contributed to some line-blurring that became a problem. The re-edited pilot was a success, and the series sold. Indeed, the new format for the series was a unique one that had never been done on TV before -- it was a sitcom about four young men living together, without any older adult supervision, getting into improbable adventures, and with one or two semi-improvised "romps", inspired by silent slapstick, over which played original songs. This became strangely influential in British sitcom when the series came out over here -- two of the most important sitcoms of the next couple of decades, The Goodies and The Young Ones, are very clearly influenced by the Monkees. And before the broadcast of the first episode, they were going to release a single to promote it. The song chosen as the first single was one Boyce and Hart had written, inspired by the Beatles. Specifically inspired by this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Hart heard that tag on the radio, and thought that the Beatles were singing "take the last train". When he heard the song again the next day and realised that the song had nothing to do with trains, he and Boyce sat down and wrote their own song inspired by his mishearing. "Last Train to Clarksville" is structured very, very, similarly to "Paperback Writer" -- both of them stay on one chord, a G7, for an eight-bar verse before changing to C7 for a chorus line -- the word "writer" for the Beatles, the "no no no" (inspired by the Beatles "yeah yeah yeah") for the Monkees. To show how close the parallels are, I've sped up the vocals from the Beatles track slightly to match the tempo with a karaoke backing track version of "Last Train to Clarksville" I found, and put the two together: [Excerpt: "Paperback Clarksville"] Lyrically, there was one inspiration I will talk about in a minute, but I think I've identified another inspiration that nobody has ever mentioned. The classic country song "Night Train to Memphis", co-written by Owen Bradley, and made famous by Roy Acuff, has some slight melodic similarity to "Last Train to Clarksville", and parallels the lyrics fairly closely -- "take the night train to Memphis" against "take the last train to Clarksville", both towns in Tennessee, and "when you arrive at the station, I'll be right there to meet you I'll be right there to greet you, So don't turn down my invitation" is clearly close to "and I'll meet you at the station, you can be here by 4:30 'cos I've made your reservation": [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, "Night Train to Memphis"] Interestingly, in May 1966, the same month that "Paperback Writer" was released, and so presumably the time that Hart heard the song on the radio for the first time, Rick Nelson, the teen idol formerly known as Ricky Nelson, who had started his own career as a performer in a sitcom, had released an album called Bright Lights and Country Music. He'd had a bit of a career downslump and was changing musical direction, and recording country songs. The last track on that album was a version of "Night Train to Memphis": [Excerpt: Rick Nelson, "Night Train to Memphis"] Now, I've never seen either Boyce or Hart ever mention even hearing that song, it's pure speculation on my part that there's any connection there at all, but I thought the similarity worth mentioning. The idea of the lyric, though, was to make a very mild statement about the Vietnam War. Clarksville was, as mentioned earlier, the site of Fort Campbell, a military training base, and they crafted a story about a young soldier being shipped off to war, calling his girlfriend to come and see him for one last night. This is left more-or-less ambiguous -- this was a song being written for a TV show intended for children, after all -- but it's still very clear on the line "and I don't know if I'm ever coming home". Now, Boyce and Hart were songwriters first and foremost, and as producers they were quite hands-off and would let the musicians shape the arrangements. They knew they wanted a guitar riff in the style of the Beatles' recent singles, and Louie Shelton came up with one based around the G7 chord that forms the basis of the song, starting with an octave leap: Shelton's riff became the hook that drove the record, and engineer Dave Hassinger added the final touch, manually raising the volume on the hi-hat mic for a fraction of a second every bar, creating a drum sound like a hissing steam brake: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] Now all that was needed was to get the lead vocals down. But Micky Dolenz was tired, and hungry, and overworked -- both Dolenz and Jones in their separate autobiographies talk about how it was normal for them to only get three hours' sleep a night between working twelve hour days filming the series, three-hour recording sessions, and publicity commitments. He got the verses down fine, but he just couldn't sing the middle eight. Boyce and Hart had written a complicated, multisyllabic, patter bridge, and he just couldn't get his tongue around that many syllables when he was that tired. He eventually asked if he could just sing "do do do" instead of the words, and the producers agreed. Surprisingly, it worked: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] "Last Train to Clarksville" was released in advance of the TV series, on a new label, Colgems, set up especially for the Monkees to replace Colpix, with a better distribution deal, and it went to number one. The TV show started out with mediocre ratings, but soon that too became a hit. And so did the first album released from the TV series. And that album was where some of the problems really started. The album itself was fine -- ten tracks produced by Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets playing and either Micky or Davy singing, mostly songs Boyce and Hart wrote, with a couple of numbers by Goffin and King and other Kirshner staff songwriters, plus two songs produced by Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, and with token participation from Tork and Dolenz. The problem was the back cover, which gave little potted descriptions of each of them, with their height, eye colour, and so on. And under three of them it said "plays guitar and sings", while under Dolenz it said "plays drums and sings". Now this was technically accurate -- they all did play those instruments. They just didn't play them on the record, which was clearly the impression the cover was intended to give. Nesmith in particular was incandescent. He believed that people watching the TV show understood that the group weren't really performing that music, any more than Adam West was really fighting crime or William Shatner travelling through space. But crediting them on the record was, he felt, crossing a line into something close to con artistry. To make matters worse, success was bringing more people trying to have a say. Where before, the Monkees had been an irrelevance, left to a couple of B-list producer-songwriters on the West Coast, now they were a guaranteed hit factory, and every songwriter working for Kirshner wanted to write and produce for them -- which made sense because of the sheer quantity of material they needed for the TV show, but it made for a bigger, less democratic, organisation -- one in which Kirshner was suddenly in far more control. Suddenly as well as Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets and Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, both of whom had been operating without much oversight from Kirshner, there were a bunch of tracks being cut on the East Coast by songwriting and production teams like Goffin and King, and Neil Sedaka and Carole Bayer. On the second Monkees album, released only a few months after the first, there were nine producers credited -- as well as Boyce, Hart, Jack Keller, and Nesmith, there were now also Goffin, King, Sedaka, Bayer, and Jeff Barry, who as well as cutting tracks on the east coast was also flying over to the West Coast, cutting more tracks with the Wrecking Crew, and producing vocal sessions while there. As well as producing songs he'd written himself, Barry was also supervising songs written by other people. One of those was a new songwriter he'd recently discovered and been co-producing for Bang Records, Neil Diamond, who had just had a big hit of his own with "Cherry Cherry": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] Diamond was signed with Screen Gems, and had written a song which Barry thought would be perfect for the Monkees, an uptempo song called "I'm a Believer", which he'd demoed with the regular Bang musicians -- top East Coast session players like Al Gorgoni, the guitarist who'd played on "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "I'm a Believer"] Barry had cut a backing track for the Monkees using those same musicians, including Diamond on acoustic guitar, and brought it over to LA. And that track would indirectly lead to the first big crisis for the group. Barry, unlike Boyce and Hart, was interested in working with the whole group, and played all of them the backing track. Nesmith's reaction was a blunt "I'm a producer too, and that ain't no hit". He liked the song -- he wanted to have a go at producing a track on it himself, as it happened -- but he didn't think the backing track worked. Barry, trying to lighten the mood, joked that it wasn't finished and you needed to imagine it with strings and horns. Unfortunately, Nesmith didn't get that he was joking, and started talking about how that might indeed make a difference -- at which point everyone laughed and Nesmith took it badly -- his relationship with Barry quickly soured. Nesmith was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the way his songs and his productions were being sidelined, and was generally getting unhappy, and Tork was wanting more musical input too. They'd been talking with Rafelson and Schneider, who'd agreed that the group were now good enough on their instruments that they could start recording some tracks by themselves, an idea which Kirshner loathed. But for now they were recording Neil Diamond's song to Jeff Barry's backing track. Given that Nesmith liked the song, and given that he had some slight vocal resemblance to Diamond, the group suggested that Nesmith be given the lead vocal, and Kirshner and Barry agreed, although Kirshner at least apparently always intended for Dolenz to sing lead, and was just trying to pacify Nesmith. In the studio, Kirshner kept criticising Nesmith's vocal, and telling him he was doing it wrong, until eventually he stormed out, and Kirshner got what he wanted -- another Monkees hit with Micky Dolenz on lead, though this time it did at least have Jones and Tork on backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] That was released on November 23rd, 1966, as their second single, and became their second number one. And in January 1967, the group's second album, More of the Monkees, was released. That too went to number one. There was only one problem. The group weren't even told about the album coming out beforehand -- they had to buy their own copies from a record shop to even see what tracks were on it. Nesmith had his two tracks, but even Boyce and Hart were only given two, with the rest of the album being made up of tracks from the Brill Building songwriters Kirshner preferred. Lots of great Nesmith and Boyce and Hart tracks were left off the album in favour of some astonishingly weak material, including the two worst tracks the group ever recorded, "The Day We Fall in Love" and "Laugh", and a novelty song they found embarrassing, "Your Auntie Grizelda", included to give Tork a vocal spot. Nesmith called it "probably the worst album in the history of the world", though in truth seven of the twelve tracks are really very strong, though some of the other material is pretty poor. The group were also annoyed by the packaging. The liner notes were by Don Kirshner, and read to the group at least like a celebration of Kirshner himself as the one person responsible for everything on the record. Even the photo was an embarrassment -- the group had taken a series of photos in clothes from the department store J. C. Penney as part of an advertising campaign, and the group thought the clothes were ridiculous, but one of those photos was the one chosen for the cover. Nesmith and Tork made a decision, which the other two agreed to with varying degrees of willingness. They'd been fine miming to other people's records when it was clearly just for a TV show. But if they were being promoted as a real band, and having to go on tour promoting albums credited to them, they were going to *be* a real band, and take some responsibility for the music that was being put out in their name. With the support of Rafelson and Schneider, they started making preparations to do just that. But Don Kirshner had other ideas, and told them so in no uncertain terms. As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of ungrateful, spoiled, kids who were very happy cashing the ridiculously large cheques they were getting, but now wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They were going to keep doing what they were told. Things came to a head in a business meeting in January 1967, when Nesmith gave an ultimatum. Either the group got to start playing on their own records, or he was quitting. Herb Moelis, Kirshner's lawyer, told Nesmith that he should read his contract more carefully, at which point Nesmith got up, punched a hole in the wall of the hotel suite they were in, and told Moelis "That could have been your face". So as 1967 began, the group were at a turning point. Would they be able to cut the puppet strings, or would they have to keep living a lie? We'll find out in a few weeks' time...

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Episode 141: “River Deep, Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2022

Episode 141 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “River Deep Mountain High'”, and at the career of Ike and Tina Turner. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, this episode was recorded before the sad death of the great Ronnie Spector, whose records are featured a couple of times in this episode, which is partly about her abusive ex-husband. Her life paralleled Tina Turner's quite closely, and if you haven't heard the episode I did about her last year, you can find it at https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-110-be-my-baby-by-the-ronettes/. I wish I'd had the opportunity to fit a tribute into this episode too. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wild Thing" by the Troggs. 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, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I referred to it for the material about Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Phil Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. Tina Turner has written two autobiographies. I Tina is now out of print but is slightly more interesting, as it contains interview material with other people in her life. My Love Story is the more recent one and covers her whole life up to 2019. Ike Turner's autobiography Takin' Back My Name is a despicable, self-serving, work of self-justification, and I do not recommend anyone buy or read it. But I did use it for quotes in the episode so it goes on the list. Ike Turner: King of Rhythm by John Collis is more even-handed, and contains a useful discography. That Kat Sure Could Play! is a four-CD compilation of Ike Turner's work up to 1957. The TAMI and Big TNT shows are available on a Blu-Ray containing both performances. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. There are sadly no good compilations of Ike and Tina Turner's career, as they recorded for multiple labels, and would regularly rerecord the hits in new versions for each new label, so any compilation you find will have the actual hit version of one or two tracks, plus a bunch of shoddy remakes. However, the hit version of "River Deep, Mountain High" is on the album of the same name, which is a worthwhile album to get,. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today's episode is unfortunately another one of those which will require a content warning, because we're going to be talking about Ike and Tina Turner. For those of you who don't know, Ike Turner was possibly the most famously abusive spouse in the whole history of music, and it is literally impossible to talk about the duo's career without talking about that abuse. I am going to try not to go into too many of the details -- if nothing else, the details are very readily available for those who want to seek them out, not least in Tina's two autobiographies, so there's no sense in retraumatising people who've experienced domestic abuse by going over them needlessly -- but it would be dishonest to try to tell the story without talking about it at all. This is not going to be an episode *about* Ike Turner's brutal treatment of Tina Turner -- it's an episode about the record, and about music, and about their musical career -- but the environment in which "River Deep, Mountain High" was created was so full of toxic, abusive, destructive men that Ike Turner may only be the third-worst person credited on the record, and so that abuse will come up. If discussion of domestic abuse, gun violence, cocaine addiction, and suicide attempts are likely to cause you problems, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the podcast. That said, let's get on with the story. One of the problems I'm hitting at this point of the narrative is that starting with "I Fought the Law" we've hit a run of incredibly intertangled stories The three most recent episodes, this one, and nine of the next twelve, all really make up one big narrative about what happened when folk-rock and psychedelia hit the Hollywood scene and the Sunset Strip nightclubs started providing the raw material for the entertainment industry to turn into pop culture. We're going to be focusing on a small number of individuals, and that causes problems when trying to tell a linear narrative, because people don't live their lives sequentially -- it's not the case that everything happened to Phil Spector, and *then* everything happened to Cass Elliot, and *then* everything happened to Brian Wilson. All these people were living their lives and interacting and influencing each other, and so sometimes we'll have to mention something that will be dealt with in a future episode. So I'll say here and now that we *will* be doing an episode on the Lovin' Spoonful in two weeks. So when I say now that in late 1965 the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the biggest bands around, and possibly the hottest band in the country, you'll have to take that on trust. But they were, and in late 1965 their hit "Do You Believe in Magic?" had made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] Phil Spector, as always, was trying to stay aware of the latest trends in music, and he was floundering somewhat. Since the Beatles had hit America in 1964, the hits had dried up -- he'd produced a few minor hit records in 1964, but the only hits he'd made in 1965 had been with the Righteous Brothers -- none of his other acts were charting. And then the Righteous Brothers left him, after only a year. In late 1965, he had no hit acts and no prospect of having any. There was only one thing to do -- he needed to start making his own folk-rock records. And the Lovin' Spoonful gave him an idea how to do that. Their records were identifiably coming from the same kind of place as people like the Byrds or the Mamas and the Papas, but they were pop songs, not protest songs -- the Lovin' Spoonful weren't doing Dylan covers or anything intellectual, but joyous pop confections of a kind that anyone could relate to. Spector knew how to make pop records like that. But to do that, he needed a band. Even though he had been annoyed at the way that people had paid more attention to the Righteous Brothers, as white men, than they had to the other vocalists he'd made hit records with (who, as Black women, had been regarded by a sexist and racist public as interchangeable puppets being controlled by a Svengali rather than as artists in their own right), he knew he was going to have to work with a group of white male vocalist-instrumentalists if he wanted to have his own Lovin' Spoonful. And the group he chose was a group from Greenwich Village called MFQ. MFQ had originally named themselves the Modern Folk Quartet, as a parallel to the much better-known Modern Jazz Quartet, and consisted of Cyrus Faryar, Henry Diltz, Jerry Yester, and Chip Douglas, all of whom were multi-instrumentalists who would switch between guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass depending on the song. They had combined Kingston Trio style clean-cut folk with Four Freshmen style modern harmonies -- Yester, who was a veteran of the New Christy Minstrels, said of the group's vocals that "the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group", and they had been taken under the wing of manager Herb Cohen, who had got them a record deal with Warner Brothers. They recorded two albums of folk songs, the first of which was produced by Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quartet, "Sassafras"] But after their second album, they had decided to go along with the trends and switch to folk-rock. They'd started playing with electric instruments, and after a few shows where John Sebastian, the lead singer of the Lovin' Spoonful, had sat in with them on drums, they'd got themselves a full-time drummer, "Fast" Eddie Hoh, and renamed themselves the Modern Folk Quintet, but they always shortened that to just MFQ. Spector was convinced that this group could be another Lovin' Spoonful if they had the right song, and MFQ in turn were eager to become something more than an unsuccessful folk group. Spector had the group rehearsing in his house for weeks at a stretch before taking them into the studio. The song that Spector chose to have the group record was written by a young songwriter he was working with named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson was as yet a complete unknown, who had not written a hit and was still working a day job, but he had a talent for melody, and he also had a unique songwriting sensibility combining humour and heartbreak. For example, he'd written a song that Spector had recorded with the Ronettes, "Here I Sit", which had been inspired by the famous graffito from public toilet walls -- "Here I sit, broken-hearted/Paid a dime and only farted": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Here I Sit"] That ability to take taboo bodily functions and turn them into innocent-sounding love lyrics is also at play in the song that Spector chose to have the MFQ record. "This Could be the Night" was written by Nilsson from the perspective of someone who is hoping to lose his virginity -- he feels like he's sitting on dynamite, and he's going to "give her some", but it still sounds innocent enough to get past the radio censors of the mid-sixties: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "This Could Be the Night (demo)"] Spector took that song, and recorded a version of it which found the perfect balance between Spector's own wall of sound and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Good Time Music" sound: [Excerpt: MFQ, "This Could be the Night"] Brian Wilson was, according to many people, in the studio while that was being recorded, and for decades it would remain a favourite song of Wilson's -- he recorded a solo version of it in the 1990s, and when he started touring solo for the first time in 1998 he included the song in his earliest live performances. He also tried to record it with his wife's group, American Spring, in the early 1970s, but was unable to, because while he could remember almost all of the song, he couldn't get hold of the lyrics. And the reason he couldn't get hold of the lyrics is that the record itself went unreleased, because Phil Spector had found a new performer he was focusing on instead. It happened during the filming of the Big TNT Show, a sequel to the TAMI Show, released by American International Pictures, for which "This Could Be the Night" was eventually used as a theme song. The MFQ were actually performers at the Big TNT Show, which Spector was musical director and associate producer of, but their performances were cut out of the finished film, leaving just their record being played over the credits. The Big TNT Show generally gets less respect than the TAMI Show, but it's a rather remarkable document of the American music scene at the very end of 1965, and it's far more diverse than the TAMI show. It opens with, of all people, David McCallum -- the actor who played Ilya Kuryakin on The Man From UNCLE -- conducting a band of session musicians playing an instrumental version of "Satisfaction": [Excerpt: David McCallum, "Satisfaction"] And then, in front of an audience which included Ron and Russel Mael, later of Sparks, and Frank Zappa, who is very clearly visible in audience shots, came performances of every then-current form of popular music. Ray Charles, Petula Clark, Bo Diddley, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Roger Miller, the Ronettes, and Donovan all did multiple songs, though the oddest contribution was from Joan Baez, who as well as doing some of her normal folk repertoire also performed "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with Spector on piano: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Phil Spector, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] But the headline act on the eventual finished film was the least-known act on the bill, a duo who had not had a top forty hit for four years at this point, and who were only on the bill as a last-minute fill-in for an act who dropped out, but who were a sensational live act. So sensational that when Phil Spector saw them, he knew he needed to sign them -- or at least he needed to sign one of them: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner with the Ikettes, "Please, Please, Please"] Because Ike and Tina Turner's performance at the Big TNT Show was, if anything, even more impressive than James Brown's performance on the TAMI Show the previous year. The last we saw of Ike Turner was way back in episode eleven. If you don't remember that, from more than three years ago, at the time Turner was the leader of a small band called the Kings of Rhythm. They'd been told by their friend B.B. King that if you wanted to make a record, the person you go to was Sam Phillips at Memphis Recording Services, and they'd recorded "Rocket '88", often cited as the first ever rock and roll record, under the name of their sax player and vocalist Jackie Brenston: [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] We looked at some of the repercussions from that recording throughout the first year and a half or so of the podcast, but we didn't look any more at the career of Ike Turner himself. While "Rocket '88" was a minor hit, the group hadn't followed it up, and Brenston had left to go solo. For a while Ike wasn't really very successful at all -- though he was still performing around Memphis, and a young man named Elvis Presley was taking notes at some of the shows. But things started to change for Ike when he once again turned up at Sam Phillips' studio -- this time because B.B. King was recording there. At the time, Sun Records had still not started as its own label, and Phillips' studio was being used for records made by all sorts of independent blues labels, including Modern Records, and Joe Bihari was producing a session for B.B. King, who had signed to Modern. The piano player on the session also had a connection to "Rocket '88" -- when Jackie Brenston had quit Ike's band to go solo, he'd put together a new band to tour as the Delta Cats, and Phineas Newborn Jr had ended up playing Turner's piano part on stage, before Brenston's career collapsed and Newborn became King's pianist. But Phineas Newborn was a very technical, dry, jazz pianist -- a wonderful player, but someone who was best suited to playing more cerebral material, as his own recordings as a bandleader from a few years later show: [Excerpt: Phineas Newborn Jr, "Barbados"] Bihari wasn't happy with what Newborn was playing, and the group took a break from recording to get something to eat and try to figure out the problem. While they were busy, Turner went over to the piano and started playing. Bihari said that that was exactly what they wanted, and Turner took over playing the part. In his autobiography, Turner variously remembers the song King was recording there as "You Know I Love You" and "Three O'Clock Blues", neither of which, as far as I can tell, were actually recorded at Phillips' studio, and both of which seem to have been recorded later -- it's difficult to say for sure because there were very few decent records kept of these things at the time. But we do know that Turner played on a lot of King's records in the early fifties, including on "Three O'Clock Blues", King's first big hit: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "Three O'Clock Blues"] For the next while, Turner was on salary at Modern Records, playing piano on sessions, acting as a talent scout, and also apparently writing many of the songs that Modern's artists would record, though those songs were all copyrighted under the name "Taub", a pseudonym for the Bihari brothers, as well as being a de facto arranger and producer for the company. He worked on many records made in and around Memphis, both for Modern Records and for other labels who drew from the same pool of artists and musicians. Records he played on and produced or arranged include several of Bobby "Blue" Bland's early records -- though Turner's claim in his autobiography that he played on Bland's version of "Stormy Monday" appears to be incorrect, as that wasn't recorded until a decade later. He did, though, play on Bland's “Drifting from Town to Town”, a rewrite of Charles Brown's “Driftin' Blues”, on which, as on many sessions run by Turner, the guitarist was Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who later found fame with the Blues Brothers: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, "Driftin' Blues"] Though I've also seen the piano part on that credited as being by Johnny Ace – there's often some confusion as to whether Turner or Ace played on a session, as they played with many of the same artists, but that one was later rereleased as by Bobby “Blue” Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, so it's safe to say that Ike's on that one. He also played on several records by Howlin' Wolf, including "How Many More Years", recorded at Sam Phillips' studio: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "How Many More Years?"] Over the next few years he played with many artists we've covered already in the podcast, like Richard Berry and the Flairs, on whose recordings he played guitar rather than piano: [Excerpt: The Flairs, "Baby Wants"] He also played guitar on records by Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Please Find My Baby"] and played with Little Junior Parker, Little Milton, Johnny Ace, Roscoe Gordon, and many, many more. As well as making blues records, he also made R&B records in the style of Gene and Eunice with his then-wife Bonnie: [Excerpt: Bonnie and Ike Turner, "My Heart Belongs to You"] Bonnie was his fourth wife, all of them bigamous -- or at least, I *think* she was his fourth. I have seen two different lists Turner gave of his wives, both of them made up of entirely different people, though it doesn't help that many of them also went by nicknames. But Turner started getting married when he was fourteen, and as he would often put it "you gave a preacher two dollars, the papers cost three dollars, that was it. In those days Blacks didn't bother with divorces." (One thing you will see a lot with Turner, unfortunately, is his habit of taking his own personal misbehaviours and claiming they were either universal, or at least that they were universal among Black people, or among men. It's certainly true that some people in the Southeastern US had a more lackadaisical attitude towards remarrying without divorce at the time than we might expect, but it was in no way a Black thing specifically -- it was a people-like-Ike-Turner thing -- see for example the very similar behaviour of Jerry Lee Lewis. I'm trying, when I quote him, not to include too many of these generalisations, but I thought it important to include that one early on to show the kind of self-justification to which he was prone throughout his entire life.) It's largely because Bonnie played piano and was singing with his band that Turner switched to playing guitar, but there was another reason – while he disliked the attention he got on stage, he also didn't want a repeat of what had happened with Jackie Brenston, where Brenston as lead vocalist and frontman had claimed credit for what Ike thought of as his own record. Anyone who saw Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm was going to know that Ike Turner was the man who was making it all happen, and so he was going to play guitar up front rather than be on the piano in the background. So Turner took guitar lessons from Earl Hooker, one of the great blues guitarists of the period, who had played with Turner's piano inspiration Pinetop Perkins before recording solo tracks like "Sweet Angel": [Excerpt: Earl Hooker, "Sweet Angel"] Turner was always happier in the studio than performing live -- despite his astonishing ego, he was also a rather shy person who didn't like attention -- and he'd been happy working on salary for Modern and freelancing on occasion for other labels like Chess and Duke. But then the Biharis had brought him out to LA, where Modern Records was based, and as Joel Bihari put it "Ike did a great job for us, but he was a country boy. We brought him to L.A., and he just couldn't take city life. He only stayed a month, then left for East St. Louis to form his own band. He told me he was going back there to become a star." For once, Turner's memory of events lined up with what other people said about him. In his autobiography, he described what happened -- "Down in Mississippi, life is slow. Tomorrow, you are going to plough this field. The next day, you going to cut down these trees. You stop and you go on about your business. Next day, you start back on sawing trees or whatever you doing. Here I am in California, and this chick, this receptionist, is saying "Hold on, Mr Bihari, line 2... hold line 3... Hey Joe, Mr Something or other on the phone for you." I thought "What goddamn time does this stop?"" So Turner did head to East St. Louis -- which is a suburb of St. Louis proper, across the Mississippi river from it, and in Illinois rather than Missouri, and at the time a thriving industrial town in its own right, with over eighty thousand people living there. Hardly the laid-back country atmosphere that Turner was talking about, but still also far from LA both geographically and culturally. He put together a new lineup of the Kings of Rhythm, with a returning Jackie Brenston, who were soon recording for pretty much every label that was putting out blues and R&B tracks at that point, releasing records on RPM, Sue, Flair, Federal, and Modern as well as several smaller labels. usually with either Brenston or the group's drummer Billy Gayles singing lead: [Excerpt: Billy Gayles with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "Just One More Time"] None of these records was a success, but the Kings of Rhythm were becoming the most successful band in East St. Louis. In the mid-fifties the only group that was as popular in the greater St. Louis metro area was the Johnny Johnson trio -- which soon became the Chuck Berry trio, and went on to greater things, while the Kings of Rhythm remained on the club circuit. But Turner was also becoming notorious for his temper -- he got the nickname "Pistol-Whippin' Ike Turner" for the way he would attack people with his gun, He also though was successful enough that he built his own home studio, and that was where he recorded "Boxtop". a calypso song whose middle eight seems to have been nicked from "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" and whose general feel owes more than a little to "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Ike Turner, Carlson Oliver, and Little Ann, "Boxtop"] The female vocals on that track were by Turner's new backing vocalist, who at the time went by the stage name "Little Ann". Anna Mae Bullock had started going to see the Kings of Rhythm regularly when she was seventeen, because her sister was dating one of the members of the band, and she had become a fan almost immediately. She later described her first experience seeing the group: "The first time I saw Ike on stage he was at his very best, sharply dressed in a dark suit and tie. Ike wasn't conventionally handsome – actually, he wasn't handsome at all – and he certainly wasn't my type. Remember, I was a schoolgirl, all of seventeen, looking at a man. I was used to high school boys who were clean-cut, athletic, and dressed in denim, so Ike's processed hair, diamond ring, and skinny body – he was all edges and sharp cheekbones – looked old to me, even though he was only twenty-five. I'd never seen anyone that thin! I couldn't help thinking, God, he's ugly." Turner didn't find Bullock attractive either -- one of the few things both have always agreed on in all their public statements about their later relationship was that neither was ever particularly attracted to the other sexually -- and at first this had caused problems for Anna Mae. There was a spot in the show where Turner would invite a girl from the audience up on stage to sing, a different one every night, usually someone he'd decided he wanted to sleep with. Anna Mae desperately wanted to be one of the girls that would get up on stage, but Turner never picked her. But then one day she got her chance. Her sister's boyfriend was teasing her sister, trying to get her to sing in this spot, and passed her the microphone. Her sister didn't want to sing, so Anna Mae grabbed the mic instead, and started singing -- the song she sang was B.B. King's "You Know I Love You", the same song that Turner always remembered as being recorded at Sun studios, and on which Turner had played piano: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "You Know I Love You"] Turner suddenly took notice of Anna Mae. As he would later say, everyone *says* they can sing, but it turned out that Anna Mae could. He took her on as an occasional backing singer, not at first as a full member of the band, but as a sort of apprentice, who he would teach how to use her talents more commercially. Turner always said that during this period, he would get Little Richard to help teach Anna Mae how to sing in a more uncontrolled, exuberant, style like he did, and Richard has backed this up, though Anna Mae never said anything about this. We do know though that Richard was a huge fan of Turner's -- the intro to "Good Golly Miss Molly": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] was taken almost exactly from the intro to "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] and Richard later wrote the introduction to Turner's autobiography. So it's possible -- but both men were inveterate exaggerators, and Anna Mae only joined Ike's band a few months before Richard's conversion and retirement from music, and during a point when he was a massive star, so it seems unlikely. Anna Mae started dating Raymond Hill, a saxophone player in the group, and became pregnant by him -- but then Hill broke his ankle, and used that as an excuse to move back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be with his family, abandoning his pregnant teenage girlfriend, and it seems to be around this point that Turner and Anna Mae became romantically and sexually involved. Certainly, one of Ike's girlfriends, Lorraine Taylor, seems to have believed they were involved while Anna Mae was pregnant, and indeed that Turner, rather than Hill, was the father. Taylor threatened Bullock with Turner's gun, before turning it on herself and attempting suicide, though luckily she survived. She gave birth to Turner's son, Ike Junior, a couple of months after Bullock gave birth to her own son, Craig. But even after they got involved, Anna Mae was still mostly just doing odd bits of backing vocals, like on "Boxtop", recorded in 1958, or on 1959's "That's All I Need", released on Sue Records: [Excerpt: Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "That's All I Need"] And it seemed that would be all that Anna Mae Bullock would do, until Ike Turner lent Art Lassiter eighty dollars he didn't want to pay back. Lassiter was a singer who was often backed by his own vocal trio, the Artettes, patterned after Ray Charles' Raelettes. He had performed with Turner's band on a semi-regular basis, since 1955 when he had recorded "As Long as I Have You" with his vocal group the Trojans, backed by "Ike Turner and his Orchestra": [Excerpt: The Trojans, Ike Turner and His Orchestra, "As Long as I Have You"] He'd recorded a few more tracks with Turner since then, both solo and under group names like The Rockers: [Excerpt: The Rockers, "Why Don't You Believe?"] In 1960, Lassiter needed new tyres for his car, and borrowed eighty dollars from Turner in order to get them -- a relatively substantial amount of money for a working musician back then. He told Turner that he would pay him back at a recording session they had booked, where Lassiter was going to record a song Turner had written, "A Fool in Love", with Turner's band and the Artettes. But Lassiter never showed up -- he didn't have the eighty dollars, and Turner found himself sat in a recording studio with a bunch of musicians he was paying for, paying twenty-five dollars an hour for the studio time, and with no singer there to record. At the time, he was still under the impression that Lassiter might eventually show up, if not at that session, then at least at a future one, but until he did, there was nothing he could do and he was getting angry. Bullock suggested that they cut the track without Lassiter. They were using a studio with a multi-track machine -- only two tracks, but that would be enough. They could cut the backing track on one track, and she could record a guide vocal on the other track, since she'd been around when Turner was teaching Lassiter the song. At least that way they wouldn't have wasted all the money. Turner saw the wisdom of the idea -- he said in his autobiography "This was the first time I got hip to two-track stereo" -- and after consulting with the engineer on the session, he decided to go ahead with Bullock's plan. The plan still caused problems, because they were recording the song in a key written for a man, so Bullock had to yell more than sing, causing problems for the engineer, who according to Turner kept saying things like "Goddammit, don't holler in my microphone". But it was only a demo vocal, after all, and they got it cut -- and as Lassiter didn't show up, Turner took Lassiter's backing vocal group as his own new group, renaming the Artettes to the Ikettes, and they became the first of a whole series of lineups of Ikettes who would record with Turner for the rest of his life. The intention was still to get Lassiter to sing lead on the record, but then Turner played an acetate of it at a club night where he was DJing as well as performing, and the kids apparently went wild: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] Turner took the demo to Juggy Murray at Sue Records, still with the intention of replacing Anna Mae's vocal with Lassiter's, but Murray insisted that that was the best thing about the record, and that it should be released exactly as it was, that it was a guaranteed hit. Although -- while that's the story that's told all the time about that record by everyone involved in the recording and release, and seems uncontested, there does seem to be one minor problem with the story, which is that the Ikettes sing "you know you love him, you can't understand/Why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man". I'm willing to be proved wrong, of course, but my suspicion is that Ike Turner wasn't such a progressive thinker that he was writing songs about male-male relationships in 1960. It's possible that the Ikettes were recorded on the same track as Tina's guide vocals, but if the intention was to overdub a new lead from Lassiter on an otherwise finished track, it would have made more sense for them to sing their finished backing vocal part. It seems more likely to me that they decided in the studio that the record was going to go out with Anna Mae singing lead, and the idea of Murray insisting is a later exaggeration. One thing that doesn't seem to be an exaggeration, though, is that initially Murray wanted the record to go out as by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm featuring Little Ann, but Turner had other ideas. While Murray insisted "the girl is the star", Turner knew what happened when other people were the credited stars on his records. He didn't want another Jackie Brenston, having a hit and immediately leaving Turner right back where he started. If Little Ann was the credited singer, Little Ann would become a star and Ike Turner would have to find a new singer. So he came up with a pseudonym. Turner was a fan of jungle women in film serials and TV, and he thought a wild-woman persona would suit Anna Mae's yelled vocal, and so he named his new star after Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a female Tarzan knock-off comic character created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in the thirties, but who Turner probably knew from a TV series that had been on in 1955 and 56. He gave her his surname, changed "Sheena" slightly to make the new name alliterative and always at least claimed to have registered a trademark on the name he came up with, so if Anna Mae ever left the band he could just get a new singer to use the name. Anna Mae Bullock was now Tina Turner, and the record went out as by "Ike and Tina Turner": [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and hit the top thirty on the pop charts, too. But there were already problems. After Ike had had a second son with Lorraine, he then got Tina pregnant with another of his children, still seeing both women. He had already started behaving abusively towards Tina, and as well as being pregnant, she was suffering from jaundice -- she says in the first of her two autobiographies that she distinctly remembered lying in her hospital bed, hearing "A Fool in Love" on the radio, and thinking "What's love got to do with it?", though as with all such self-mythologising we should take this with a pinch of salt. Turner was in need of money to pay for lawyers -- he had been arrested for financial crimes involving forged cheques -- and Juggy Murray wouldn't give him an advance until he delivered a follow-up to "A Fool in Love", so he insisted that Tina sneak herself out of the hospital and go into the studio, jaundiced and pregnant, to record the follow-up. Then, as soon as the jaundice had cleared up, they went on a four-month tour, with Tina heavily pregnant, to make enough money to pay Ike's legal bills. Turner worked his band relentlessly -- he would accept literally any gig, even tiny clubs with only a hundred people in the audience, reasoning that it was better for the band's image to play small venues that had to turn people away because they were packed to capacity, than to play large venues that were only half full. While "A Fool in Love" had a substantial white audience, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was almost the epitome of the chitlin' circuit act, playing exciting, funky, tightly-choreographed shows for almost entirely Black audiences in much the same way as James Brown, and Ike Turner was in control of every aspect of the show. When Tina had to go into hospital to give birth, rather than give up the money from gigging, Ike hired a sex worker who bore a slight resemblance to Tina to be the new onstage "Tina Turner" until the real one was able to perform again. One of the Ikettes told the real Tina, who discharged herself from hospital, travelled to the venue, beat up the fake Tina, and took her place on stage two days after giving birth. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with the Kings of Rhythm backing Tina, the Ikettes, and male singer Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had solo spots, were an astonishing live act, but they were only intermittently successful on record. None of the three follow-ups to "A Fool in Love" did better than number eighty-two on the charts, and two of them didn't even make the R&B charts, though "I Idolize You" did make the R&B top five. Their next big hit came courtesy of Mickey and Sylvia. You may remember us talking about Mickey and Sylvia way back in episode forty-nine, from back in 2019, but if you don't, they were one of a series of R&B duet acts, like Gene and Eunice, who came up after the success of Shirley and Lee, and their big hit was "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] By 1961, their career had more or less ended, but they'd recorded a song co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, which had gone unreleased: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] When that was shelved they remade it as an Ike and Tina Turner record, with Mickey and Sylvia being Ike -- Sylvia took on all the roles that Ike would normally do in the studio, arranging the track and playing lead guitar, as well as joining the Ikettes on backing vocals, while Mickey did the spoken answering vocals that most listeners assumed were Ike, and which Ike would replicate on stage. The result, unsurprisingly, sounded more like a Mickey and Sylvia record than anything Ike and Tina had ever released before, though it's very obviously Tina on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That made the top twenty on the pop charts -- though it would be their last top forty hit for nearly a decade as Ike and Tina Turner. They did though have a couple of other hits as the Ikettes, with Ike Turner putting the girl group's name on the label so he could record for multiple labels. The first of these, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)" was a song Ike had written which would later go on to become something of an R&B standard. It featured Dolores Johnson on lead vocals, but Tina sang backing vocals and got a rare co-production credit: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] The other Ikettes top forty hit was in 1965, with a song written by Steve Venet and Tommy Boyce -- a songwriter we will be hearing more about in three weeks -- and produced by Venet: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches 'n' Cream"] Ike wasn't keen on that record at first, but soon came round to it when it hit the charts. The success of that record caused that lineup of Ikettes to split from Ike and Tina -- the Ikettes had become a successful act in their own right, and Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars wanted to book them, but that would have meant they wouldn't be available for Ike and Tina shows. So Ike sent a different group of three girls out on the road with Clark's tour, keeping the original Ikettes back to record and tour with him, and didn't pay them any royalties on their records. They resented being unable to capitalise on their big hit, so they quit. At first they tried to keep the Ikettes name for themselves, and got Tina Turner's sister Alline to manage them, but eventually they changed their name to the Mirettes, and released a few semi-successful records. Ike got another trio of Ikettes to replace them, and carried on with Pat Arnold, Gloria Scott, and Maxine Smith as the new Ikettes,. One Ikette did remain pretty much throughout -- a woman called Ann Thomas, who Ike Turner was sleeping with, and who he would much later marry, but who he always claimed was never allowed to sing with the others, but was just there for her looks. By this point Ike and Tina had married, though Ike had not divorced any of his previous wives (though he paid some of them off when Ike and Tina became big). Ike and Tina's marriage in Tijuana was not remembered by either of them as a particularly happy experience -- Ike would always later insist that it wasn't a legal marriage at all, and in fact that it was the only one of his many, many, marriages that hadn't been, and was just a joke. He was regularly abusing her in the most horrific ways, but at this point the duo still seemed to the public to be perfectly matched. They actually only ended up on the Big TNT Show as a last-minute thing -- another act was sick, though none of my references mention who it was who got sick, just that someone was needed to fill in for them, and as Ike and Tina were now based in LA -- the country boy Ike had finally become a city boy after all -- and would take any job on no notice, they got the gig. Phil Spector was impressed, and he decided that he could revitalise his career by producing a hit for Tina Turner. There was only one thing wrong -- Tina Turner wasn't an act. *Ike* and Tina Turner was an act. And Ike Turner was a control freak, just like Spector was -- the two men had essentially the same personality, and Spector didn't want to work with someone else who would want to be in charge. After some negotiation, they came to an agreement -- Spector could produce a Tina Turner record, but it would be released as an Ike and Tina Turner record. Ike would be paid twenty thousand dollars for his services, and those services would consist of staying well away from the studio and not interfering. Spector was going to go back to the old formulas that had worked for him, and work with the people who had contributed to his past successes, rather than leaving anything to chance. Jack Nitzsche had had a bit of a falling out with him and not worked on some of the singles he'd produced recently, but he was back. And Spector was going to work with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich again. He'd fallen out with Barry and Greenwich when "Chapel of Love" had been a hit for the Dixie Cups rather than for one of Spector's own artists, and he'd been working with Mann and Weill and Goffin and King instead. But he knew that it was Barry and Greenwich who were the ones who had worked best with him, and who understood his musical needs best, so he actually travelled to see them in New York instead of getting them to come to him in LA, as a peace offering and a sign of how much he valued their input. The only problem was that Spector hadn't realised that Barry and Greenwich had actually split up. They were still working together in the studio, and indeed had just produced a minor hit single for a new act on Bert Berns' label BANG, for which Greenwich had written the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] We'll hear more about Neil Diamond, and about Jeff Barry's work with him, in three weeks. But Barry and Greenwich were going through a divorce and weren't writing together any more, and came back together for one last writing session with Spector, at which, apparently, Ellie Greenwich would cry every time they wrote a line about love. The session produced four songs, of which two became singles. Barry produced a version of "I Can Hear Music", written at these sessions, for the Ronettes, who Spector was no longer interested in producing himself: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] That only made number ninety-nine on the charts, but the song was later a hit for the Beach Boys and has become recognised as a classic. The other song they wrote in those sessions, though, was the one that Spector wanted to give to Tina Turner. "River Deep, Mountain High" was a true three-way collaboration -- Greenwich came up with the music for the verses, Spector for the choruses, and Barry wrote the lyrics and tweaked the melody slightly. Spector, Barry, and Greenwich spent two weeks in their writing session, mostly spent on "River Deep, Mountain High". Spector later said of the writing "Every time we'd write a love line, Ellie would start to cry. I couldn't figure out what was happening, and then I realised… it was a very uncomfortable situation. We wrote that, and we wrote ‘I Can Hear Music'…. We wrote three or four hit songs on that one writing session. “The whole thing about ‘River Deep' was the way I could feel that strong bass line. That's how it started. And then Jeff came up with the opening line. I wanted a tender song about a chick who loved somebody very much, but a different way of expressing it. So we came up with the rag doll and ‘I'm going to cuddle you like a little puppy'. And the idea was really built for Tina, just like ‘Lovin' Feelin” was built for the Righteous Brothers.” Spector spent weeks recording, remixing, rerecording, and reremixing the backing track, arranged by Nitzsche, creating the most thunderous, overblown, example of the Wall of Sound he had ever created, before getting Tina into the studio. He also spent weeks rehearsing Tina on the song, and according to her most of what he did was "carefully stripping away all traces of Ike from my performance" -- she was belting the song and adding embellishments, the way Ike Turner had always taught her to, and Spector kept insisting that she just sing the melody -- something that she had never had the opportunity to do before, and which she thought was wonderful. It was so different from anything else that she'd recorded that after each session, when Ike would ask her about the song, she would go completely blank -- she couldn't hold this pop song in her head except when she was running through it with Spector. Eventually she did remember it, and when she did Ike was not impressed, though the record became one of the definitive pop records of all time: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] Spector was putting everything on the line for this record, which was intended to be his great comeback and masterpiece. That one track cost more than twenty thousand dollars to record -- an absolute fortune at a time when a single would normally be recorded in one or two sessions at most. It also required a lot of work on Tina's part. She later estimated that she had sung the opening line of the song a thousand times before Spector allowed her to move on to the second line, and talked about how she got so hot and sweaty singing the song over and over that she had to take her blouse off in the studio and sing the song in her bra. She later said "I still don't know what he wanted. I still don't know if I pleased him. But I never stopped trying." Spector produced a total of six tracks with Tina, including the other two songs written at those Barry and Greenwich sessions, "I'll Never Need More Than This", which became the second single released off the "River Deep, Mountain High" album, and "Hold On Baby", plus cover versions of Arthur Alexander's "Every Day I Have to Cry Some", Pomus and Shuman's "Save the Last Dance", and "A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)" a Holland-Dozier-Holland song which had originally been released as a Martha and the Vandellas B-side. The planned album was to be padded out with six tracks produced by Ike Turner, mostly remakes of the duo's earlier hits, and was planned for release after the single became the hit everyone knew it would. The single hit the Hot One Hundred soon after it was released: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] ...and got no higher up the charts than number eighty-eight. The failure of the record basically destroyed Spector, and while he had been an abusive husband before this, now he became much worse, as he essentially retired from music for four years, and became increasingly paranoid and aggressive towards the industry that he thought was not respectful enough of his genius. There have been several different hypotheses as to why "River Deep Mountain High" was not a success. Some have said that it was simply because DJs were fed up of Spector refusing to pay payola, and had been looking for a reason to take him down a peg. Ike Turner thought it was due to racism, saying later “See, what's wrong with America, I think, is that rather than accept something for its value… what it's doing, America mixes race in it. You can't call that record R&B. But because it's Tina… if you had not put Tina's name on there and put ‘Joe Blow', then the Top 40 stations would have accepted it for being a pop record. But Tina Turner… they want to brand her as being an R&B artist. I think the main reason that ‘River Deep' didn't make it here in America was that the R&B stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was pop, and the pop stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was R&B. And it didn't get played at all. The only record I've heard that could come close to that record is a record by the Beach Boys called ‘Good Vibrations'. I think these are the two records that I've heard in my life that I really like, you know?” Meanwhile, Jeff Barry thought it was partly the DJs but also faults in the record caused by Phil Spector's egomania, saying "he has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep' is terrible, he buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that… if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song – just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me, listen to that bass sound. …' That, to me, is what hurts in the long run... Also, I do think that the song is not as clear on the record as it should be, mix-wise. I don't want to use the word overproduced, because it isn't, it's just undermixed." There's possibly an element of all three of these factors in play. As we've discussed, 1965 seems to have been the year that the resegregation of American radio began, and the start of the long slow process of redefining genres so that rock and roll, still considered a predominantly Black music at the beginning of the sixties, was by the end of the decade considered an almost entirely white music. And it's also the case that "River Deep, Mountain High" was the most extreme production Spector ever committed to vinyl, and that Spector had made a lot of enemies in the music business. It's also, though, the case that it was a genuinely great record: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] However, in the UK, it was promoted by Decca executive Tony Hall, who was a figure who straddled both sides of the entertainment world -- as part of his work as a music publicist he had been a presenter on Oh Boy!, written a column in Record Mirror, and presented a Radio Luxembourg show. Hall put his not-inconsiderable weight behind promoting the record, and it ended up reaching number two in the UK -- being successful enough that the album was also released over here, though it wouldn't come out in the US for several years. The record also attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who invited Ike and Tina to be their support act on a UK tour, which also featured the Yardbirds, and this would be a major change for the duo in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it got them properly in contact with British musicians -- and the Stones would get Ike and Tina as support artists several times over the next few years -- and also made the UK and Europe part of their regular tour itinerary. It also gave the duo their first big white rock audience, and over the next several years they would pivot more and more to performing music aimed at that audience, rather than the chitlin' circuit they'd been playing for previously. Ike was very conscious of wanting to move away from the blues and R&B -- while that was where he'd made his living as a musician, it wasn't music he actually liked, and he would often talk later about how much he respected Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, and how his favourite music was country music. Tina had also never been a fan of blues or R&B, and wanted to perform songs by the white British performers they were meeting. The tour also, though, gave Tina her first real thoughts of escape. She loved the UK and Europe, and started thinking about what life could be like for her not just being Ike Turner's wife and working fifty-one weeks a year at whatever gigs came along. But it also made that escape a little more difficult, because on the tour Tina lost one of her few confidantes in the organisation. Tina had helped Pat Arnold get away from her own abusive partner, and the two had become very close, but Arnold was increasingly uncomfortable being around Ike's abuse of Tina, and couldn't help her friend the way she'd been helped. She decided she needed to get out of a toxic situation, and decided to stay in England, where she'd struck up an affair with Mick Jagger, and where she found that there were many opportunities for her as a Black woman that simply hadn't been there in the US. (This is not to say that Britain doesn't have problems with racism -- it very much does, but those problems are *different* problems than the ones that the US had at that point, and Arnold found Britain's attitude more congenial to her personally). There was also another aspect, which a lot of Black female singers of her generation have mentioned and which probably applies here. Many Black women have said that they were astonished on visiting Britain to be hailed as great singers, when they thought of themselves as merely average. Britain does not have the kind of Black churches which had taught generations of Black American women to sing gospel, and so singers who in the US thought of themselves as merely OK would be far, far, better than any singers in the UK -- the technical standards were just so much lower here. (This is something that was still true at least as late as the mid-eighties. Bob Geldof talks in his autobiography about attending the recording session for "We Are the World" after having previously recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and being astonished at how much more technically skilled the American stars were and how much more seriously they took their craft.) And Arnold wasn't just an adequate singer -- she was and is a genuinely great talent -- and so she quickly found herself in demand in the UK. Jagger got her signed to Immediate Records, a new label that had been started up by the Stones manager Andrew Oldham, and where Jimmy Page was the staff producer. She was given a new name, P.P. Arnold, which was meant to remind people of another American import, P.J. Proby, but which she disliked because the initials spelled "peepee". Her first single on the label, produced by Jagger, did nothing, but her second single, written by a then-unknown songwriter named Cat Stevens, became a big hit: [Excerpt: P.P. Arnold, "The First Cut is the Deepest"] She toured with a backing band, The Nice, and made records as a backing singer with artists like the Small Faces. She also recorded a duet with the unknown singer Rod Stewart, though that wasn't a success: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] We'll be hearing more about P.P. Arnold in future episodes, but the upshot of her success was that Tina had even fewer people to support her. The next few years were increasingly difficult for Tina, as Ike turned to cocaine use in a big way, became increasingly violent, and his abuse of her became much more violent. The descriptions of his behaviour in Tina's two volumes of autobiography are utterly harrowing, and I won't go into them in detail, except to say that nobody should have to suffer what she did. Ike's autobiography, on the other hand, has him attempting to defend himself, even while admitting to several of the most heinous allegations, by saying he didn't beat his wife any more than most men did. Now the sad thing is that this may well be true, at least among his peer group. Turner's behaviour was no worse than behaviour from, say, James Brown or Brian Jones or Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis, and it may well be that behaviour like this was common enough among people he knew that Turner's behaviour didn't stand out at all. His abuse has become much better-known, because the person he was attacking happened to become one of the biggest stars in the world, while the women they attacked didn't. But that of course doesn't make what Ike did to Tina any better -- it just makes it infinitely sadder that so many more people suffered that way. In 1968, Tina actually tried to take her own life -- and she was so fearful of Ike that when she overdosed, she timed it so that she thought she would be able to at least get on stage and start the first song before collapsing, knowing that their contract required her to do that for Ike to get paid. As it was, one of the Ikettes noticed the tablets she had taken had made her so out of it she'd drawn a line across her face with her eyebrow pencil. She was hospitalised, and according to both Ike and Tina's reports, she was comatose and her heart actually stopped beating, but then Ike started yelling at her, saying if she wanted to die why didn't she do it by jumping in front of a truck, rather than leaving him with hospital bills, and telling her to go ahead and die if this was how she was going to treat him -- and she was so scared of Ike her heart started up again. (This does not seem medically likely to me, but I wasn't there, and they both were). Of course, Ike frames this as compassion and tough love. I would have different words for it myself. Tina would make several more suicide attempts over the years, but even as Tina's life was falling apart, the duo's professional career was on the up. They started playing more shows in the UK, and they toured the US as support for the Rolling Stones. They also started having hits again, after switching to performing funked-up cover versions of contemporary hits. They had a minor hit with a double-sided single of the Beatles' "Come Together" and the Stones' "Honky-Tonk Women", then a bigger one with a version of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher", then had their biggest hit ever with "Proud Mary". It's likely we'll be looking at Creedence Clearwater Revival's original version of that song at some point, but while Ike Turner disliked the original, Tina liked it, and Ike also became convinced of the song's merits by hearing a version by The Checkmates Ltd: [Excerpt: The Checkmates Ltd, "Proud Mary"] That was produced by Phil Spector, who came briefly out of his self-imposed exile from the music business in 1969 to produce a couple of singles for the Checkmates and Ronnie Spector. That version inspired Ike and Tina's recording of the song, which went to number four on the charts and won them a Grammy award in 1971: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Proud Mary"] Ike was also investing the money they were making into their music. He built his own state-of-the-art studio, Bolic Sound, which Tina always claimed was a nod to her maiden name, Bullock, but which he later always said was a coincidence. Several other acts hired the studio, especially people in Frank Zappa's orbit -- Flo and Eddie recorded their first album as a duo there, and Zappa recorded big chunks of Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe('), two of his most successful albums, at the studio. Acts hiring Bolic Sound also got Tina and the Ikettes on backing vocals if they wanted them, and so for example Tina is one of the backing vocalists on Zappa's "Cosmik Debris": [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Cosmik Debris"] One of the most difficult things she ever had to sing in her life was this passage in Zappa's song "Montana", which took the Ikettes several days' rehearsal to get right. [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "Montana"] She was apparently so excited at having got that passage right that she called Ike out of his own session to come in and listen, but Ike was very much unimpressed, and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said “I don't know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long. He treated her terribly and she's a really nice lady. We were recording down there on a Sunday. She wasn't involved with the session, but she came in on Sunday with a whole pot of stew that she brought for everyone working in the studio. Like out of nowhere, here's Tina Turner coming in with a rag on her head bringing a pot of stew. It was really nice.” By this point, Ike was unimpressed by anything other than cocaine and women, who he mostly got to sleep with him by having truly gargantuan amounts of cocaine around. As Ike was descending further into paranoia and abuse, though, Tina was coming into her own. She wrote "Nutbush City Limits" about the town where she grew up, and it reached number 22 on the charts -- higher than any song Ike ever wrote: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Nutbush City Limits"] Of course, Ike would later claim that he wrote the music and let Tina keep all the credit. Tina was also asked by the Who to appear in the film version of their rock opera Tommy, where her performance of "Acid Queen" was one of the highlights: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Acid Queen"] And while she was filming that in London, she was invited to guest on a TV show with Ann-Margret, who was a huge fan of Ike and Tina, and duetted with Tina -- but not Ike -- on a medley of her hits: [Excerpt: Tina Turner and Ann-Margret, "Nutbush City Limits/Honky Tonk Woman"] Just as with "River Deep, Mountain High", Tina was wanted for her own talents, independent of Ike. She was starting to see that as well as being an abusive husband, he was also not necessary for her to have a career. She was also starting to find parts of her life that she could have for herself, independent of her husband. She'd been introduced to Buddhist meditation by a friend, and took it up in a big way, much to Ike's disapproval. Things finally came to a head in July 1976, in Dallas, when Ike started beating her up and for the first time she fought back. She pretended to reconcile with him, waited for him to fall asleep, and ran across a busy interstate, almost getting hit by a ten-wheel truck, to get to another hotel she could see in the distance. Luckily, even though she had no money, and she was a Black woman in Dallas, not a city known for its enlightened attitudes in the 1970s, the manager of the Ramada Inn took pity on her and let her stay there for a while until she could get in touch with Buddhist friends. She spent the next few months living off the kindness of strangers, before making arrangements with Rhonda Graam, who had started working for Ike and Tina in 1964 as a fan, but had soon become indispensable to the organisation. Graam sided with Tina, and while still supposedly working for Ike she started putting together appearances for Tina on TV shows like Cher's. Cher was a fan of Tina's work, and was another woman trying to build a career after leaving an abusive husband who had been her musical partner: [Excerpt: Cher and Tina Turner, "Makin' Music is My Business"] Graam became Tina's full-time assistant, as well as her best friend, and remained part of her life until Graam's death a year ago. She also got Tina booked in to club gigs, but for a long time they found it hard to get bookings -- promoters would say she was "only half the act". Ike still wanted the duo to work together professionally, if not be a couple, but Tina absolutely refused, and Ike had gangster friends of his shoot up Graam's car, and Tina heard rumours that he was planning to hire a hit man to come after her. Tina filed for divorce, and gave Ike everything -- all the money the couple had earned together in sixteen years of work, all the property, all the intellectual property -- except for two cars, one of which Ike had given her and one which Sammy Davis Jr. had given her, and the one truly important thing -- the right to use the name "Tina Turner", which Ike had the trademark on. Ike had apparently been planning to hire someone else to perform as "Tina Turner" and carry on as if nothing had changed. Slowly, Tina built her career back up, though it was not without its missteps. She got a new manager, who also managed Olivia Newton-John, and the manager brought in a song he thought was perfect for Tina. She turned it down, and Newton-John recorded it instead: [Excerpt: Olivia Newton-John, "Physical"] But even while she was still playing small clubs, her old fans from the British rock scene were boosting her career. In 1981, after Rod Stewart saw her playing a club gig and singing his song "Hot Legs", he invited her to guest with him and perform the song on Saturday Night Live: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, "Hot Legs"] The Rolling Stones invited Tina to be their support act on a US tour, and to sing "Honky Tonk Women" on stage with them, and eventually when David Bowie, who was at the height of his fame at that point, told his record label he was going to see her on a night that EMI wanted to do an event for him, half the record industry showed up to the gig. She had already recorded a remake of the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" with the British Electric Foundation -- a side project for two of the members of Heaven 17 -- in 1982, for one of their albums: [Excerpt: British Electric Foundation, "Ball of Confusion"] Now they were brought in to produce a new single for her, a remake of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together": [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Let's Stay Together"] That made the top thirty in the US, and was a moderate hit in many places, making the top ten in the UK. She followed it up with another BEF production, a remake of "Help!" by the Beatles, which appears only to have been released in mainland Europe. But then came the big hit: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "What's Love Got to Do With It?"] wenty-six years after she started performing with Ike, Tina Turner was suddenly a major star. She had a string of successes throughout the eighties and nineties, with more hit records, film appearances, a successful autobiography, a film based on the autobiography, and record-setting concert appearan

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TikTokking around the Christmas Tree!

tiktok testing happy holidays gen z option christmas trees reels social media today amanda davis tommy boyce

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2021 31:24

We wish you a Merry Tikmas! e.l.f. cosmetics debuts a long-form “movie” on TikTok, Instagram tests a new “Dancify” capability for Reels, LinkedIn publishes a report of Gen-Z insights, and more on this week's holiday #5Things! The Things: TikTok Publishes 2021 Music Recap Instagram's Testing a 'Dancify' Option for Reels Which Would Automatically Sync Video and Music Meta Opens Up Simplified AR Creation Tools to More Users LinkedIn's Publishes Gen Z Best Practices Report e.l.f. goes long-form for meme-heavy holiday 'movie' native to TikTok Sources: The Verge, Social Media Today, LinkedIn, and Marketing Dive Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Amanda Davis, Tommy Boyce, and Beth Rolfs Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com Editor's Note: The crew is going on break until the new year, but that doesn't mean you have to. Take a listen to the previous episodes, and make your own predictions for the new year! Happy Holidays from the 5Things family.

Tis the Season to Shop Social

social shop tis the season vr ar tommy boyce

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2021 24:28

The social holiday shopping village is open. A little water cooler talk alleges Meta is opening brick-and-mortar VR/AR stores, Instagram will launch livestream shopping and free holiday shipping and much more on this week's #5Things! The Things: Meta Reportedly Opening Brick-and-Mortar VR/AR Stores Twitter Blue Launches in US with Ad-Free Article Viewing and More Instagram to Launch Livestream Shopping and Free Holiday Shipping TikTok Publishes Holiday Campaign Guide Facebook Adds Creator Monetization Tools in Response to Apple Fees Sources: Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce, and Amanda Davis Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com

TikTok Tips, Super Apps, and "More Cowbell!"

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 8, 2021 22:49

What are ye doin in my Snap? Snap partners with NBCUniversal for new audio access and More Cowbell!, Pinterest announces a new live-stream shopping series, Facebook shuts down its facial recognition program and more on this week's #5Things!" The Things: Pinterest Announces New Shoppable Live-Stream Series Snapchat Partners with NBC Universal to Bring NBC-related Audio to Snaps TikTok Testing New Tipping Feature Facebook to Shut Down Facial Recognition Program Super Apps Are the Future Sources: Social Media Today, The Verge, Tech Crunch, NYT Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Tommy Boyce, and Amanda Davis Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com

1967 - January: The Monkees "More of the Monkees"

What the Riff?!?

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 8, 2021 25:38

This second studio album from The Monkees was number 1 on the Billboard 200 for 18 weeks, displacing their debut album to get there. More of the Monkees has been certified quintuple platinum, was the first pop/rock album to be the best selling album of the year in the U.S. – and the third best-selling album of the 60's.It is also the one that Monkee Michael Nesmith said was “probably the worst album in the history of the world."The Monkees were originally Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. The group was conceived for the TV series “The Monkees” which aired from 1966 to 1968, and the band members primarily contributed lead vocals and only limited roles in the studio, as they were expected to spend their time filming the television series. Michael Nesmith composed and produced some songs, and Peter Tork did some guitar work, but it was mainly session musicians. The Candy Store Prophets were the studio band for the first album, and other session musicians including The Wrecking Crew were involved in the second album. Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider had the idea for the show. They interviewed musicians for the job, first recruiting Davy Jones, who had been working in Broadway. The instruments played were driven by what looked good on camera rather than what they actually played. Davy Jones was the only one with experience playing drums, but he was considered too short so Dolenz was assigned to the drums. Nesmith was on guitar, Tork on bass, and Jones was the front man. The more natural lineup for concerts would be Jones on drums, Tork on guitar, Nesmith on bass and Donlenz as front man.The show was a hit, but the music was a bigger hit, with album sales outstripping Nielsen ratings. That pushed the producers to pay more attention to the music. It also encouraged the studio to send the Monkees out to play live concerts. These guys were recording the TV show by day, recording songs by night, and doing special appearances on the weekend, then they had to figure out how to rehearse for live performances. It was all very confusing for the “band,” with Nesmith shocked to see the first album presenting them as an actual band. That was October 1966. But the second album was released while they were on tour as a real band in January of 1967. They hadn't selected the songs, and it went out without their permission or knowledge. They weren't even given a copy, but had to buy it in a record store. The album cover was a picture of the band originally taken for a JC Penny commercial. This would eventually lead to the band being able to take creative control, and Don Kirshner being dismissed. Despite the controversy, this is quite a good album, and quite representative of the music at the time. (I'm Not Your) Steppin' StoneThis track was written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and Micky Dolenz is on lead. Paul Revere & the Raiders originally recorded it, but the Monkees' version is the best known. It was also the first song from the Monkees' to chart as a B-side.Mary, MaryAlso featuring Micky Dolenz on lead, this track was written by Michael Nesmith. It was originally recorded by The Butterfield Blues Band in 1966, and in the summer of the same year Nesmith produced and recorded the song for The Monkees with Dolenz on lead and the Wrecking Crew on backing instruments. It was never released as a single in the U.S., but was given away as a cut-out cereal box prize in 1969.When Love Comes Knockin' (At Your Door)Davy Jones takes lead duties here, and the song was written by Carole Bayer Sager and Neil Sedaka. I'm A BelieverThis is the big hit from the album. Micky Dolenz returns to lead, and the song was written by Neil Diamond. It hit number 1 for the week ending December 31st, 1966, and would be the biggest selling single for all of 1967. It went gold within two days of its release because of advance orders. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the television series The Green Hornet)This was the last month for a short-lived series was famous for co-starring Bruce Lee as Kato. It also had a crossover with the Batman TV series. STAFF PICKS:Happenings Ten Years Time Ago by the YardbirdsBrian's brings us the psychedelic sensibilities of the Yardbirds. The singer is looking back on the time from a perspective of reincarnation. This song has participation from both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. John Paul Jones also contributed the bass lines for this one. Look What You've Done by Pozo-Seco SingersRob features a folk-oriented piece from Don Williams before his solo career. Williams would go on to have 17 number one country hits. His hits would be covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Pete Townshend...to Telly Savalas.(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet by The Blues MagoosWayne's staff pick returns to the psychedelic genre. This is the best known song for The Blues Magoos. While not very successful commercially as a band, the Blues Magoos was a big influence on many bands including Pink Floyd.Good Vibrations by The Beach BoysBruce brings us the high water mark song of The Beach Boys' discography. Good Vibrations was the costliest single ever recorded. Brian Wilson recorded a bunch of short musical modules with his bandmates and with session musicians at four different Hollywood studios. He had more than 90 hours of tape to make this 3.5-minute single. Wilson's mother was the inspiration for this song. COMEDY TRACK:Snoopy vs. The Red Baron by The Royal GuardsmenA novelty song inspired by the comic serial "Peanuts," in which Snoopy often daydreams of fighting the Red Baron in his doghouse - re-envisioned as a Sopwith Camel.

Into the Metaverse

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2021 33:03

Welcome to the metaverse! Have a look around. Facebook invests $50 Million into metaverse research fund, Snapchat encourages users to run for office, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, urges Congress to regulate the platform and more on this week's jam-packed #5Things! The 5Things: Instagram Announces “Instagram Video” Combining IGTV and Videos Facebook Invests $50M into Building the Digital Metaverse Twitter Opens Up Applications for Professional Profiles Snapchat Launches Run for Office Portal, Encouraging Users to Consider Political Careers Facebook Whistleblower Recommends Congress to Regulate Platform Sources: NYT, The Verge, AdWeek, Reuters, Tech Crunch Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Juliana Diatezua, Tommy Boyce

Everything's Banned in Texas

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 20, 2021 36:49

Facebook has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, TikToker's at the Met Gala prove they're all that, Texas bans removing posts based on political expression and more on this week's jam-packed #5Things The 5 Things: Texas Bans Social Media Platforms from Removing Posts Based on Political Views Facebook Internal Report Reveals Harm Instagram has on Teenage Mental Health Secret Facebook Program Reportedly Lets Celebrities Avoid Moderation Instagram to Add “Favorites” Option Allowing Users to Prioritize Accounts on Their Feed How TikTok Democratized the 2021 Met Gala Sources: NYT, The Verge, Refinery 29 Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Juliana Diatezua, Tommy Boyce

We Just Got a Letter… from our Past

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2021 31:19

Summer break is over, but the team is not cooling down! This week, we look at a data report from App Annie, updates from Twitter, and how Steve from Blue's Clues broke the internet. The 5 Things: TikTok Surpasses YouTube in US Average Watch Time AppAnnie Releases “Evolution on Social Apps” Report Twitter Launches “Super Follows,” a Creator Monetization Option Twitter Launches Communities, as Rival to Facebook Groups The Internet Reacts to Nostalgic Blue Clues Video Celebrating the Show's 25th Anniversary Sources: The Verge, AdWeek, Social Media Today Hosts: Joey Scarillo, Juliana Diatezua, Tommy Boyce

"I love a good Zoom Out"

tiktok zoom labor day shopify replacing stickers swipe up tommy boyce

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2021 26:04

Swipe-Up's are out, Facebook Reels are in, and TikTok has shopping. The team welcomes Tommy Boyce to the pod to discuss all of this and more! YouTube Partnership Program Officially Passes 2 Million Members Facebook Adds Reels to iOS App Twitter Launches Newsletter Subscription Button on User Profiles TikTok Partners with Shopify to Allow In-App Purchasing Instagram is Removing the “Swipe Up” Feature, Replacing it with Stickers. Sources: The Verge and NYT Hosts: Amanda Davis, Tommy Boyce, and Joey Scarillo Email us: Podcasts@Grey.com Program Note: No podcast next week, we're off for Labor Day.

The Monkees' "Head" (Ep. 025)

The MacGuffin Guild

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2021 102:32

On this episode of the MacGuffin Guild, we're celebrating our 25th episode by letting our hair down, having a few drinks and enjoying "Head" courtesy of the Monkees.This 1968 Fantasy, Comedy, Musical stars Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Micheal Nesmith. It was written by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, who also Directed.We're gonna let loose and talk about the history of The Monkees, real executions in G-Rated Movies, Frank Zappa's musical and physical body and cherry ice cream.We'll discuss Jack Nicholson's 158 million viewings, the works of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Brutus the Barber Beefcake, and Justin's Points.We'll also get into the contest that brought this film to the show, the winner Ash, and our very first guest appearance -- featuring Sarah.I'm Pat Dougherty and as always I'll be joined by my fellow MacGuffin's Justin Jones and Mike Antonio. Our theme song was written and performed by Jordan Vincent. Join us as we are tossed into a psychedelic, surrealist, plotless, curricular bit of fun fluff -- in The Monkee's 'Head'.

21 - I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite? by Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart

Mixology: The Mono/Stereo Mix Differences Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2021 26:54

Hello Friends! We're staying in 1968 this week with a look at an underrated pop gem from that summer, 'I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite' from Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart. The Monkees songwriters would put together a top tier collection of Monkees styled jams, ranging from top tier pop hooks, riffs on psychedelia and beat, to just an all-out good time. Released to the public in a stereo mix in 1968, the album received a mono promo mix for radio airplay, and somehow this is the mix issued digitally today! Which should you seek out? The answers lie in the lap of The Countess down in Tear Drop City!Happy Listening, Frederick Email the show at: backtomonoradio@gmail.comSupport the podcast on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/backtomonoListen to companion podcast Back to Mono here: backtomono.podbean.comJoin the Facebook Community here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/backtomono

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Episode 186: Come To The Sunshine 4 - The Turtles

Kellie and Kimbra in the Moment

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 201:34

In an episode first aired on October 26, 2020 - DJ Andrew Sandoval revists the playlist for episode #4, spinning sides by P.F. Sloan; Tommy Boyce; Every Mother's Son; Modern Folk Quintet; The Shindogs; The Black Sheep; Gary Lewis & The Playboys; The Lemon Pipers; Ellie Janov; The Spectrum; Herman's Hermits; Freddie & The Dreamers; Graham Gouldman; Jackie DeShannon; The Back Porch Majority; Chris & Craig; Jesse Lee Kincaid; The Looking Glass; The Montage; The Cyrkle; The Proposition; and Rick Price. In the album spotlight, Sandoval spins selections from 1969's Mojo Magic by Mojo. For the artist spotlight, he turns you on to the Turtles deepest cuts in an extended look at the best from Westchester.

Bobby Hart, Award-winning Songwriter and Musician #26

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2020 29:58

Kimbra Westervelt and Kellie Nicholson enjoy talking with Bobby Hart about his successful career as a songwriter and musician with his partner, Tommy Boyce, of Boyce and Hart. ~ Learn more about Bobby Hart at https://www.officialboyceandhart.com. ~ Get to know Kimbra Westervelt and learn more about her career at https://www.kimbrawestervelt.com. ~ Find out more about Kellie Nicholson, her courses and her marketing business at https://www.kellienicholson.com, https://barprofessional.com and https://www.worldwidewebwizards.com. ~ Buy cool t-shirts at https://shop.spreadshirt.com/kellie-and-kimbra-in-the-moment/all. Support this channel via PayPal Top Supporter ($9.99 monthly): https://py.pl/e4MW Super Fan ($4.99 monthly): https://py.pl/CaEGH Fan ($1.99 monthly): https://py.pl/2JHqIg Social Media Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kellieandkimbra Twitter: @kellieandkimbra Instagram: @kellieandkimbrainthemoment Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYvVK7FN2F4 Audio Podcasts Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0VARO5bTL0BFAsL0PVcwQg Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8yYjYzZGU3NC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== Anchor: https://anchor.fm/kellie-and-kimbra RadioPublic: https://radiopublic.com/kellie-and-kimbra-in-the-moment-WkbwVY Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/zcbr74eq Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/kellie-and-kimbra-in-the-moment --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kellie-and-kimbra/support

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Come To The Sunshine 1 - Gary Lewis & The Monkees

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2020 176:03

In an episode first aired September 14, 2020: DJ Andrew Sandoval revisits his first broadcast from 14 years ago, spinning 20 45's made between 1965 & 1969 by Utica Club Natural Carbonation Band/London Phogg/Split Level/The Groop/Jacobson & Tansley/The Pretty Things/Byzantine Empire/San Francisco Earthquake/The Hollies/The Picadilly Line/P.F. Sloan/Gerry Marsden/The Monopoly/Oscar/The Rondells/The Marshmellows/Scott McKenzie/The Action/Los Bravos/The Nashville Teens. In the album spotlight: October 1967's Listen! by Gary Lewis & The Playboys. In our artist spotlight - The Monkees - studying the making of their debut album from October 1966. Including music by the band and Michael Nesmith, Carole King, David Gates, Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart, Micky Dolenz, The New Society, Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Gamma Goochee Himself!

Albums and All That, Starting with the letter F as in Foxtrot, Part 2

Vinyl-O-Matic

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2020 57:59

Fairport Convention [00:47] "Million Dollar Bash" Fairport Chronicles A&M SP-3530 1976 Fairport Convention plucking a little something from the Basement Tapes and giving it a fine dust off. Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart [03:41] "Girl I'm Out to Get You" Family Portrait A&M SP-19002 1967 Bubblegum Pop takes a dip into Chamber Pop? Maybe this is what happened when Boyce & Hart listened to Sgt Pepper and Their Satanic Majesties Request? Bobbie Gentry [06:05] "Rainmaker" Fancy Capitol Records ST-428 1970 A fine funky arrangement of this Harry Nilsson/Bill Martin song. The album made it to number 34 on the Hot Country Albums chart. The Oak Ridge Boys [08:45] "She's Gone to L.A. Again" Fancy Free MCA Records MCA-5209 1981 From the album that unleashed the song "Elvira" on an unsuspecting listening public. Lightnin' Hopkins [12:40] "Lightnin' Boogie" Fast Life Woman Verve Records V-8453 1962 Some excellent electric boogie from the Texas legend. Fun fact: Hopkins recorded an album in 1969 entitled Free Form Patterns in which he was backed by the 13th Floor Elevators rhythm section. Frank Yankovic [15:29] "Champagne Taste and a Beer Bankroll" Favorite Polkas ABC Records ABCD-873 1975 Ain't it the truth, buddy. Feargal Sharkey [17:29] "It's All Over Now" Feargal Sharkey A&M Records SP-6-5108 1985 Former Undertones frontman with his first solo outing. Couldn't resist picking this one. For interested parties, there is the album opens with a bit of she said/he said: Side 1 Track 1 is by Maria McKee about her relationship with Benmont Tench, and Side 1 Track 2 is by Benmont Tench but is purportedly not about Maria McKee. Nina Hagen [21:40] "What It Is" Fearless Columbia BFC 39214 1983 That's right, an RHCP song. And oddly it fits in the context of this album very well. José Feliciano [27:30] "Just a Little Bit of Rain" Feliciano! RCA Victor LSP-3957 1969 Could definitely use a little rain out here. Deerhoof [30:20] "Paradise Girls" Fever 121614 Polyvinyl Record Company PRC-309 2015 Recorded live in Tokyo, on beautiful translucent red vinyl. One of the my favorite bands to see live. Tom Jones [33:49] "Don't Fight It" Fever Zone Parrot PAS 71019 1968 Tom doing his best Wilson Pickett. Julio Iglesias [36:41] "Une Chanson Quie Revient" Fidèle CBS DIL-50323 1981 Awe yeah, disco Cole Porter. Begin the Beguine for those of you wondering. PJ Harvey [42:15] "50ft Queenie" 50ft Queenie Island Records 12IS 538 1993 The third single from Rid of Me. Recorded at Prince's Pachyderm Studios by Steve Albini. Ohio Players [44:38] "Fire" Fire Mercury SRM-1-1013 1974 Ohio Players number one single from their number one album. UiLab [49:06] "St. Elmo's Fire (Radio)" Fires Bingo BIN 2 1998 Ui + Stereolab + Eno = Awesome! Billy Mure's Super-Sonic Guitars [53:14] "Guitar Theme" Fireworks RCA Victor LSP-1694 Some stereophonic snazziness! Music behind the DJ: "Everybody's Talkin" by Terry Baxter and his Orchestra

Darts special with Den Hagarty

C86 Show - Indie Pop

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2020 44:45

Darts special with Den Hagarty in conversation with David Eastaugh Founded in 1976, they built up a large following playing clubs and universities, although their break came after they appeared on Charlie Gillett's show on BBC Radio London in October 1976. This secured the band a recording contract with Magnet Records, where they were teamed up with record producer Tommy Boyce who had previously produced The Monkees. Covering 1950s rock and roll hits, they scored their first UK hit in November 1977 with a medley of "Daddy Cool" (originally a US 1957 hit for The Rays) and Little Richard's 1957 hit "The Girl Can't Help It".[2]More cover versions followed in 1978 with "Come Back My Love" (originally recorded by US R&B group The Wrens in 1955), and "The Boy from New York City" (originally a US hit for The Ad Libs in 1965).

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EV138 (S6E8) Don’t Forget the Gum (From October something, 2019ish. I forget.)

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2020 58:59

The old Professor is getting a bit forgetful, but we still get a good hour of bubblegum pop music! A dramatic reading from a Banana Splits comic book! Some nice words from Jimmy Osmond! An early rarity from Tommy Boyce! A recent rarity from Micky Dolenz! Plenty of jolly good gummy fun from The Bay City Rollers, The Wombles, Beano, Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart, The Yo-Yos, The Collage, The Raindrops, Gene Thomas, Street People, and Together!

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Showaddywaddy with Dave Bartram

C86 Show - Indie Pop

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 23, 2020 51:29

Showaddywaddy special with Dave Bartram in conversation with David Eastaugh Their first single, "Hey Rock and Roll" (written by the band), was released in April 1974. It reached number two in the UK Singles Chart. Showaddywaddy then went on to have a further 22 UK hits until late summer 1982. They had most of their biggest hits with covers of songs from the 1950s and the early 1960s. These cover versions included "Three Steps to Heaven" (originally by Eddie Cochran in 1960), "Heartbeat" (originally written and recorded by Buddy Holly), "Under the Moon of Love" (originally a US hit for Curtis Lee in 1961 and co-written by Tommy Boyce), "When" (originally by the Kalin Twins), "You Got What It Takes" (originally by Marv Johnson) and "Dancin' Party" (originally by Chubby Checker). These six singles were all produced by Mike Hurst (a former member of the Springfields).

EV90 (S4E10) Patty Duke (From May 4th, 2015)

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2020 59:53

Can Fred Flintstone replace Kid Bubblegum as Echo Valley intern?A tribute to the bubblegum stylings of Patty Duke! The Banana Splits got soul, baby! Focus on Tony Orlando! Songwriters Bo Gentry and Ritchie Cordell! A dramatic reading about identical cousins! Great gum pop from Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, The Archies, David Cassidy, 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Monkees, Blue Mink, Andy and David Williams, Wind, The Third Rail, Four Jacks and a Jill, Alan Gary, Do-Re-Mi Children's Chorus, The Times and Gidians League!

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EV138 (S6E8) Don't Forget the Gum

The Art of Process with Aimee Mann and Ted Leo

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2019 58:59

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The Menace's Attic #907

Bombshell Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2019 59:54

Today The Menace's Attic/Just Another Menace SundayBombshell Radio Today's Bombshell (Bombshell Radio)1pm-2pm EST 10am-11am PDT 6pm-7pm BST bombshellradio.comRepeats Friday 5pm ESTAnd Sundays 6pm EST#classics #pop #rock #classicrock #themenacesattic #BombshellRadioThis Week – Episode #907(07/20/2019) “When You Go Deep Inside The Grooves You Never Know What You’ll Turn Up. So, As We Get Into This Final Vinyl Freeform Edition Make Sure You Empty Your Pockets Of All Metal Objects And Have Your I.D. At The Ready!" Opening SongYou Better Sit Down Kids – Cher (Liberty U.K.)Set #1 If You’re Going To Play The Game, You Kids Better Be Ready For A Lot More Than Buying A Hotel Or Going To Jail!Chequered Love – Kim Wilde (EMI) She’s So Cold – The Rolling Stones (Rolling Stone) Master Jack – Four Jacks & A Jill (RCA Victor) I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight? – Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart (A&M)Set #2 I Know You Got That Haircut just For Your Date, But Between The Wings And The Hair Color, You Better Be At The Top Of Your Game Jackson!Calling Captain Autumn – Haircut 100 (Arista) Listen To What The Man Says – Paul McCartney & Wings (Apple) Never Can Say Goodbye Girl – Jackson 5 (Motown) Our Love Is insane – Desmond Child & Rouge (Capitol)Set #3 This Set Courtesy Of Netflix And Their Music Supervisors Though My Thinking Is if We Get Them To License Tracy We’re Like Totally FTW!Hot Blooded – Foreigner (Atlantic) Tracy – The Cufflinks (Decca) The Girl Of My Dreams – Bram Tchaikowski (Polydor)Set #4 For The First Time Ever! An R. Dean Taylor Cell, Uh Soul Block!There’s A Ghost In My House – The Yachts (Polydor) Indiana Wants Me – R. Dean Taylor (Rare Earth)Closing Song Brother Louie – Stories (Kama Sutra)

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45s and Other Revolutions: A-Sides beginning with the letter O.

Vinyl-O-Matic

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2019 61:37

Honey Cone [00:23] a side: "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show (Part I)" b side: "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show (Part II)" Hot Wax HS 7110 1971 Of course the show is going on when I've got more monkey tunes to spin. Fun fact: lead singer Edna Wright is the sister of Darlene Love. Reached #5 on the R&B charts and #15 on the Hot 100. Another fun fact: Hot Wax was started by the great Holland, Dozier and Holland when they left Motown in 1968. Murray Head [07:20] a side: "One Night in Bangkok" b side: "Merano" MCA Records PB-13988 1984 The sound of 80s musicals is alive and well in this production from ABBA's Bjorn and Benny teaming up with Tim Rice, featuring Murray Head doing to the spoken word bits. Oh right, it's a musical about Chess... called Chess. The great Frank Rich described the Broadway production thusly: "a suite of temper tantrums, [where] the characters ... yell at one another to rock music". INXS [19:35] a side: "The One Thing" b side: "Phantim of the Opera" ATCO Records 7-99905 1982 The lead single from their 1982 album Shabooh Shoobah, released in the US in 1983. The b-side is a tongue in cheek reference to yes, the Phantom of the Opera and INXS lead guitarist Tim Farriss. The Damned [26:15] a side: "One Way Love" b side: "Don't Cry Wolf" Stiff Records BUY 24 1977 A 1981 Re-release of their second single originally release in 1977, this time with the sides flipped around. Interestingly enough, this was produced by Nick Mason after the band originally tried to get the ever reclusive Syd Barrett to produce. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy [34:39] a side: "One with the Birds" b side: "Southside of the World" Palace Records PR20 1998 The first official release of the newly minted Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, after a brief spell recording and performing as Will Oldham, after a slightly longer spell recording and performing of all the Palace iterations. Brenton Wood [42:53] a side: "The Oogum Boogum Song" b side: "I Like the Way You Love Me" Double Shot Records 111 1967 Hot stuff and cool stuff from Brenton Wood. This single reached #19 on the R&B charts and #34 on the Hot 100 in 1967. Seems like it should have gone much higher than that if you ask me. The Marmalade [48:25] a side: "Otherwise It's Been a Perfect Day" b side: "I See the Rain" Epic Records 5-10236 1967 Sorta Kinksian, sort Bacharachian a-side from these Glaswegians. But that flipside! Some excellent psyche pop. Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart [55:07] a side: "Out & About" b side: "My Little Chickadee" A&M Records 858 Or as they say in Canada, Oot and Aboot. Super singer/songwriters release a bit of their own magic that reached #39 on the Hot 100 in 1967. And the nostalgic b-side sort of sets us up for when we reach Sonny & Cher's 1967 single "Podunk" in a few episodes from now. Fun fact: Jeanie was their drummer, and Phil Spector approves. (https://youtu.be/R5GoGClBvOg) "I Dream of Jeanie Closing Theme" by Hugo Montenegro and Buddy Kaye

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Ep. 4 - Rachel Lichtman "You're gonna make it after all"

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2019 51:25

Sorry for the delay this Monday, but we're happy to present to you, this conversation with our friend, Rachel Lichtman; among other things, the co-creator of the "Something Cool" podcast; director of music videos for Juliana Hatfield, Creamer, and yours truly (me); director of "The Guys Who Wrote 'Em," a documentary about songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who wound up writing the Monkees' most iconic songs. And I want to make a plea here - this doc is hard to find, but if anyone knows anyone at PBS, it belongs on something like Independent Lens, or as its own episode of American Experience - I'm serious about this. It's all built around archival footage, not Graham Nash sitting in front of a mixing board, and it's incredible and important. MOST RECENTLY THOUGH, Rachel's been devoting every bit of her time and energy into building an entire feminist retro-futurist world under the umbrella of "Network 77". We talk at length about the "Dottie Carroll" mini-doc, found within the first episode of Network 77, available at the website, and we briefly touch on the "Annex Bank" commercial, which is in that episode, but also clipped for Youtube, and linked below. In this podcast, first, Aimee and I tackle the thorny question of what separates supper from dinner, set up the fact that we have some *sponsors,* finally, and then get into it with Rachel. We hope you'll enjoy and check out ALL of the links below. SPONSORS: Green Chef - a USDA certified organic company that sends you everything you need to easily cook delicious meals that you can feel good about. Enjoy clean ingredients you can trust, seasonally sourced for peak freshness. Get $50 off your first box of Green Chef at http://www.GreenChef.us/art Care/Of - a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packs right to your door. Make health and wellness as top priority with the help of Care/Of's monthly subscription vitamin service, and get 50% off your first month by going to http://www.TakeCareOf.com and entering the code "process50" at checkout. LINKS: Network 77 "Annex Bank" Juliana Hatfield "Lost Ship" Creamer "Drugs no More" Something Cool podcast FOLLOW: @artofprocesspod @AimeeMann @TedLeo @MaxFunHQ @Network77 @rachelichtman on Twitter and @rachellichtman on Instagram

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Show #16! TEXAS PRAIRIE CHICKEN HOME COMPANION Monkees Podcast

TEXAS PRAIRIE CHICKEN HOME COMPANION Monkees Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2018 121:44

This is the big blockbuster episode! Famed songwriter Bobby Hart calls in, recalling his days of co-writing some of the Monkees biggest hits ("Last Train to Clarksville," "Monkees Theme," "Valleri," etc.), his early impression of the guys themselves, the hits, Don Kirshner, writing with partner Tommy Boyce, the Boyce & Hart recording years, later reunions, and so much more! A fabulous interview, where we ask our trademark "off the beaten path" questions! PLUS: Hear the rare Boyce & Hart versions of a few of their Monkees tunes, such as "Teardrop City," and "P.O. Box 9847!" AND: You can also learn how Boyce and Hart affected US history! BONUS: Monkees agent and event organizer Jodi Ritzen calls in, with sea-going tales of the 2018 "Flower Power Cruise," Micky's karaoke events, and much more Monkees machinations! WOW! A contest update! You can still win the treasure trove of rare Monkees goodies! Find out how! Music! Interviews! Updates! Humor! Love! What more could any frantic fan ask for? Come SEE what we discuss on our powerful podcasts, at our fabulous TPCHC blog page! http://tpchcmonkeescast.blogspot.com

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Come To The Sunshine 121 - the songs of Randy Newman

Between Light and Shadow: A Twilight Zone Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2017 114:06

In an episode first aired on October 23, 2017: DJ Andrew Sandoval reviews the wonderful songwriting work of Randy Newman with selections recorded between 1963 - 1971 as performed by Billy J. Kramer, Saturday's Children, Nashville Teens, Eric Burdon & The Animals, Van Dyke Parks, Wayne Fontana, Tom Northcott, The Everly Brothers, Nilsson, Harper's Bizarre, The Alan Price Set, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Ruthann Friedman, Claudine Longet, Lori Burton, Eddie Hodges, Frankie Laine, P.J. Proby, Gene Pitney, The Epics, Tommy Boyce, Manfred Mann, Beverley, Ella Fitzgerald, Davy Jones, The Brothers, The Beau Brummels, Rick Nelson and Randy himself.

1x01 "Rod's Lonely Man"

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2016 66:38

Welcome! Join host Craig Beam (the My Life in the Shadow of The Twilight Zone blog) as he compares and contrasts two Rod Serling classics: “Where is Everybody?” and “King Nine Will Not Return.” One will emerge the victor, and the other… well, you’ll have to tune in to find out. Somewhere in the all the chaos Teresa pops in to dole out some trademark spousal emasculation; also listen for a special appearance by Dr. Reba Wissner, PhD (author of A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone) and an unexpected connection between The Twilight Zone and Nine Inch Nails. http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/fred-steiner# Opening theme: “Neither Here Nor There” by Twin Loops Closing music: “Earl Holliman State of Mind” by DJ Crabby CraB The Twilight Zone is a trademark of CBS, Inc. “Where Is Everybody?” by Lorraine Feather (from the album Tales of the Unusual; copyright 2012 by Jazzed Media) “Where Is Everybody?” by Nine Inch Nails (from the album The Fragile, copyright 1999 by Nothing/Interscope) Day of Our Lives theme composed by Charles Albertine, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (copyright Corday Productions and NBC) Between Light and a Shadow: A Twilight Zone Podcast is a nonprofit podcast. Music clips and dialogue excerpts used herein are the property of their respective copyright owners; we claim no ownership of these materials. Their use is strictly for illustrative purposes and should be considered Fair Use as stated in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107.

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Ep. 38 - BOBBY HART ("Last Train to Clarksville")

Songcraft: Spotlight on Songwriters

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2016 54:53

The legendary songwriting team of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart found early success with songs such as “Lazy Elsie Molly,” which was a Top 10 R&B hit for Chubby Checker, “Come a Little Bit Closer,” which was a Top 5 pop hit for Jay & The Americans, and the instrumental theme song for the long-running soap opera, Days of Our Lives. The pair are best known, however, for writing and producing more than 20 songs for The Monkees, including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “(Theme From) The Monkees,” “I Wanna Be Free,” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” “She,” “Words,” and “Valleri.” As artists, the Grammy nominated duo found success in the late 1960s with the self-penned Top 40 hits “Out & About,” “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight,” and “Alice Long (You’re Still My Favorite Girlfriend).” Bobby Hart wrote a number of hit singles apart from Tommy Boyce, including “Hurt So Bad,” which was a hit for Little Anthony & The Imperials in 1965 before finding subsequent chart success with the Letterman, Jackie DeShannon, and Linda Ronstadt, who made it a Top 10 pop hit in 1980. He also wrote Helen Reddy’s #1 single “Keep on Singing,” as well as Lane Brody’s #15 country hit “Over You,” which was included in the film Tender Mercies and earned Bobby Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations in 1983. He continued to score on the R&B and pop charts into the 1980s with New Edition’s “My Secret” and Robbie Nevil’s “Dominoes.” Most recently, the Monkees recorded Boyce & Hart’s “Whatever’s Right” on their critically acclaimed 2016 comeback album, Good Times. In 2015 Bobby published his autobiography, Psychedelic Bubble Gum: Boyce & Hart, The Monkees, and Turning Mayhem into Miracles.

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Bobby Hart Returns: Monkees, Music and More

Deep Dish Radio with Tim Powers

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2016 42:47

Hit songwriter Bobby Hart returns to discuss his involvement in the Monkees phenomenon and his song "Whatever's Right" co-written by Tommy Boyce, which appears on The Monkees' new album Good Times, available from Rhino Records whenever fine music is sold See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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WLF #75 - Origin 1 with Michael Hagan, Megadeth, Casanovas, Motor Sister

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Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2015 46:39

@WLFpodcast goes into the victorious Queensland sheds for a tactical debrief with Maroons assistant coach Michael Hagan, plus the final installment of our headline-hitting Dave Ellefson chat and the conclusion of conversations with Tommy Boyce of the Casanovas and Joey Vera of Motor Sister.

WLF #74 - Origin, Dave Ellefson, Joey Vera, Tommy Boyce

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Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2015 49:37

Origin preview, Joey Vera, Tommy Boyce, Dave Ellefson

WLF #73 - Megadeth, Motor Sister, The Casanovas

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Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2015 41:59

@WLF Podcast talks to returning Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson, Motor Sister's Joey Vera and Casanovas principal Tommy Boyce, plus Rugby League International Federation chief executive David Collier

EV90 (S4E10) Patty Duke

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Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2015 59:53

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Episode -8: "Past Lives"

Cosmic Castoff

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 14, 2014 29:43

Episode -8 is all about Past Lives! What if you used to be somebody else, back in time, then died, then came back as you? Is your head spinning yet? You ain't heard nothing yet, b-b-b-baby you just ain't heard n-n-othing yet.. Here's something, here's something you're n-n-never gonna forget, baby! Guest Agatha Chode thinks her son Danny is the reincarnated spirit of several of history's most notable personalities, including John Lennon! Also- A new sponsor, Colin drives his car through a Chili's® Restaurant and what the **** is ZAPUPU, and why is it COMING!? With Debbie Chou and Chris Gersbeck Songs: "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" - Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart "With a Girl Like You" - Troggs

Come To The Sunshine 30 - Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2014 144:51

In a show first aired on October 8th, 2007, Episode 30 of "Come To The Sunshine" is an extended extravaganza of music Composed, Produced or Performed by Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart! DJ Andrew Sandoval spins rare singles, demos, alternate mixes and MONO album tracks (no CD's here folks) by the following artists: Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart/The Monkees/Trini Lopez/Billy Budd/School Mates + Jimmy Takeuchi/Gamma Goochie/The Frosted Shake 5/The Goodies/The Astronauts/Tommy Boyce/Keith Allison/The Pineapple Heard/The Regents/The Cherokees/Sounds Unlimited/Linda Ball/Bucky Wilkin/Dino, Desi & Billy/Griffin/Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart A full playlist is available at http://cometothesunshine.com/id46.html

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Come To The Sunshine #82 featuring Perry Botkin, Jr.

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 21, 2013 116:52

In an episode first aired on January 21, 2013 "Come To The Sunshine" host Andrew Sandoval talks with arranger/composer/musician/publisher Perry Botkin, Jr. Botkin's work in the mid-1960's with such artists as Harry Nilsson, The Ronettes, The New Establishment, Tommy Boyce, Mojo Men, Thorinsheild, Sunday Funnies, The Shangri-las, Gil & Johnny, Tom Northcott, Electric Prunes, Jennifer Warnes, Harper's Bizarre, the Looking Glass, Collage and Robin Ward is reviewed, replayed and discussed. Along the way he tells stories of his path in music through the Los Angeles studio scene, working at Gold Star Studios and with such luminaries as arranger George Tipton, Leon Russell, The Incredible Bongo Band, Phil Spector, Lenny Waronker, Dave Hassinger, Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Johnny Cole, Steve Douglas, Rusty Draper, the Trends and many more in a one-of-a-kind glimpse into this golden era of recording and creativity.

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WLF #5 - Fire Up!, Steve Ricketts, Tommy Boyce, Tulsen Tollett

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2011 44:52

@WLF_podcast visits Tommy Boyce of the Casanovas at home, we go into the studio with Brett and Steve of Fire Up! to see how the magic happens and we finish up with Tulsen Tollett.

"Come To The Sunshine" Hot 100 countdown Part Five

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2011 59:43

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of "Come To The Sunshine," a Special HOT 100 list was compiled from some of the 3,018 unique songs by 837 artists that the show has played since 2006. How many songs each artist accrued with multiple plays and how many total times they appeared on the program defined their final chart position. In hour four of the broadcast, host Andrew Sandoval counts down artist and songs #20 through #1. These include: The Searchers; Grapefruit; The Mojo; The Merry-Go-Round; The Kinks; The Twilights; Harpers Bizarre; The Hollies; The Beau Brummels; Nilsson; The Idle Race; Sinon & Garfunkel; Chad & Jeremy; The Byrds; The Cyrkle; Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart; Herman' Hermits; The Monkees; Gary Lewis And The Playboys; Peter and Gordon. The full show is available in five parts. This episode is part five of five.

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"Come To The Sunshine" Hot 100 countdown Part Three

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2011 57:35

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of "Come To The Sunshine," a Special HOT 100 list was compiled from some of the 3,018 unique songs by 837 artists that the show has played since 2006. How many songs each artist accrued with multiple plays and how many total times they appeared on the program defined their final chart position. In hour three of the broadcast, host Andrew Sandoval counts down artist and songs 59 through 40. These include Los Bravos, The Millennium, The Merseys, The Beach Boys, Ronnie Burns, Tin Tin, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Tom Northcott, The Peppermint Trolley Company, The Critters, Keith Allison, Claudine Longet, Like A Summer Rain, Gene Clark, Good Evening Girl, Mind Over Matter, the Dave Clark Five, Tommy Boyce, Dino, Desi & Billy and P.F. Sloan. The full show is available in five parts. This episode is part three of five.

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WLF #3 - Fire Up!, Steve Ricketts, Casanovas, Tulsen Tollett