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It's a late Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, and the smell of freshly cut grass (and the inevitable hay fever) is drifting through the studio as I sit down to record this episode. After a whirlwind few months — including seven incredible weeks photographing on Crystal Cruises — it feels good to be back behind the mic, even if I'm a little sniffly. In this episode, I'm reflecting on the magic of authentic portrait photography, the rapid rise of AI in our world (and our inboxes!), and why the human touch still matters more than ever. Plus, there's news about upcoming workshops, a few tech tips for cleaner files and faster edits, and a good-natured rant about AI-generated podcast pitches. As always, it's a mix of stories, laughter, tech, and a reminder to stay creative — and stay human. Cheers P. If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode. PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think! If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk.    Transcript   Introduction and Podcast Setup So it's Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, and here I am late on Sunday recording this podcast and I'm recording it with the smell of freshly cut grass, uh, wafting in through the windows, which is gonna trigger my hay fever one way or another. Um and also the reason I'm recording it quite so late at this stage of the day. It's 'cause my neighbors have been cutting their grass and they do have the loudest petrol mower in the world. I'm Paul, and assuming I can get through this without sneezing, this is the Mastering Portrait Photography  

Olivia went from Kindergarten teacher to Sales at Scholastic. Hear her story and how Classroom to Boardroom helped her land her first position at an education company.   Learn more about Classroom to Boardroom at www.carrieconover.com. Transcript: Introduction (00:00): Welcome to the Classroom to Boardroom podcast. If you are a teacher or administrator looking to change careers, you are in the right place. There can be many reasons an educator is ready to leave the classroom, boredom, burnout, pressure from parents and administrators. The list goes on and on. If you are ready to move on from teaching, there are many roles in which you can use your teacher skillset to have a positive social impact and set yourself up for a fulfilling and rewarding career. Now, let's meet your host, Carrie Conover. Carrie is a veteran educator and ed tech, corporate leader, turn founder, and c. So grab your notepad because your new journey outside the classroom starts right now. Carrie Conover (00:47): Hey there, friends. Welcome back to the Classroom to Boardroom podcast. Today I have a success story that you are going to love. The best way I can summarize it is the person I'm about to interview now works in sales for an education company. You definitely know, and when this person came to Classroom to Boardroom, I never would've guessed sales for them, and they would've never kept, guessed sales for themselves. But guess what? Sales was a match made in heaven with my guest, Olivia, today. We'll get to that in one second, but I just wanna let you know that if you have not listened to the first episode of this new season of the Classroom to Boardroom podcast, our third season, I'm gonna ask you to pause this podcast and go back and start there. This year I am focusing classroom to boardroom everything we do around these seven stages that I believe a teacher or educator goes through when they are transitioning out of the classroom quickly. Carrie Conover (01:52): I'll just share those with you. They are contemplation, decision making, exploration, fear, action, belief and results. And I am basing everything we do on classroom to wardroom this year around those kind of seven pillars. So if you haven't listened to the episode that came out on January 10th, please go listen to that episode now and then come back to this success story within these pillars. The, the first stage that I think most teachers go through is a stage I call contemplation. And when it's when an educator realizes, Hey, I'm not totally satisfied or totally happy or totally fulfilled in the role that I'm currently in, and they first recognize that unsettling feeling, that unhappiness, and then they start wondering about other options that are out there for them and are dreaming of what that change could look like. And so I want you to really pay attention in this Success story interview with Olivia about at the beginning of her journey, this contemplation stage where she recognizes she wasn't totally unhappy, but she knew it was time to think about more in her career. Carrie Conover (03:05): So today in this interview, I not only want you to hear the success story, I want you to really hone in on that first stage that I think teachers go through, which is what I call the conation stage. Today I have a very, very special guest, one of my first classroom boardroom students, Olivia Luwak. She is a former teacher that now works as an education specialist at a company. You all know Scholastic Learning? She is a passionate educator. She's passionate about reading, she loves talking about education, and now she has gone from teacher to working at an education company. Thank you so much, Olivia, for being here today. Olivia L. (03:54): Carrie, thank you so much for having me. It's so great to connect with you. I feel like it's been a little while since we've had a chance to speak. So it is so, so great to be able to to catch up with you tonight and to be able to talk about Classroom to Boardroom. Carrie Conover (04:08): Well, you know, you hold a special place in my heart because you were one of my first classroom to boardroom students , and I knew Classroom to Boardroom was gonna work, and I knew it was good, but there's kind of a trio of you. You, Marjorie and Jessica were like the first three that got jobs outta costume border, and I'm like, this works, this works. But before we start talking about all of that, could you just give our listeners a general story of your career and your background? Olivia L. (04:35): Sure. So I graduated from Marquette University and while at Marquette I studied both education and communication studies. And during my time in college, I always thought that it would be so neat to one day tie both of my degrees together. I had no idea what that would look like, but as I was going through my classes, I really had a passion for both, a passion for education and a passion for communication studies where I had the opportunity, you know, to work with clients and to share knowledge about a particular, you know, topic with a larger audience. And so I kept that idea in the back of my pocket. A student taught in first grade my last year of my senior year at college. I loved first grade, and so I knew when I started to apply for teaching roles that I wanted to stay somewhere in the primary grade level. Olivia L. (05:44): I never thought that I would teach kindergarten, but an opportunity came up and as soon as I went through the interview process and got to meet with some of my some of the teachers that were going to to be on my team, I became super excited about kindergarten. And I have to say teaching kindergarten was a very, very special time for me. I was in the classroom for five years. I truly loved getting to know the families that I worked with and my colleagues, but I have to say that two things stuck out to me during my time as a teacher. I found myself loving teaching, phonics and reading. And I also had a deep love for going to professional development sessions, which I know not every teacher enjoys getting to do that or, you know, it can, they can be long days. Olivia L. (06:40): But I always loved going and learning about new curriculum, new technology. So about after my third year of teaching, I, you know, I kind of kept thinking about these thoughts that were coming through my mind of man, I, you know, I really love you know, the time that I have in the classroom where I'm watching students learned how to identify single sounds and eventually blend them together and make words. And I also really love sitting down with my team every Thursday and going over lesson plans and explaining and sharing ideas about how we can best implement the curriculum that we've been given, you know, to teach our students. So I started thinking about a little bit and year four, same thing, that those same thoughts kind of kept coming up on my heart. And by year five I remember telling my husband, I was like, I think I'm gonna start to look at what other opportunities are out there within the education field. Olivia L. (07:42): I have no idea, you know, if there is anything or how I would even get there, but I just wanna start looking. And so it was the spring of my fifth year of teaching. I started Googling, you know, jobs outside of the classroom. And the more and more that I searched, I just found my heart filled with excitement for some of these, some of these roles. And so I, I was so excited to explore, but I felt kind of stuck at the same time. You know, every time I would read a read a job description, I would be like, yes, this is what I wanna do. Like this is exactly what's in my heart. But I didn't exactly know how to express that to others and exactly know like what to do with those thoughts. So it was an evening in May and I was on the phone with one of my very dear friends, also now a classroom to boardroom graduate, and she calls me up and she said, Olivia, she's like, I know someone who who has a program called Classroom to Boardroom, and the program is designed to help teachers find a job outside of the classroom. Olivia L. (08:57): And I remember turning to my friend and being like, are you reading my mind? Because like, this is exactly like what I have been thinking about and I just don't know how to get from here to there. So she quickly shared your information with me, Carrie and I immediately like Googled her name and like found classroom to boardroom, and within 24 hours I was signed up . That Carrie Conover (09:21): Is awesome. I I actually have forgotten about because that was Lexi, right? Olivia L. (09:28): Yes, yes. That Carrie Conover (09:29): Is crazy because okay, we just kind of have to tell this story. So Olivia L. (09:33): Yes, Carrie Conover (09:34): Of, you know, that I am an avid tennis player, and when I started my own business, I started playing competitive tennis again. Like I, I am on a traveled tennis team, like every week we travel to different clubs and play, and that's a whole other thing. But on my, in my tennis program is a woman who, her daughter's name is Lexi, and she was a teacher. And so Lexi's the one that told you about me because she knew through her mom, right? Like, that's so funny. And then Lexi just recently came back around and also took classroom to boardroom and also just got a job working with you, which is just, yes, so crazy. I mean, I, I had forgotten that's how the intro was and how all the dots were connected. So what a crazy, crazy timeline there. So I wanna pause you for a second because this is a question I always ask every guest. Did you feel guilty about leaving? Olivia L. (10:36): I did. Carrie, at first I felt a sense of guilt because I felt, you know, for the longest time I felt teaching was my calling. And, you know, everyone knew me as a teacher. I, it was something that I wanted to do. Ever since I was a little girl. I, you know, I remember playing school in the basement. My mom was a teacher. And so for the longest time, you know, teaching had been my dream. So I did feel guilty in the sense that I was leaving my calling. However as soon as I started researching jobs outside of the classroom and, you know, reading the, the job descriptions, I found that so much of what these jobs entailed were areas of focus that I did every day in the classroom. Meaning that the skills that were needed and the, you know, the job duties, so much of that was what I was already doing in the classroom. So that made me feel 10 times better. And I was like, you know, the, the, the outlines here that I'm seeing are exactly what I wanna do. And so being able to do that in a new way, in a new light, in a new environment made me really excited. So I think seeing that information helped me feel less guilty and made me really excited to take the next step forward. Carrie Conover (11:57): Well, and I also, I, I felt guilty at the beginning, but like looking back, I don't feel guilty at all. Like, I gave 10 years of my life. You gave five years of your life to teaching. And I do remember, I, I was chuckling, like I played school in my basement, I think all the way through middle school . And the funny thing is that I didn't even get my undergrad in teaching. I went back and got my master's so I could teach. But my point is, is that I think that, you know, especially with the teacher shortage right now, everyone's so scared about the teacher shortage, but it's okay. Like you can do something for five or 10 years or 15 years and then be like, okay, I'm done doing that thing. It doesn't mean it bothers me a little bit that society thinks, like I call them the Apple handcuffs, that like, once you're a teacher, you're never allowed to leave . Carrie Conover (12:43): And that's just, you know, you know, that's a whole other complex , this is a subject. But I do think that a lot of times when you're a really successful and talented teacher, a lot of the things that make you a successful and talented teacher are what would make you a really good salesperson or customer success person and all the various roles. So tell us a little bit about so you talked about joining Classroom to Boardroom and you know, that process. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how you grew in Classroom to Boardroom and then what you think, like, looking back on your new career so far, how do you think you've grown and changed the most? Olivia L. (13:24): Sure. so as I began, I remember like with, you know, within 24 hours I had signed up for Classroom to Boardroom. And that following weekend, like I was so excited to dive right into like module one . And so I, I have to say Carrie, that the modules within classroom to, to Boardroom provided me with so much knowledge about different opportunities and the different areas that you could go into. Again, you know, I was researching these jobs on my own, but I didn't exactly know what area they all fell into. And so the modules really helped me to see all the different fields that I could go into. And I have to say that the vocabulary that you provided for us in the modules was so, so helpful. It was so helpful When it came time for interviews I would use my little notebook and reference the vocabulary that I learned, you know, when the person interviewing me with rollout an acronym and I would be able to understand, you know, what they were talking about. Olivia L. (14:28): So the vocabulary that I learned was just amazing. And actually, I still use my little notebook from classroom to boardroom today because I still use the vocabulary that's in there. Even in my, my new job now I referenced that vocabulary and so I grew in my knowledge of the ed tech field, the ed tech world and I was able to take that knowledge that I gained and apply it to, you know, to where I am now. Like I said you know, before joining Classroom to Boardroom, I had no idea what C R M meant. And now, you know, I use Salesforce, our, that's our customer relationship management tool that we use. And, you know, I'm able to reference the concepts and the terminology that I used in classroom to boardroom. So classroom to boardroom, I refer to it as like my stepping stone to where I, to where I am today. Olivia L. (15:25): The knowledge that I learned the interview help and just growing with the classroom to boardroom community, you know, when we met and did our group sessions, we shared, you know, tips and tricks on resumes and interview help and all of that helped form who I am today. And I still use the same skills, you know, that I, that I learned from classroom to boardroom in my day-to-day job. Now I remember Carrie calling you for the first time I had an interview and I was like, Carrie, I have an interview. Like what do I do? Can you like walk me through? And I still remember the advice that you gave me and I still have my pearls and red lipstick by the way. . Carrie Conover (16:08): Okay, we're gonna get to that, but I have to pause you for a second because I remember when you said you were prepping for the interview and I think you showed me or told me that you had like a binder, a notebook with all the vocab and I was like, oh my gosh, I need to make a workbook. So you inspired me. I made a hundred page digital workbook that goes with the course now. Cause I'm like, everybody needs this in their back pocket. But you were also one of the people that listened to the modules over and over again so that you knew it. And it, it's interesting, I have a new leader board in classroom to boardroom. We didn't do this when you were part of the cohort, but every month for our monthly get together and coaching call, I say who the leader boards are, like who's completed the most of the course. Carrie Conover (16:49): And when I pull the data and I can pull it and sort it from, you know, who's completed all of it down to who's completed, like none of the coursework. What's interesting is that the people at the top are the people with jobs. So like you pull all the historical data of everyone that's ever taken it and the people that have gotten jobs are the people at the top. And so I always tell the members like the magic is in, you know, building a strong relationship with me, but it's in the coursework, like I spent Yes. Blood, sweat, and tears giving that knowledge. So I'm glad that helped you so much. Let's shift and talk a little bit about those pearls and red lipsticks, . So you purchased a one-on-one coaching call with me when you were going into your interview with Scholastic. And I'll never forget it was it was like kind of a gray day. We were talking later in the day and one of the first things we talked about is how are you gonna present yourself to the camera? How are we, so I remember we broke down your job descript the job description. Yes. And really started thinking through like, you know, your answers for interview questions based on your history, but we did talk about pearls and red lipsticks. So can you talk about that a little bit? Olivia L. (18:00): ? Yes, I do remember we'd gone through all like the logistics of the job and then you're, and then you're like, I also have some advice on, you know, you know, we wanna make you, cuz again, I only taught for five years in the classroom and so I am still, you know, rather new in my, in my career. Yeah. And so you're like, I think I know the perfect like finishing touches to add to your outfit pearls and red lipstick . Yes. Those are like my confidence boosters. So ever since that conversation I would always wear my pearls and red lipstick for any interview that I did . Carrie Conover (18:33): Well, and I remember saying because the one job that we were looking at in that session repeated over and over again that they needed someone to be like super poised and seem experienced. I can't remember what the vocabulary was, but yes, really professional. So I wanted you to really look kind of buttoned up and pulled together cuz you're so articulate. I knew you would nail that part, but I didn't want them to look and be like, oh, you only taught kindergarten for five years, you're so young. I wanted you to seem experienced so that they would like, you know, not, they would look past that and and say like, wow, this woman has a lot of knowledge. So whether it's pros or red lipstick, I just think it's like putting your best foot forward in these interviews in the way you look, in the way you talk in your energy. So I'm glad that worked out. . Let's talk a little bit about, okay, so you've had two different roles at Scholastic. So can you tell us those two different roles and then talk to us a little bit about like your day-to-day responsibilities? Olivia L. (19:36): Sure. So when I, I had applied to Scholastic you know, last year and it was, I applied for a full-time position actually. And when I received the email back from them, it was actually regarding a temporary role. And I remember reaching out to you Kiri, I think you may have been in Florida at the time, and it was like, I don't wanna bother her, but I have to share this news. They emailed me back about an interview for a temporary role on the classroom magazine team and Kiri, I remember you took time outta your day to write me back and you said, Olivia, like, you know, I would go for it. Give it your all work hard, you know, and just put your best foot forward because you never know what could come out of an opportunity like this. Yeah. And so I took your advice, Carrie and I was on the magazine team for the fir for, it was a three month position and at the end of the my third month there were some additional job postings in the company for full-time positions. Olivia L. (20:41): And I remember reaching out to the HR manager asking if I would be able to, to, or if I would be eligible to apply to one of the full-time positions. And she had gotten back to me and said yes. And so I applied for a position on the education team and that is where I'm currently at. So I went from working on the magazine team where we focused on renewing classroom magazines for schools in addition to, you know, trying to get new business as well. And then I transitioned over to the education team where our focus is more so on classroom instructional materials. So I have the opportunity each day to work with principals and superintendents to have conversations with them about their pain points what's working for them, what's not working from them, for them. And ultimately my job is to help find a solution to help support their teachers and students in whatever initiative or goal they may have. Olivia L. (21:51): So I work really closely with principals and superintendents having conversations with them about, you know, what are their goals, what are their, what are their initiatives, what are they currently using and where do they see gaps where I can come in and provide a resource, whether it would be you know, a classroom library collection, professional learning for their teachers small group instructional material or even books to send home with students to help students build their at-home library. So I have the, the privilege and the opportunity to work with school districts on reaching their, you know, their literacy, literacy initiatives and their literacy goals. Carrie Conover (22:36): That's amazing. Wow. And I, can we just talk about the fact that, how many times have you heard me say this, and I say it all the time, teachers in trans transition, your first job may or may not be your ideal job, but you've got to get that first job and get that on your resume, right? Yes. And whether Olivia had taken that magazine job and then that ended and she didn't have the opportunity to continue full-time, she would've had a leg up in so many ways looking for a full-time position outside of Scholastic. So I say it all the time, I mean, don't get desperate, but if you can get that first job and stay there a year, 18 months, even a few months, if it's temporary, I love contract positions, go for it. Be brave and take the job. Olivia L. (23:28): Yes, I remember, that's exactly what you told me, Carrie, and like as soon as I got the email back from you, I was like, okay, I'm doing this. I'm in . Carrie Conover (23:36): Well, and you mentioned a little bit too about the group meetings. This is where you hear me say a lot of the same things over and over again, , but those group coaching calls, we really are, we become friends, we become a community. And I am still close with a lot of the people who started Classroom boardroom and are all and are outworking and many of you are gonna hear those talented individuals on the podcast this season. When we talk, think about your role, can you talk to us a little bit of some of the soft skills required in your role, and then maybe tell us about some of the different hard skills required in your role. Olivia L. (24:15): Okay. So regarding soft skills, I would say that it's definitely important to be a good listener to have good communication good communication skills, and also to be time oriented. So when I call a customer, again, whether it be a principal or a superintendent or a curriculum specialist I have to be able to listen closely and carefully to their needs their pain points, you know, what they're looking at so that I can then provide a solution that will actually be able to meet their needs and, you know, and that they can have success. So it's really important that I, that I listen closely and carefully to my customers. And then the second part of that is having good communication where I can share the products that I sell. I need to be able to share what the product is and how it will benefit them. Olivia L. (25:09): Oftentimes, if, you know, a principal doesn't know about the value of the product it can be easy for them to, to turn away and, you know, not have as much interest in what I am selling. So it's important for me to be able to convey the value of the product that I am selling to them. And then with that in mind it's very important that I am time oriented. Most times a principal won't, you know, purchase a product on the first phone call that we have, so I will set a callback with them and, and sometimes it can be many callbacks. So I need to keep track of my call log who I talk to when the next phone call conversation will be. And then also whether sometimes, you know, the customer will, will request a Google meet or a Zoom session. So I need to make sure that I stay on top of my appointments and my calls because that's ultimately how I get, you know, my sales and how we get business. So it is important for me to be time oriented you know, without throughout my day, but with answering emails, answering phone calls, and then being proactive and reaching out on my own to customers and setting up those appointments. Carrie Conover (26:28): Wow. Just listening to you, I I'm just, it's, it is amazing how far you've come in a year, . And, and, and whoever thought like, I think, so you're technically in sales, correct? Under the sales under, yes. And like I think a lot of people, especially teachers are like, oh, there's no way I could ever do sales. And I bet you probably thought that you weren't a sales person, but like that's the difference between selling, there's a difference between selling, you know, used cars and selling education tools that are gonna make classrooms better. Olivia L. (27:10): Exactly. No, I never would've pictured myself in sales, but Carrie, I absolutely love it . I, I find it so fun to engage with customers. You know, in a way it's like consulting where I'm listening, you know, to their needs and being able to provide a solution. And ultimately these solutions are helping students and that was one of the main reasons why I became a teacher in the first place. So I still feel like I'm getting to help students and teachers every single day, which really is my passion and my dream. So I feel like I'm living, I feel like I'm living my, my best dream . Carrie Conover (27:45): Well, what advice do you have for teachers who are looking to transition into a role at an education company? Olivia L. (27:53): Very, very similar to your advice, Carrie. I I just say go for it. So many education companies need teachers input and need teachers knowledge in order to successfully run, you know, run their business. You know, I use my teaching experience, my teaching background on a day-to-day basis. And I even tell my customers, you know, I was a former teacher, so I totally understand where you're coming from. And just sharing with them my understanding, it's that is such a great relationship builder for me with my customers because I can relate to what they're going through. I've been there, I understand what it's like to be, you know, in their shoes. And so my advice would be to keep moving forward, keep applying. And I used to think of it as this, every application, every interview that I did every afternoon that I would spend time researching different jobs and different roles is a stepping stone to your final destination. And so even though the journey may seem long keep your head up high because there are so many education companies out there that need you. Carrie Conover (29:03): Oh, that's amazing advice. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I just ask you if you have any final thoughts or advice before we sign off here on today's episode. Olivia L. (29:16): I just wanna say carried. You and the classroom to boardroom community will forever hold a special place in my heart. You and the community have formed who I am today, and I just encourage anyone who is thinking about leaving the classroom to give classroom to boardroom a chance because I feel all the tools and the knowledge that I now carry in my pocket were gained from attending the classroom to boardroom group sessions and by going through the modules. And so I definitely 100% hands down would say Join Classroom to Boardroom because you truly will receive the tools that you need to make the transition forward. Carrie Conover (30:00): It's like, I wanna sing that song, you've Got a Friend In Me, . I think that's story, story, right? . But the truth is you do have a friend in me and through going through this process, I get to know everyone. And I'm here for you, Olivia, no matter where your career journey takes you. I hope you stay at Scholastic for a long, long time, , but I'll be here for you through the rest of your career. It's not just a short-term partnership. So thank you for those kind words and thank you so much for taking your time to be here with us. If you are interested in taking Classroom to Boardroom, you can learn more about the course and all the courses that I teach@carrieconover.com. Olivia, thank you so much for being here Olivia L. (30:45): Today. Introduction (30:47): Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of The Classroom to Boardroom podcast. If you are enjoying the show, please feel free to rate, subscribe, and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. That helps others find the show and we greatly appreciate it. Once again, thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode of The Classroom to Boardroom podcast.  

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

Website: https://explainedinenglish.comNeed help understanding? Use the text transcript below.Sections:(00:01) Introduction(00:21) Who is Kiah?(00:59) About the Explained in English project(02:24) Why not just use translations?(03:22) What level English should I have?(03:53) How to use the podcast(05:48) Try an explanation now (https://explainedinenglish.com)[Transcript]Introduction (00:01)Hello and welcome to Explained in English, a new podcast for English learners and music lovers. Today, I'm explaining how to use this podcast, with music, to improve your English.Who is Kiah? (00:21)I'm so excited to finally share this podcast with all of you. I'd like to start by introducing myself. My name is Kiah, or Ki, for short. It kind of has a weird spelling, K-I-A-H. I'm from the state of Michigan in the United States, but I live and work in Italy. My job is an English teacher. I've been a language teacher for over 10 years now. I started teaching Spanish in the United States, but here I teach English. About the Explained in English project (00:59)Since I work with students who are learning English, I'm always looking for authentic, real ways for them to improve their English. Music and song lyrics in general are something that everyone seems to like. But, even my advanced students often find learning English with music and songs challenging. Sometimes it's hard to understand what the singer is singing. Sometimes we lack cultural knowledge or history to understand the song properly, and sometimes we lack the motivation to sit down and look up the unknown words. Sometimes it just feels like a lot of work!For all of these reasons, my students felt a little bit blocked in using music as a learning tool. So, this project, this podcast, is to fix that problem. This podcast is all about giving you the support that you need to enjoy and feel confident understanding songs, all in English. I go through and explain each line of the song, making the words, phrases, and grammar easy to understand and easy to remember.Why not just use translations? (02:24)Some people have asked me, “Why not just use translations?”, and my answer is: well, that depends on your goal or what you're hoping to accomplish. For example, if you just want to understand the meaning of a song then I think translations are a great way. However, if you also want to improve your language skills, then you'll learn and remember more if you learn all in English.As an intermediate or advanced student, you want to train yourself to think, interpret, and speak in English, using your native language as little as possible. These explanations will help move you in that direction and get you closer to thinking, speaking, and interpreting in English. What level English should I have? (03:22)So, because everything is explained in English, this podcast is not intended for beginners. These explanations are really for intermediate to advanced students of English. If you can understand most of what I'm saying now, then you're in the right place. If you are really struggling to understand, then this podcast is probably not for you yet.How to use the podcast (03:53)So, how should you use this podcast? To get the most of these explanations follow three simple steps. Step one: 1. Get familiar with the real song.Even if you know the song already, I still suggest listening to it once before you go to the explanation. However, if the song is new or unknown, you should spend some time getting to know it; becoming familiar with the tune, the singer's voice. Just getting comfortable with what the song sounds like. You don't need to understand all the lyrics yet. After you've heard the song, you can move to step two. In the second step you...2. Listen to the explanation audio.You should preferably listen in a place free of distractions, where you can relax and enjoy the explanation. The goal of the explanation is for you to understand the song lyrics. However, you don't have to understand every word that I say. I use a lot of examples, a lot of extra words to help you comprehend and understand the lyrics. You definitely don't have to memorize all of the words in the explanation. Just focus on grasping the meaning of the song lyrics. At the end of the explanation you move to step three, the final step, where you...3. Listen to the song again.This time, you should be able to understand and appreciate the song in a much deeper way. Hopefully, understanding all of the words and the meaning of the song.Okay! That's it for this introductory podcast. In the future, I'll likely record more in-depth information about how to use this podcast. But, for now, I invite you to try one of the explanations. Follow the three basic steps I mentioned before, and you'll be all set to improve your English with music. Thanks again and I'll see you in the next explanation. Bye bye! -KiahWebsite:https://explainedinenglish.comE-mail:info@explainedinenglish.com

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