Podcasts about Torbert

"Behind the Scenes with Rob Bleetstein: Archiving the Legacy of the NRPS"Larry's guest, Rob Bleetstein, is known for his role as the host of the live concerts on the Sirius XM Grateful Dead station and as the voice of Pearl Jam Radio. In today's episode, he discusses the recently released live album "Hempsteader" by the New Riders Of The Purple Sage (NRPS), where he serves as the archivist and producer.The New Riders of the Purple Sage is an American country rock band that emerged from the psychedelic rock scene in San Francisco in 1969, with original members including some from the Grateful Dead. Their roots trace back to the early 1960s folk and beatnik scene around Stanford University, where Jerry Garcia and David Nelson played gigs together. Influenced by American folk music and rock and roll, the band formed, including Garcia on pedal steel guitar initially.The discussion delves into the background of the NRPS, their albums, and notable tracks like "Panama Red," written by Peter Rowan and popularized by the band. The album "New Riders of the Purple Sage" features Garcia on pedal steel guitar and includes tracks like "Henry," a humorous tale of marijuana smuggling.Throughout the show, various NRPS tracks are highlighted, showcasing the band's eclectic style and songwriting. Additionally, news segments cover topics such as the DEA's agreement to reschedule marijuana and updates from the music industry, including rare concert appearances and tour plans.Overall, the episode provides insights into the NRPS's music, their influence on the country rock genre, and relevant news in the marijuana and music industries. Larry's Notes Rob Bleetstein who many folks know as the host of the three live concerts played every day on the Sirius XM Grateful Dead station.  Also the voice of Pearl Jam Radio. And, most importantly for today's episode, the archivist for the New Riders Of The Purple Sage and the producer of the Hempsteader album. Today, featuring recently released NRPS live album, “Hempsteader” from the band's performance at the Calderone Concert Hall in Hempstead, NY on June 25, 1976, just shy of 48 years ago.New Riders of the Purple Sage is an American country rock band. The group emerged from the psychedelic rock scene in San Francisco in 1969 and its original lineup included several members of the Grateful Dead.[2] The band is sometimes referred to as the New Riders or as NRPS.The roots of the New Riders can be traced back to the early 1960s Peninsulafolk/beatnikscene centered on Stanford University's now-defunct Perry Lane housing complex in Menlo Park, California where future Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia often played gigs with like-minded guitarist David Nelson. The young John Dawson (also known as "Marmaduke") also played some concerts with Garcia, Nelson, and their compatriots while visiting relatives on summer vacation. Enamored of the sounds of Bakersfield-style country music, Dawson would turn his older friends on to the work of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and provided a vital link between Timothy Leary's International Federation for Internal Freedom in Millbrook, New York (Dawson having boarded at the Millbrook School) and the Menlo Park bohemian coterie nurtured by Ken Kesey.Inspired by American folk music, rock and roll, and blues, Garcia formed the Grateful Dead (initially known as The Warlocks) with blues singer Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, while Nelson joined the similarly inclined New Delhi River Band (which would eventually come to include bassist Dave Torbert) shortly thereafter.  The group came to enjoy a cult following in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties through the Summer of Love until their dissolution in early 1968.In 1969, Nelson contributed to the Dead's Aoxomoxoa album in 1969.  During this period Nelson and Garcia played intermittently in an early iteration of High Country, a traditional bluegrass ensemble formed by the remnants of the Peninsula folk scene.By early 1969, Dawson had returned to Los Altos Hills and also contributed to Aoxomoxoa.  After a mescaline experience at Pinnacles National Park with Torbert and Matthew Kelly, he began to compose songs on a regular basis working in a psychedelic country fusion genre not unlike Gram Parsons' Flying Burrito Brothers.Dawson's vision was prescient, as 1969 marked the emergence of country rock via Bob Dylan, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, the Dillard & Clark Band, and the Clarence White-era Byrds. Around this time, Garcia was similarly inspired to take up the pedal steel guitar, and an informal line-up including Dawson, Garcia, and Peninsula folk veteran Peter Grant (on banjo) began playing coffeehouse and hofbrau concerts together when the Grateful Dead were not touring. Their repertoire included country standards, traditional bluegrass, Dawson originals, and a few Dylan covers ("Lay Lady Lay", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Mighty Quinn"). By the summer of 1969 it was decided that a full band would be formed and David Nelson was recruited to play lead guitar.In addition to Nelson, Dawson (on acoustic guitar), and Garcia (continuing to play pedal steel), the original line-up of the band that came to be known as the New Riders of the Purple Sage (a nod to the Foy Willing-led Western swing combo from the 1940s, Riders of the Purple Sage, which borrowed its name from the Zane Grey novel) consisted of Alembic Studio engineer Bob Matthews on electric bass and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead on drums; bassist Phil Lesh also played sporadically with the ensemble in lieu of Matthews through the end of the year, as documented by the late 1969 demos later included on the Before Time Began archival release. Lyricist Robert Hunter briefly rehearsed with the band on bass in early 1970 before the permanent hiring of Torbert in April of that year.[8] The most commercially successful configuration of the New Riders would come to encompass Dawson, Nelson, Torbert, Spencer Dryden (of Jefferson Airplane fame), and Buddy Cage.After a few warmup gigs throughout the Bay Area in 1969, Dawson, Nelson, and Torbert began to tour in May 1970 as part of a tripartite bill advertised as "An Evening with the Grateful Dead". An acoustic Grateful Dead set that often included contributions from Dawson and Nelson would then segue into New Riders and electric Dead sets, obviating the need to hire external opening acts. With the New Riders desiring to become more of a self-sufficient group and Garcia needing to focus on his other responsibilities, the musician parted ways with the group in November 1971. Seasoned pedal steel player Buddy Cage was recruited from Ian and Sylvia's Great Speckled Bird to replace Garcia. In 1977 and 1978, NRPS did open several Dead and JGB shows, including the final concert preceding the closure of Winterland on December 31, 1978.In 1974, Torbert left NRPS; he and Matthew Kelly co-founded the band Kingfish (best known for Bob Weir's membership during the Grateful Dead's late-1974 to mid-1976 touring hiatus) the year before. In 1997, the New Riders of the Purple Sage split up. Dawson retired from music and moved to Mexico to become an English teacher. By this time, Nelson had started his own David Nelson Band. There was a reunion performance in 2001. In 2002, the New Riders accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from High Times magazine. Allen Kemp died on June 25, 2009.[13][14] John "Marmaduke" Dawson died in Mexico on July 21, 2009, at the age of 64.[15][16]Pedal steel guitarist Buddy Cage died on February 5, 2020, at age 73. (Rob – this is mostly notes for me today so I can sound like I know what I'm talking about.  I'll go through some of it to set some background for the band, but feel free to take the lead on talking about those aspects of the band, and its musicians, that you enjoy most or find most interesting – keeping in mind that our target audience presumably are fans of marijuana and the Dead.)   INTRO:                Panama Red                                Track #1                                Start – 1:49 Written by Peter Rowan “Panama Red” is well known in the jam-grass scene, but it's perhaps not as widely known that Peter Rowan wrote the song.It was originally a 1973 hit for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and the first popular version with Rowan singing and playing it came when the supergroup Old & In the Way, released their eponymous album in 1975, two years after their seminal time, in 1973, and a year after they disbanded. Jerry Garcia was the connective tissue between the two projects, playing pedal steel in the early New Riders and banjo in Old & In the Way. “I wrote ‘Panama Red' after leaving my first project with David Grisman, Earth Opera, around the summer of the Woodstock music festival [1969],” Rowan explains. “It's a fun song because it captures the vibe of the time. I was from the East Coast, but I found there to be more creativity on the West Coast during that time period.“Nobody wanted to do ‘Panama Red' on the East Coast. I took it to Seatrain [the roots fusion band in which Rowan played from 1969 to 1972], and when it eventually became a hit, the manager of Seatrain claimed it. I never saw any money, even though it became the title of an album for the New Riders of the Purple Sage [1973's The Adventures of Panama Red]. “The subject was "taboo" in those days. You did jail time for pot. So that might have scared commercial interests. But Garcia was a green light all the way! "Oh sure" was his motto, both ironically and straight but always with a twinkle in his eye! After Seatrain management kept all the money, Jerry suggested I bring the song to Marmaduke and Nelson!" “When David Grisman and I got back together for Old & In the Way in 1973 with Jerry Garcia, Vassar Clements and John Khan, we started playing it.”From the NRPS album “The Adventures of Panama Red”, their fourth country rock album released in October 1973. It is widely regarded as one of the group's best efforts, and reached number 55 on the Billboard charts.The album includes two songs written by Peter Rowan — "Panama Red", which became a radio hit, and "Lonesome L.A. Cowboy". Another song, "Kick in the Head", was written by Robert Hunter. Donna Jean Godchaux and Buffy Sainte-Marie contribute background vocals on several tracks.  SHOW No. 1:   Fifteen Days Under The Hood                                Track #41:55 – 3:13 Written by Jack Tempchin and Warren Hughey.  Jack Tempchin is an American musician and singer-songwriter who wrote the Eagles song "Peaceful Easy Feeling"[1] and co-wrote "Already Gone",[2] "The Girl from Yesterday",[3]"Somebody"[4]and "It's Your World Now".[5] Released as the opening song on the NRPS album, “New Riders”, their seventh studio album, released in 1976 SHOW No. 2:   Henry                                Track #6                                1:19 – 3:05 "Henry", written by John Dawson, a traditional shuffle with contemporary lyrics about marijuana smuggling.  From the band's debut album, “New Riders of the Purple Sage”, released by Columbia Records in August, 1971.  New Riders of the Purple Sage is the only studio album by the New Riders to feature co-founder Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead on pedal steel guitar. He is also featured on the live albums Vintage NRPS and Bear's Sonic Journals: Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage.Mickey Hart and Commander Cody play drums and piano, respectively, on two tracks—"Dirty Business" and "Last Lonely Eagle".Then, there's a swerving left turn away from romance tunes on this album with ‘Henry‘, whose titular hero has stepped right out of a Gilbert Shelton underground comic.  At a frenetic pace the story of Henry's run to Mexico to fetch twenty kilos of (Acapulco?) gold unravels, with Henry driving home after sampling the wares “Henry tasted, he got wasted couldn't even see – how he's going to drive like that is not too clear to me.”  It's a joke, but a joke that sounds pretty good even after repeat listens.SHOW No. 3:   Portland Woman                                Track #9                                :34 – 2:00 Another Marmaduke tune from the NRPS album released in August, 1971.A bittersweet love song progressing from touring boredom to be relieved by a casual hook-up with the pay-off with the realization that the Portland Woman who “treats you right” has actually made a deeper connection “I'm going back to my Portland woman, I don't want to be alone tonight.”   SHOW No. 4:   You Never Can Tell                                Track #15                                :51 – 2:26 You Never Can Tell", also known as "C'est La Vie" or "Teenage Wedding", is a song written by Chuck Berry. It was composed in the early 1960s while Berry was in federal prison for violating the Mann Act.[2] Released in 1964 on the album St. Louis to Liverpool and the follow-up single to Berry's final Top Ten hit of the 1960s: "No Particular Place to Go", "You Never Can Tell" reached number 14, becoming Berry's final Top 40 hit until "My Ding-a-Ling", a number 1 in October 1972.  Berry's recording features an iconic piano hook played by Johnnie Johnson.  The piano melody was influenced by Mitchell Torok's 1953 hit "Caribbean". The song has also been recorded or performed by Chely Wright, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Jerry Garcia Band, Bruce Springsteen, the Mavericks, and Buster Shuffle.  JGB performed it almost 40 times in the early ‘90's. The song became popular again after the 1994 release of the film Pulp Fiction, directed and co-written by Quentin Tarantino. The music was played for a "Twist contest" in which Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) competed (and were the only contestants shown in the film). The music added an evocative element of sound to the narrative and Tarantino said that the song's lyrics of "Pierre" and "Mademoiselle" gave the scene a "uniquely '50s French New Wave dance sequence feel".  OUTRO:              Glendale Train                                Track #17                                1:30 – 3:14 Still another Marmaduke tune from the “New Riders of the Purple Sage” album released in late summer 1971.   MJ News:Just one MJ News story today important enough to take a few minutes to talk MJ:  DEA's agreement to reschedule MJ to Schedule 3 from Schedule 1.DEA Agrees To Reschedule Marijuana Under Federal Law In Historic Move Following Biden-Directed Health Agency's Recommendation - Marijuana Moment Benefits:  banking services, no 280(e) restrictions on what expenses retailers can deduct and allows for full medical research of MJ. Negatives:  Still illegal, all drugs on Schedules I, II and III must be prescribed by a licensed health care provider with prescription privileges and can only be dispenses by licensed pharmacists.  Music News:A few quick hits re Music (no real need to get into any of these but I like to see what's going on so I don't miss anything interesting, these are the first things that get cut when we decide we want to keep talking): Jaimoe makes rare public concert appearance with Friends of the Brothers in Fairfield CN, plays ABB hitsJaimoe Takes Part in Rare Public Concert Appearance, Revisits Allman Brothers Band Classics (relix.com) Mike Gordon sits in at the Dodd's Dead Residency at Nectar's in Burlingtron, VT as part of “Grateful Dead Tuesday”.  Plays He's Gone and Scarlet (we have some Phish fans as listeners so try to toss a few bones to them)Listen: Mike Gordon Offers Grateful Dead Classics at Nectar's (A Gallery + Recap) (relix.com) David Gilmour may be planning first tour since 2016, won't play any Pink Floyd songs from the ‘70's – like the old Doonesbury strip where Elvis comes back from the Dead, Trump hires him to play in one of his casinos and at the start of the show, Elvis announces that he is only playing the songs of the late great John Denver.David Gilmour Plots First Tour Since 2016 (relix.com) Roy Carter, founder of High Sierra Music Festival passes away.Roy Carter, High Sierra Music Festival Founder, Passes Away at 68 (relix.com) .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

In this conversation with William Torbert we explore his perspectives on Dave Snowden's critiques of vertical development, including the concern about elitism, action logic perspectives, post cognitive consciousness, the 4 territories of experience and a more inclusive way of being. William R. Torbert is the Principal of Action Inquiry Associates LLC, Co-Founder and Director Emeritus of Global Leadership Associates, Director of the Amara Collaboration and a Founding Member of the Action Inquiry Fellowship. His groundbreaking work on Developmental Action Inquiry is the foundation for the work of Global Leadership Associates. Bill has enjoyed an distinguished academic career: Yale, Southern Methodist university, Harvard, Boston College, Leadership professor Emeritus, and is an award winning teacher. He is the author of a dozen books, including Seven Transformations of Leadership, selected as one of the top ten Harvard Business Review leadership articles of all time and his most recent book, Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry. See our latest training, The Power of Embodied Transformation (registration open until March 2nd): https://www.coachesrising.com/powerofembodiedtransformation/

Wrath Of Sean: Are Professional Referees Ever Going To Be Held Accountable? Sean Salisbury hits on this topic after the questionable calls in the AFC Championship Game. With the power of replay why can't the refs / the league review everything as quick as possible and get all the calls right all the time? Enjoy this highlight from the Sean Salisbury Show!

Money's Post Show Pod: DeMeco On His Way To Houston? Was Tony Romo About to Say The N-Word?

An interview discussion that explores the science of Zen.Neil Schmitzer-Torbert is a Professor of  Psychology at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN where he teaches courses and conducts research on memory and learning.  He is a Zen practitioner and runs a website called the "Neural Buddhist" which explores the intersection of Zen and neuroscience.https://neuralbuddhist.com/https://scienceofzen.org/Zen Podcast:https://simplicityzen.com/

Today we sit down with Emma Torbert to discuss her distinctive approach to sustainable farming practices. Emma is the Market Garden Manager and Educator for the Student Farm at UC Davis. Started in 2020, the Student Farm is a nine-acre mixed vegetable farm and adjacent hedgerow that familiarizes UC Davis students with agriculture and teaches them how to grow organic crops.  With a passion for community-supported agriculture, Emma is a foundational part of the UC Davis community. Using her position in this program, Emma facilitates experiential learning for students across all majors…  Join the podcast now to learn more about: What a market garden is.  The challenges that can arise in the Student Farm program.  How sustainability plays a role in Emma's work.  The importance of providing students with hands-on learning experiences. Farming is a valuable skill that can be challenging to learn without the proper resources. Fortunately, experts like Emma are passing this knowledge on to people from varying walks of life so that they can participate in this essential part of sustainability! You can find out more about Emma and her work with the Student Farm by clicking here! Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3bO8R6q

Farming is a skill that requires hands-on training – but what if you don't have access to the resources to learn for yourself? Thanks to people like Emma Torbert, this type of education is available to the students of UC Davis who are interested in sustainable agriculture… As the Market Garden Manager and Educator for the Student Farm at UC Davis, Emma plays a major role in facilitating farming principles that are regenerative and sustainable. This is all done on a 9-acre mixed vegetable farm that sells its produce through a pop-up farm stand, the UC Davis Dining Service, a 110-member CSA, and the campus farmers market.  Tune in now to discover: The kinds of students that participate in the Student Farm.  How economic sustainability impacts agricultural operations.  The key aspects of an organic farm.  Three facets of sustainability that influence the functioning of the Student Farm. You can find out more about Emma and her work with the Student Farm by clicking here! Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9C

Jesus commanded his followers to share the gospel with people all around the world. However, we often allow obstacles or fear to prevent us from obeying Christ. Missionaries Darin and Carolina Torbert of Catapult Missions shared their experiences on the mission field and challenged us to live in the victory that Jesus won through his blood. Cornerstone Baptist Church, Alice, Texas, is a church where friends become family. Our Senior Pastor is Dr. John L. Rothra. Join us each Sunday for worship online and in person. Support Our Ministry CONNECT WITH US Website YouTube Facebook Instagram

Dallas County Extension Regional Director Ann Torbert recaps the 2022 Dallas County Fair and highlights some upcoming programs.

Leadership is everything! We are taking a closer look at the importance of leadership and how coaching and leadership partner together in transformation. Our focus is on the roles that inquiry and feedback play in transformational leadership.  Dr. William Torbert is a Leadership Professor Emeritus at Boston College. He has spent his career leading, consulting, teaching, and researching. In addition to consulting dozens of companies, not-for-profits, and governmental agencies, Bill has served on numerous boards. Since his retirement from academia in 2008, he continues his leadership work in various capacities. His most recent book is Numbskill In the Theater of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations, and Social Science. We have a great conversation about his research around leadership and its accompanying thought patterns and behaviors, along with how those influence the way we receive feedback.  Show Highlights: What lights up Bill about the work he does today and his path to get there How Bill was inspired to write Numbskull, a memoir that shares a personal look at his life What we need to understand about developmental transformation for leaders How our action logics come with choices about power How feedback is tied into the transformation of leaders How action logics represent the fundamental ways people think about themselves and the world Why people are sometimes resistant to their early action logics How coaching and feedback play into transformational leadership How we move from level to level as The Expert, The Achiever, The Diplomat, and The Over-Achiever The three loops of feedback and their differences: single-loop, double-loop, and triple-loop Why human nature determines that not everyone will invest in transformational leadership at the same level Resources: Connect with Dr. Torbert through hishttp://www.actioninquiryleadership.com/ ( Website). Find his book on https://amzn.to/3vi23oG (Amazon). To join the Fall Mentor Program with Meg, visithttp://www.starcoachshow.com/mentor ( www.starcoachshow.com/mentor).    Visit myhttps://www.starcoachshow.com ( website) for your FREE download: What I Know Now, That I Wish I Had Known When I First Started Coaching. 

http://www.williamrtorbert.com/PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/minddogtvSponsors:https://daily-high-club-affiliate-program.pxf.io/5bE0nnKOA Coffee https://koacoffee.com/?sscid=21k6_79g17FIVERR https://go.fiverr.com/visit/?bta=86037&brand=fiverrcpa&utm_campaign=minddogTVSOUTHWEST RAPID REWARDS https://swa.eyjo.net/c/3290446/517226/4705SUPPORT THE HAPPY MINUTE https://ko-fi.com/minddogtvTRUE FIRE GUITAR MASTERY: http://prf.hn/click/camref:1101lkzyk/pubref:minddogGet Koa Coffee at minddogtv.com/coffee

Dallas County Extension and Outreach Regional Director Ann Torbert gives updates on the Dallas County Fair, the new extension building and programming people should be on the lookout for.

Pitcher Luke Torbert chats with Rylee Robinson about the team's performance, how deep the bullpen is, and more in this Owl Network Exclusive.

Radio call from Ted Fattal on z925 The Castle from the matchup between Kelvin Torbert's Flint Northwestern squad and the Owosso Trojans on 3/9/01 of the MHSAA Class A Districts at Swartz Creek.

How can we transform individually and collectively, and how can become good leaders of ourselves and others? Bill has studied individual and organisational development for many decades and developed a compelling theory of "action inquiry": how to continually progress our ability to reflect on ourselves, our relationships and our actions to expand our potentiality. Unique, radical and thought-provoking: a session definitely not to be missed! “A Lifelong Quest to Transform Our World: The Powerful Art of Action Inquiry” - Leaders for Humanity with Bill Torbert, celebrated Speaker, teacher, consultant, board member and Professor Emeritus of Leadership at the Carroll School of Management and former Director of the Organizational Transformation Doctoral Program at Boston College. Co-hosted as always by: Antoinette Weibel and OttiVogt. Webcast recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0-kHhS-4Zo&list=PLAPiHnsKsNHvIX9ScwluwGVsMH8DI5z-1&index=19 Transcript, Materials and Notes: https://goodorganisations.com/LeadersForHumanity/#BILLTORBERT The Leaders for Humanity series is part of the #goodorganisations project (for further info see https://goodorganisations.com) and intends to offer a critical dialogue with "wise" thought and action leaders related to key questions in the area of individual, organisational and societal transformation. Some of the participants in Season 1 are renowned researchers in the area of business ethics such as Alejo Sison, Alicia Hennig, Andre Habisch and Blaine Fowers; organisation and management scholars such as Henry Mintzberg, Stefano Zamagni, Bill Torbert, Bruno Frey, Haridimos Tsoukas, Paul Adler, Emanuele Quintarelli – and leadership thinkers like Bill Torbert, Carol Sanford and Simon Western. During our interview we always examine three critical questions: a) What is good? What is a good society? b) How can we craft good organisations? c) How can we as leaders or organisational citizens enable positive change? Our main intent is to develop critical thinking and deeper reflection by bringing together multiple perspectives - across philosophy, psychology, sociology, management science, complexity - in a shared inquiry into the nature of good organisations and a good society. We publish an exclusive set of recommended materials to the followers of the inquiry prior to each episode on the Good Organisations LinkedIn page and on https://goodorganisations.com/leadersforhumanity. In addition, we publish opinion pieces and further reflections on our Medium page at https://medium.com/@goodorganisations. You can also join the conversation on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/LeadersForHumanity/ #GoodOrganisations #LeadersforHumanity #UniteforGood #Leadership #Transformation #BusinessEthics #Philosophy #Business

Are you (or a player you care about) struggling with self-doubt? How do you work your way out of the valleys of defeat and self-doubt? Why is belief in yourself so important to your success? What role do metrics play in your confidence and development? What book should you read if you're struggling with self-doubt? Luke Torbert, pitcher for Kennesaw State University, joins Riding The BUS on this episode and talks through all those questions and more. You're listening to Riding The BUS because you want to know what it takes to play college baseball. This episode features a current college player who is living his dream right now and it packs a punch with great advice for players, parents, and coaches! Tap play, take a listen, and learn from someone who has been through the recruiting process, experienced highs and lows in his career, and is currently competing at the Division 1 level right now.

Ron Torbert, a 1981 graduate of South High School from Youngstown, shares his experience as a referee for Super Bowl LVI on Feb. 13, 2022, and growing up in the Valley.Listen up!

Bill Torbert is a founding board member of Global Leadership Associates and Amara Collaborative, as well as Leadership Professor Emeritus at Boston College.  Recent recognitions include: the 2010 Outstanding Scholar Award from the Western Academy of Management; the 2012 re-publication of his 2005 HBR article “Seven Transformations of Leadership” as one of the Harvard Business Review's top ten leadership reads ever; the 2013 Center for Creative Leadership Walter F. Ulmer Jr. Award for Career Contributions to Applied Leadership Research; and the 2014 Chris Argyris Career Achievement Award from the Academy of Management. Between 1978-2008, Torbert served first as BC's Carroll School Graduate Dean and later as Director of the PhD Program in Organizational Transformation – the MBA program rising from below the top 100 to 25th nationally during his deanship.  With regard to scholarship, Torbert's 2004 Berrett-Koehler book, Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership (still in print and now translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Russian) presents his theories, cases, surveys, and lab and field experiments about developmental transformation at both the personal and organizational levels, as well as within science itself, undergirded by an action research process exercised in real-time, everyday life, called "Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry." Torbert's eleven other books and more than 80 articles and chapters include the national Alpha Sigma Nu award-winning Managing the Corporate Dream (Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987), and the Terry Award Finalist book The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry (Sage, 1991).  His latest book, co-authored with action inquiry colleague Hilary Bradbury, is entitled Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry (Integral Publishers, 2016).  Torbert received a BA, magna cum laude, in Political Science & Economics and a Ph.D. in Administrative Sciences, both from Yale University, holding a Danforth Graduate Fellowship during his graduate years.  He founded the Yale Upward Bound (War on Poverty) program and the Theatre of Inquiry and taught at Yale, Southern Methodist University, and Harvard prior to joining the Boston College faculty in 1978.  Most of all, though, Bill takes great pleasure and pride (not to mention occasional pain) in the ongoing development of his closest friends and colleagues, of his three sons, Michael, Patrick, and Benjamin, and of their children.His latest book is Numbskull in the Theater of Inquiry.A Quote From This Episode"So horizontal learning is absolutely a key element of learning. But it isn't the most fundamental kind of learning. The most fundamental and the least often practiced in schools and organizations is vertical learning. Vertical learning has a number of meanings, but one is that each time you change perspective, you get to a kind of higher place, where you see what you did before in different ways, and have access to new possible actions."ResourcesBook: How to Change Your Mind by Michael PollanWebsite: http://www.actioninquiryleadership.com/About The International Leadership Association (ILA)The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals with a keen interest in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. 

Rev. Benny Torbert --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/holinesspreachingonline/message

We learn this week that if it weren't the MLB, Tip was going to make a name for himself on the stage running lead vocals and guitar. Watch out world, this is how a star is born. Before our interview with former MLB-player-turned-Physician-Assistant-who-also-is-a-body-builder, Beau Torbert – Tip and Dan tell us about Labor Day weekend with POP friend Jake Hutt who drove up to RI to play a round with the Prime Boys. And finally, we have a bit of a division debacle of who plays where in the NFL. Beau Torbert, a 9 year MLB veteran outfielder joins the second half of the show to chat with the boys about his time as a teammate of Tip's, how he got into the world of bodybuilding and what that entails, and finally what drives him as a physician's assistant to help care for his community. Find Beau on social @beau.torbert @_teamelitebodies Follow along with the team @PastOurPrimeShow on Instagram

We learn this week that if it weren't the MLB, Tip was going to make a name for himself on the stage running lead vocals and guitar. Watch out world, this is how a star is born. Before our interview with former MLB-player-turned-Physician-Assistant-who-also-is-a-body-builder, Beau Torbert – Tip and Dan tell us about Labor Day weekend with POP friend Jake Hutt who drove up to RI to play a round with the Prime Boys. And finally, we have a bit of a division debacle of who plays where in the NFL. Beau Torbert, a 9 year MLB veteran outfielder joins the second half of the show to chat with the boys about his time as a teammate of Tip's, how he got into the world of bodybuilding and what that entails, and finally what drives him as a physician's assistant to help care for his community. Find Beau on social @beau.torbert @_teamelitebodies Follow along with the team @PastOurPrimeShow on Instagram

"One of the great feelings about intimacy is that it keeps unraveling itself. It keeps exposing itself. It keeps flowering anew. You keep feeling like you're discovering an unknown other for the first time, because what you're discovering is new for you." — William Torbert William Torbert's oeuvre of Collective Developmental Action Inquiry has been making waves for decades. But when we approach Torbert's remarkably practical body of work intent only optimizing our own effectiveness, our we doing ourselves a disservice? In this conversation about Torbert's memoir Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry we consider the importance of spiritual questioning that hinges on timely inaction.

Bill Torbert received a BA in Political Science & Economics and a PhD in Administrative Sciences from Yale University. He founded the Yale Upward Bound (War on Poverty) program and the Theatre of Inquiry, and taught at Yale, Southern Methodist University, and Harvard prior to joining the Boston College faculty in 1978. He has written 12 books, the most recent of which is Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations, and Social Science. It illustrates a new kind of social action and social science where the researchers include themselves in the study, and explore to what degree all the different participants are, or are not, exercising timely and mutually-transforming action.  In this episode, I speak with Bill about his mission and the impact his work is making in the world.  Let's dive in! Learn more at http://www.williamrtorbert.com/

Bill Torbert received a BA in Political Science & Economics and a PhD in Administrative Sciences from Yale University. He founded the Yale Upward Bound (War on Poverty) program and the Theatre of Inquiry, and taught at Yale, Southern Methodist University, and Harvard prior to joining the Boston College faculty in 1978. He has written 12 books, the most recent of which is Numbskull in the Theatre of Inquiry: Transforming Self, Friends, Organizations, and Social Science. It illustrates a new kind of social action and social science where the researchers include themselves in the study, and explore to what degree all the different participants are, or are not, exercising timely and mutually-transforming action.  In this episode, I speak with Bill about his mission and the impact his work is making in the world.  Let's dive in! Learn more at http://www.williamrtorbert.com/

In this episode, Bill Torbert, a jack of all trades, talks with Dave on how Practice and action science has animated a lifelong teaching career and his twelfth book!

Wir sind einfach nur glücklich.

Presidential Dialogue - Dr. Torbert and Evan Rocheford Join Dr. Torbert and Evan Rocheford, Founders of NutraMaize, to discuss their bio fortified orange corn, food security, and a multitude of other topics. Led by Ag Week Seniors Nick Bowser and Audrey Kruse. Be sure to check out Ag Week on our social media channels: Instagram: purdueagweek Twitter: @PurdueAgWeek Facebook: Ag Week at Purdue Youtube: Purdue Ag Week Spotify: Ag Week Podcast: The Future of Ag

Dallas County ISU Extension and Outreach Regional Director Ann Torbert talks about new extension programming as well as what the Dallas County Fair looks like so far this year.

Talking community with Pastor Torbert of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Tullahoma, TN. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

This week, Jennifer talks to AUMC Sunday School teacher Lisa Torbert. They talk about living as chosen children of God, as children of our earthly parents and Lisa's experience losing her mother, and serving Jesus as disciples to those waiting to hear the Good News.If you are looking for a church home in central Delaware check out Asbury UMC. We are currently holding worship services online on Facebook (www.facebook.com/asburyumcsmyrna) and YouTube. You can find out more about other ministries on the church website (www.asburyumcsmyrna.org)

William Rowden is an executive coach and consultant here at Accenture | SolutionsIQ. His journey to leading transformation initiatives has piqued his curiosity in org development and adult developmental psychology. For the past few years he has been researching how these two inform each other – and how the focus of an organization’s leaders provides a good indicator for the success or failure of business agility transformation. He walks us through the different focuses that leaders – and indeed everyone – have: self-centric, group-centric, skill-centric and beyond. Drawing from the work of Robert Keegan, Chris Argyris, Bill Joiner, and more, Rowden provides useful information for agilists for dealing with leaders of many types – do they shoot the messenger or install feedback loops? Do they see agile as a process or a means to an end? Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Bryan Stallings hosts. Listen to Rowden's previous episode: Adult Cognitive Development and the Agile Mindset References: - Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs, Leadership Agility (2007) - Susanne R. Cook-Greuter, "Making the case for a developmental perspective," in Industrial and Commercial Training (2004) - The MAP Institute, "The Leadership Maturity Framework." - DevOps Research and Assessment, “DevOps Culture: Westrum Organizational Culture” - Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (2016) - William R. Torbert and Steven S. Taylor, "Action Inquiry: Interweaving Multiple Qualities of Attention for Timely Action" The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

CAS 4 - 7-1 - 2020 Beau Torbert SF Canaries Alum by Calling All Sports

Listen to an audio interview with Entrepreneur in Residence Hank Torbert

What is orange corn? Evan Rocheford, the CEO of NutraMaize, shares his story, what orange corn is, and how it is solving vitamin deficiencies. Evan's father, Torbert Rocheford, pursued a career in agriculture to reduce world hunger. Although people were successful in lowering caloric hunger, communities began eating staple foods with lower micronutrients. Torbert and others recognized this issue and started performing biofortification on foods that people were already eating, like corn. Meanwhile, Evan, Torbert's ambitious and adventurous son, was looking to start a business. Little did he know that his years spent helping out on the farm when he was younger would pay off as he is now the CEO of NutraMaize, a consumer-focused agriculture company supporting the research and selling the products constructed from biofortification. Learn about the process for developing a nutrient-rich staple food like orange corn, about NutraMaize's go-to-market and business strategies, and how Evan, Torbert, and the NutraMaize team are delivering nutritious food people need in a culturally appropriate way. Drink deep of the culture that surrounds you with Evan Rocheford from NutraMaize. Learn about the NutraMaize! Review the episode on iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook! Join our community on Patreon! What we tasted...El Espolón Blanco Herradura Silver Herradura Repasado Herradura Ultra, Tequila Anejo Del Maguey VIDA mezcal Check out our sponsors for this episode: Naptown Fitness - To start your health journey today, visit naptownfitness.com http://naptownfitness.com/ https://www.instagram.com/naptownfitness/ https://www.facebook.com/NapTownFitness FullStack PEO - Turnkey HR for Emerging Companies.https://www.fullstackpeo.com/drnkcltr https://www.linkedin.com/company/27092746/ https://twitter.com/fullstackpeo https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Consulting-Agency/FullStack-PEO-1107694849373703/ TechPoint BE BOLD.Did you know you can nominate someone for one of the state's top tech honors this year? Check out the 2020 Mira Awards categories and then decide if you want to nominate someone you know or even apply for yourself or your company. LEARN MORE Drink Culture Website: https://www.drnkcltr.com Drink Culture Newsletter: https://www.drnkcltr.com/newsletter/ Drink Culture Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/drnkcltr Drink Culture Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drinkculturepodcast/ Drink Culture Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drinkculturepodcast Drink Culture YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvrw7Fqfw4ZORgZMPJKio-A

In this second of a special three part series, Host Bill Nussey travels to Puerto Rico and talks with Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI), Roy Torbert. Listen as Roy tells us how the RMI team fostered powerful partnerships to craft long-term, resilient, community based electricity solutions using solar microgrids for schools in remote parts of the island.

In this episode of the Fully Integrated Leadership Podcast I welcome my friend, former colleague, and Chief People Officer of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Mike Tetreault.  For the past four years, Mike has been leading a team that is responsible for scaling VUCA leadership skills and competencies across the 4300 employees of one of the world's largest nonprofit organizations.  Mike shares his own learning journey as he discovered the VUCA concept and how it informed his personal and leadership development.  We then talk about the seven competencies he and others are focusing on in developing leaders at TNC, and then he talks about how they are designing learning and development to grow these competencies to help them tackle complex challenges like climate change.  He finishes off the interview giving us a practice called the After Action Review, something teams can use to ensure learning is a continuous process.   There are a number of concepts, models, and frameworks that Mike and I refer to during the conversation.  I encourage you to explore the following resources prior to listening to the interview: The Cynefin Framework is an explanatory model that helps leaders identify which of four realms they are operating in...simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.  To learn more about this framework and its use, check out the following video: You Tube Cynefin Framework Explanation Mike refers to "Adult Developmental Stages" and the name Torbert at one point in the interview.  Here is more on what he is referring to: Seven Transformations of Leadership Article In different parts of the interview Mike refers to an organization called Conversant.  Here is a link to their website: Conversant Website This is an awesome conversation with a wise and caring man who is leading amazing work in an organization that is trying to tackle VUCA challenges.  

NutraMaize is a consumer-focused agbioscience company commercializing a more nutritious variety of better tasting, non-GMO orange corn. The company was co-founded by a father-son team, Torbert and Evan Rocheford, who now serve as the company's CTO and CEO respectively. CTO: “Professor Torbert” Rocheford is internationally recognized as a leading expert in his field and holds the Patterson Endowed Chair for Translational Genomics in Crop Improvement at Purdue University. Professor Torbert has over 25 years of experience working as a research professor in corn breeding and molecular genetics. Professor Torbert and his collaborators have made substantial advancements to their discipline and have published on discoveries in prestigious journals, such as Science and Nature Genetics, that are held up as some of the best examples of basic genomic research on a crop plant that has been applied to benefit the developing world. CEO: Evan Rocheford is an enthusiastic young entrepreneur with experience managing new ventures and bringing consumer products to market. Evan is the architect of the Professor Torbert’s brand and has successfully authored and served as the PI of two SBIR/STTR grants (USDA and NSF) attracting over $400,000 in non-dilutive funding for NutraMaize. Follow AgriNovus Indiana: Twitter Facebook Instagram LinkedIn

Lieah Torbert was “forged in the fires of start-ups.” Since 17 years old, she has worked for start-ups helping them build out infrastructure, processes, and people to scale and be successful. She has tried to leave the startup work but keeps getting pulled back. She teaches consultants and small businesses on how to scale using the skills I learned along the way. In this episode, she shares some of her business secrets on how to scale your startup.

A unique food gaining the attention of professional chefs and home cooks alike has its origin right here in Indiana. On this episode, we learn how Dr. Torbert Rocheford's original mission to improve diets in underdeveloped countries lead to a new specialty food product here in the U.S.--Professor Torbert's Orange Corn Grits. Host Susan Mintert talks with the professor and his son Evan about the orange corn story, and with Torbert's wife Katie who shares recipes and interesting uses for the orange corn grits. Recipes, pictures, and more are on the blog, indianahomecooks.com. IHC music is by The Underscore Orkestra and Slainte at The Free Music Archive. Closing theme is by Leon Mercer.

In this second episode devoted to my support of The "Better Angels" organization, Bruce Frazer & Virgil Torbert discuss the need of this training for both The Croasdaile Village in Durham, North Carolina and in our greater American society.   They discuss the underlying issues of polarization and our new norms that have contributed to our American divide. Bruce Frazer, a former Carter Presidential Administration member who now leans Republican, and Virgil Torbert, an Independent, (born Republican) the now leans Democratic come together to promote the need for Americans to find a structure - such as that offered by The "Better Angels" organization to assist individuals and groups through a process to deeply consider the perspectives of the "other" political sides respectively. Bruce discusses the lack of civility in our communities and nation. Virgil presents a detailed review of current writings such as THEM by Senator Ben Sasse and current news of the day. They both speak on the influence of polarized television news outlets and the influences of technology on decreasing our social skills and norms to simply talk to one another and consider other points of view.  Both bring poignant quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin and George Washington again, reminding us that this problem was foreseen by our founding fathers. They emphasize the need to pay attention to the indicators we see in our news daily to address this political divide and come together as people.

James Surwillo joins me in conversation this week to talk about his book 'Metamodern Leadership: A History of the Seven Values That Will Change the World'. We discuss the unique role of the millennial generation, evolving cultural value sets, the possibility of millennials being a ‘hero’ generation, Torbert’s seven stage model of leadership development, the need to master the game before you change the game (h/t Jordan Peterson), and conventional and post-conventional leadership. https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership https://medium.com/the-abs-tract-organization/on-metamodern-leadership-87bcf9ada5f9 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/emerge/support

Lieah Torbert of Harrington Strategic Partners joins the guys this week to discuss her tech stack that enables her and her clients to deliver superior support and sales growth. She shares with us a few bits of her expertise of Evernote. Learn how to exploit this powerful tool to upgrade your client relationship. Learn more […]

New  farmers need new farms, near populations of appreciative consumers. With the average age of farmers over 60, we can say for sure it's time for a changing of the guard.  And with farm land disappearing to erosion and development while the population of the Globe makes its way to 9 billion,  changes are necessary.  Those changes may be thousands of small changes instead of just gigantic solutions.  Fortunately progress is happening as innovative beginning farmers are finding uniques arrangements with land owners and under utilized spaces near or in cities. Farm To Table Talk explores these opportunities with a panel of farmers at the Farm To Fork Festival in Sacramento.  Our guests are Emma Torbert of Cloverleaf Farms, AJ Gomez of Gomez Farms and Chanowk Yisrael of Yisrael Family Farms. What are the challenges and opportunities for young farmers today: new, near or urban?  

Marques Torbert on The MindMill Podcast Innovating an Industry by Helping Others | Marques Torbert Entrepreneur, Investor, & Financial Strategist Marques Torbert on how to seize opportunities, work with purpose, and lead with positivity. Todays episode is with Marques Torbert.  Marques is the CEO of Ametros Financial, a firm that provides financial services and tools for injured workers with staggering healthcare needs.  Ametros works closely with patients, insurers, employers, attorneys, brokers, medical providers and Medicare to create a seamless experience for their clients.  Prior to Ametros, Marques worked on Wall Street as an investor, adviser and strategist within the insurance and business services sector. He has been instrumental in the sale and acquisition of multiple privately held organizations within the claims solutions management and managed care industries.  [clear] Marques' story is truly inspiring.  Coming from a rough neighborhood, Marques distinguished himself through academics and his positive attitude.  He earned an opportunity to attend Clevelands “University School”, a prestigious academy for talented students.  These formidable years at University School taught Marques a critical skillset, the most important being the ability to seize the opportunities presented to him. He is a millennial highlight reel of entrepreneurial endeavors, relentless drive, and high expectations.  What struck me upon meeting him was how friendly and light hearted Maques was.  With such a serious resume and position, one cant help but expect a personality to match.  While Marques exhibited this, he did so with an approachable and relatable air about him. Marques and I spend as much time talking about embarrassing childhood stories and terrible styles as we do high-level corporate strategies and investment.  He loves to laugh, and applies his infectious positivity to his leadership style. Marques is the man, and Im honored to have him on the show. [hr] SHOW NOTES CONNECT WITH MARQUES  marques.torbert@gmail.com Twitter: marquest22 [clear] ABOUT MARQUES Marques is the Chief Executive Officer of Ametros. Prior to Ametros, he worked on Wall Street as an investor, adviser and strategist within the insurance and business services sector. Marques was previously the principal adviser to Millbrook, an Associate with Clarion Capital Partners a middle market private equity firm, and an investment banker with Lazard Freres. He has been instrumental in the sale and acquisition of multiple privately held organizations within the claims solutions management and managed care industries. [clear] Marques obtained his B.A. in Economics from Columbia University and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He is currently on the Board of Directors of Ametros Financial, and is also a member of the Board of Trustees for University School, a private K-12 school in Cleveland. Marques currently resides in Boston with his wife Alexandra. [clear] ABOUT AMETROS Ametros is changing the way individuals navigate healthcare by providing them with the tools and support necessary to make savvy decisions on how to spend their medical funds. Ametros' team works closely with patients, insurers, employers, attorneys, brokers, medical providers and Medicare to create a seamless experience for our clients. Our depth of expertise in the Medicare Set Aside, property and casualty insurance, healthcare, legal, financial and software industries positions us to offer the best solutions in the marketplace. Our flagship product, CareGuard, is revolutionizing the way funds from insurance claim settlements are administered after settlement, for Medicare Set Aside accounts and any other medical allocation. Ametros continues to innovate, bringing new solutions to the market all with the goal of simplifying healthcare for our clients. Ametros is backed by Clarion Capital Partners, LLC, a New York based private equity firm. [hr]

In this conversation, we explore how people deal with power, and the goal of mutuality in relationships. This conversation is available as a video, as well as audio only, and as a printable PDF transcript. Audio only: Hilary Bradbury is a scholar-practitioner focused on the human and organizational dimensions of creating healthy communities. A professor of […]

In this conversation, we explore how people deal with power, and the goal of mutuality in relationships. This conversation is available as a video, as well as audio only, and as a printable PDF transcript. Hilary Bradbury is a scholar-practitioner focused on the human and organizational dimensions of creating healthy communities. A professor of organization studies […]

Is workplace friendship between women and men possible in a time of #MeToo? If so, what might it look like, and how can both women and men show up differently? In our important societal discussion about sexual harassment and power, these questions aren't exactly on the tips of people's tongues. Yet they are vitally important […] The post Episode 72: Friendship After #MeToo With Hilary Bradbury & Bill Torbert [The Amiel Show] appeared first on .

Amy Torbert, the Maher Curatorial Fellow in American Art, talks about "The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820" on view May 19 through December 31, 2017 at the Harvard Art Museums. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/visit/calendar/gallery-talk-philosophy-chamber-conversations-copley-and-trumbull-in-print

This week’s Chapel Talk episode features Dr. Neil Schmitzer-Torbert in Pioneer Chapel, giving his talk titled: “What’s in a Name?” Episode 22 - Original Speech Date: Mar. 23, 2017

Join Dr. Krister Lowe and today’s featured guest and leading organizational scholar and practitioner Dr. Bill Torbert—a Principal at Action Inquiry Associates—for this week’s episode of The Team Coaching Zone Podcast! Bill Torbert received a BA in Politics and Economics and a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Yale University. He served as the Founder and Director of the War on Poverty Yale Upward Bound program and the Theatre of Inquiry. He taught leadership at Southern Methodist University, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and from 1978-2008 at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College where he served as the graduate school Dean. He later served as the Director of the Organizational Transformation Doctoral Program. In addition to consulting to dozens of companies, not-for-profits and government agencies, Bill has served on a number of boards including notably at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare and Trillium Asset Management. As of 2014 he serves as Principal of Action Inquiry Associates and is a Founding Member of the Action Inquiry Fellowship. Bill has published a range of books, papers, psychometric assessments and has created a number of training programs and fellowships in Action Inquiry as well. On this episode of the podcast Dr. Torbert shares his journey first growing up abroad as the son of a father who worked in the Foreign Service and where he had to learn a number of languages. These early experiences set the stage for his future work around “developmental action-logics.” Bill shares some of his experiences as a student of Chris Argyris at Yale and his work trying to create a collaborative program between blacks and whites in the Yale Upward Bound program. He discusses how the work in this program led to his interest in understanding the developmental stages of leaders and organizations. Themes covered in the podcast include: developmental stages among leaders; the Global Leadership Profile; Action Inquiry; single, double & triple loop learning; 7 Developmental Action Logics – Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Redefining, Transforming, Alchemical; unilateral and mutual power; humanity’s evolution across three stages of action-logics: dependence, independence & inter-independence; action-logics at the team and organization levels; stories applying Action Inquiry with teams; redistributing leadership roles in the team; the moderating role of the CEO’s action logic; the action-logics of coaches; the role of conflict in Action Inquiry; time frames for change and more. Bill shares an interesting tip involving coaching with your eyes closed. Specific resources mentioned in the episode include: Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership; www.actioninquiryleadership.com; 3 day Action Inquiry Workshops including the Global Leadership Profile; the 3 day Alchemists' Workparty; the Action Inquiry Fellowship; and the 2005 Harvard Business Review article The Seven Transformations of Leadership. This episode provides team coaches with yet another priceless opportunity to learn from a legend in the field. This is an episode you will surely not want to miss!

A passionate educator, motivational speaker, and author, Dr. Gretchen Jones Torbert has traveled across the United States to conduct professional development sessions and lead inspirational sessions for educators and women. Dr. Torbert completed her Bachelor’s degree in Middle Childhood Education from Georgia State University, her Master’s degree in Urban Teacher Leadership from Georgia State University, and her Education Specialist degree in Educational Leadership from Liberty University. She has completed her Doctor of Philosophy in Education degree with a specialization in Curriculum and Instruction from Capella University. In addition to her educational endeavors, she is an author of over 20 books in various genres, a passionate motivational speaker and a philanthropist.

Join us for today's podcast as we interview Roy Torbert, and learn about the instruments aboard the MMS mission.