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Welcome back to this week's exciting episode of Diving in Deep! Sara sits down with the talented grandchildren of country music legends Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, Tre Twitty and Tayla Lynn! In this heartfelt conversation, they share their journey as a tribute band honoring their grandparents, revealing incredible behind-the-scenes stories, and personal anecdotes that highlight the legacy of Conway and Loretta. From their childhood memories to the challenges of touring, this episode is packed with laughter, nostalgia, and a deep appreciation for family and music.Discover how Tre and Tayla blend their own musical influences with the iconic sounds of their grandparents, hear about their new album, and even some of their hot takes on pop culture.Don't miss this chance to connect with the next generation of country music stars! If you enjoy the episode, please like, subscribe, and share your thoughts in the comments below.Listen to Unbroke: (https://ffm.to/seunbroke).About Tayla Lynn & Tre Twitty:There's a moment right at the very beginning of any Twitty & Lynn show that affords country music fans the chance to look back in time. Just after the band has played the signature intro to “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” Tre Twitty and Tayla Lynn shoot each other a glance that summons the electrifying chemistry of their grandparents: Tre is the grandson of Conway Twitty, Tayla is the granddaughter of Loretta Lynn.Audiences can't believe their eyes. From that moment, for the next 90 minutes, they're in the presence of living country music history. “Fans have told Tayla and me that when they see us onstage singing, talking, and just looking at each other, they think, ‘Wow, there must be something genetic in those two families,'” Tre says. “It validates the experience of the concert for them. We're telling our grandparents' story through our story.”But Twitty & Lynn — and their internationally popular show “A Salute to Conway & Loretta” — aren't impersonators. Tre doesn't groom Seventies sideburns and perm his hair; Tayla doesn't mimic her grandmother's mannerisms. Rather, they are onstage celebrating country music, the lost art of duet singing, and the two beloved icons they refer to as “Poppy” and “Memaw.”LET'S BE SOCIAL:Follow Tayla Lynn & Tre Twitty:Instagram - (@twittyandlynn)Facebook - (@Twitty and Lynn)Instagram - (@taylalynnfinger)Facebook - (@Tayla Lynn)X - (@taylalynnheller)TikTok - (@taylalynnofficial)Instagram - (@tretwitty)Facebook - (@Tre Twitty)Follow Diving in Deep Podcast:Instagram –(@divingindeeppod)TikTok – (@divingindeeppod)X – (@divingindeeppod)Facebook – (@divingindeeppod)Follow Sara Evans:Instagram – (@saraevansmusic)TikTok – (@saraevansmusic)Twitter – (@saraevansmusic)Facebook – (@saraevansmusic)Produced and Edited by: The Cast Collective (Nashville, TN)YouTube – (@TheCastCollective)Instagram – (@TheCastCollective)Twitter – (@TheCastCollective)Directed by: Erin DuganEdited By: Sean Dugan, Corey Williams, & Michaela Dolphhttps://www.thecastcollective.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Oral Arguments for the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
United States v. Reginald Twitty
This episode delves into property tax relief options available for homeowners affected by recent calamities, focusing on the procedures for claiming refunds and the significance of the Save Our Homes cap. Tune in for expert insights on homestead exemptions, tax assessments, and actionable steps residents can take to secure financial relief in uncertain times. • Discussion on partial property tax refunds available for displaced homeowners • Application process and important deadlines outlined • Explanation of the refund calculation based on days displaced and structure value • Insights on the Save Our Homes cap and implications for long-term residents • Clarifications regarding reapplying for homestead exemptions post-rebuild • Importance of community engagement and resources for property owners • Tips for realtors to assist clients in navigating tax processes
Join us for a groundbreaking conversation with the Honorable Mike Twitty, the Pinellas County Property Appraiser, as we unlock the mysteries behind the innovative updates to the PCPAOgov site. We promise you'll gain valuable insights into the often-confusing FEMA 50% rule letter, understanding its true origins and how it assists property owners in navigating the aftermath of storms. Discover how this massive three-year project enhances user experience with cutting-edge tools and architecture, especially for residents dealing with storm-induced challenges. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for property owners, offering practical guidance on handling property appraisal intricacies and storm-related repairs with confidence.We also tackle the complex world of FEMA regulations and permitting processes in Pinellas County, drawing lessons from Hurricane Ian's impact. Learn about the critical importance of flood insurance compliance and the potential pitfalls of neglecting FEMA guidelines, as evidenced by Lee County's loss of NFIP insurance discounts. Our discussion shines a light on the crucial role floodplain managers play in efficiently managing the rebuilding appraisal process, ensuring timely permit approvals amidst the bureaucracy. With insights from Mike Twitty, we equip you with the tools to navigate governmental red tape and streamline your storm-related permit endeavors.
In this episode, Brittany Elliott and Chari Twitty-Hawkins explore the themes of self-care and mom guilt, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing one's own needs as a mother. Chari shares her personal journey of rediscovering herself beyond motherhood and the significance of self-awareness and self-compassion in navigating the challenges of being a mom. They discuss the concept of mom guilt, its causes, and how to shift mindsets from perfectionism to purposefulness. The conversation highlights practical self-care strategies and the importance of community support in the motherhood journey. Takeaways Self-care is essential for mothers to thrive. Mom guilt often stems from unrealistic expectations. Acknowledging feelings of guilt is the first step to overcoming it. Celebrating small wins can help shift focus from guilt. Mothers should prioritize their own needs to better support their families. Self-care is a holistic practice, encompassing emotional, physical, and mental health. Finding joy outside of motherhood is crucial for personal fulfillment. Community support is vital in navigating the challenges of motherhood. It's okay to ask for help and lean on partners for support. Motherhood should not mean losing one's identity. Resources Follow Chari on Instagram! -- @cicinspireme --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/brittany-elliott0/support
In “America's Lost Peanut and the Price of Bringing it Back,” Gravy producer Otis Gray takes listeners on a journey through the history and revival of the Carolina African Runner Peanut, an heirloom crop thought to be extinct until 2013. Today, a contingency of heirloom enthusiasts and chefs are trying to bring the historic peanut back into the spotlight through farm-to-table dining. The question is: if not everyone can sit at the table, are we doing it the right way? In 2015, heirloom farmer and “flavor chaser” Nat Bradford was entrusted with a handful of the small, rust-colored African Runner Peanuts uncovered in a seed bank at North Carolina University—peanuts that trace their lineage back to the transatlantic slave trade. These peanuts, once a staple in Southern cuisine, were nearly lost to time, replaced by larger, more industrialized varieties like the Virginia peanut. This Gravy episode delves into the complex history of this crop, uncovering how it was grown by enslaved Africans for sustenance, quietly thriving in clandestine gardens on plantations. Culinary historian Michael Twitty explains the peanut's deep cultural and historical ties to the African diaspora and the way it shaped Southern foodways. As the peanut reemerges, it raises important questions: Who gets to grow, cook, and profit from these heirloom crops today? While passionate about preserving the peanut, Bradford has found that reviving heirloom ingredients in today's economy is costly. The African Runner Peanut, marketed primarily to high-end chefs, is expensive to grow and difficult to shell, limiting its accessibility. Chef Kevin Mitchell, a culinary instructor and historian, shares these concerns. While he uses heirloom crops like the African Runner Peanut to educate his students about food history, he also grapples with the reality that many of the people who helped shape this crop's history are now economically excluded from its revival. Through conversations with experts like Twitty, Mitchell, and culinary historian Tonya Hopkins, the episode explores the extractive nature of the modern food industry and how white chefs and high-end restaurants often overshadow Black culinary history. While the African Runner Peanut's story is one of cultural and historical importance, it's also a story of economic and racial disparity. How do we grapple with the broader implications of reviving lost crops and whether our methods are truly equitable? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support the show and get bonus content on our PATREON here!New TWITTY BURGER shirt here!Last week on the Patreon we documented the cooking and eating of Conway Twitty's legendary Twitty Burger. We loved it, and we want to encourage Shovelos to try making it for themselves and let us know what you think! You document the process and share it with us we'll share it on our social media! Find us on Instagram (@takethispodandshoveit) or email us at takethispodandshoveit@gmail.com.Ingredients (for 1 Twitty Burger)4 oz. patty ground sirloin1 large pineapple ring (we used two on ours, for what its worth)Graham cracker crumbs and shortening for the pineapple crusting and deep frying2 slices of bacon, fried crispHamburger bun and mayonnaise on both bun slicesDirections:cook patty of ground sirloin as desiredbatter the pineapple ring with graham cracker crumbs and deep fry that suckerThen put it all together with the bacon, bun, etc. (You know how to make a sandwich.)EAT! Bask in the glory of your creation. Tells us what you think!Check out our Patreon!Check out our new merch store!Instagram: @TakeThisPodandShoveItFor everything else click HERE!Want to create your own great podcast? Why not start today! We use BuzzSprout for hosting and have loved it. So we suggest you give them a try as well! Buzzsprout gets your show listed in every major podcast platform, and makes understanding your podcast data a breeze. Follow this link to let Buzzsprout know we sent you—you'll get a $20 credit if you sign up for a paid plan, and it helps support our show.
In this episode, I chat with Kevin Twitty, Portland based Interior Designer and Founder of Kevin Twitty Interiors. Kevin brings his passion for life into his interior design creations. He fashions original, inspired interiors throughout the United State and shows tremendous ambition and attention to detail in his work. He has an intuitive nature that helps translate a client's interior design wants and needs into beautiful, functional spaces that serve as the stage to create their memories. What set's Kevin apart from other interior designers is he truly listens to his client's needs. He stays true to their personal style and brings that into every space while challenging them to step outside of their comfort zone to create individual interiors. In this episode we chat about designing with intention, learning through challenges, and his best design tips. To connect with Kevin: @kevintwittyinteriors Schedule a consultation To connect with Jen Spooner click HERE To connect with Dr. Olesya Salathe click HERE This episode is brought to you by OZ & Co
In this episode of 'The Biggest Table,' hosted by Andrew Camp, culinary historian Michael Twitty shares insights into how food serves as a medium for exploring cultural identity, heritage, and spirituality. Twitty, the creator of the blog Afroculinaria and author of award-winning books like 'The Cooking Gene' and 'Kosher Soul,' delves into his journey of connecting African American and Jewish food traditions. He discusses profound themes around the biblical narrative of Exodus, the legacy of slavery, and the importance of storytelling and memory in food. The episode also touches on the significance of Juneteenth, addressing intergenerational trauma and resilience, and the sacredness of food in cultural practices, offering listeners a rich, multifaceted conversation about identity, history, and liberation.Michael Twitty is a culinary historian, living history interpreter, and Judaics teacher. He is the creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacy. In 2018, his book The Cooking Gene won both the James Beard Foundation Book of the Year Award and Best Writing Award. He is the first Revolutionary in Residence at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, a TED Fellow, and was named to The Forward's list of influential Jews in 2020 and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2021. He is also the author of Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew, which was released in 2022. He lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.Follow Michael Twitty on Instagram: @thecookinggeneThis episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com.
On this episode of Bounced From The Roadhouse:Special Guests in 4B:Marching BandBlackballedDocumentariesPat SajakNavageEgg RollsMicrowaveFull House House Lawn LinesLego MoviesShila LeboughCrown VicTijuana Taco MuseumPeeing in the poolWaterslidesGremlinsSunscreenBerlin WallElephantsBaby at Golden CorralJerkyLaughingSupermanOne Word Text MessagesJoey ChestnutVintage ToysTwitty CentAI and ApplePebblingRoadtripsAmazon TribeSwoogieTimed BathroomHonorary CatFlag DayAlexa DaddyJoey ChestnutDean's Daily - GiraffeDR BJFake News - BuffaloKAT OUT BAGOpera NewsGood NewsStupid Criminal - UberTruth or Tale - DeanTV Theme SongsWould you Rather - Ck Dance Random Fact - EverestQuestions? Comments? Leave us a message! 605-389-3456Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review and some stars! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this episode of Taste Buds with Deb, host Debra Eckerling speaks with award-winning culinary historian, food writer and chef Michael W. Twitty. Twitty is the author of Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew, which received the 2023 National Jewish Book Award. “I've grown up with …African diaspora foodways from the Caribbean, Latin America and foodways from African immigrants in the United States,” he says. “And I've lived an entire life with Jewish food from challah to kibbeh. Being able to translate across those cultural lines is really important for me.” Twitty is also the author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, which won the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as book of the year, and “Rice,” a Savor the South cookbook from The University of North Carolina Press. In addition to sharing his food origin story (his food education started in his intergenerational family kitchen and with PBS food shows), Twitty talks about his love for exploring, elevating, and combining food cultures/foodways from around the world. He also explains the three parts to every food tradition, the value of mastering the trinities (the two or three or more ingredients that are the basics of every cuisine), and other cooking insights. Follow @TheCookingGene on Instagram and MichaelWTwitty on Facebook. Learn more at KoshersoulBook.com and JewishJournal.com/podcasts. For more from Taste Buds, follow @TheDEBMethod on social media.
In this special edition of the podcast, Managing Director of Admissions Brett Twitty and Assistant Director of Admissions Ali Torres debunk frequent Executive MBA- and Part-Time MBA-related myths! In this wide-ranging conversation, Brett and Ali share application tips, offer insights about the working professional student experience, detail career support for Executive MBA and Part-Time MBA and much more. Essential listening.
This case is heavy, about a female serial killer, who's story begs the question ... was she working alone? Or was there someone pulling the strings that caused the lives of three innocent men. This week I am joined by Sirron who was such a great sport, you may recognize his voice from our coverage of Aaron Hernandez I was also inspired by Sistahs Who Kill I love the banter and coverage between those two women, its just so well done. Check out my sources ivanaestelle.com and follow me on instagram @ivanaestelletruecrime written.edited.produced- Ivana Thornton music - Stephanie Spain
National burnt ends day. Entertainment from 2019. 1st female telephone operators hired, Germany started WW2 by invading Poland, 1st San Francisco cable car began running. Todays birthdays - Engelbert Humperdinck (composer), Yvonne De Carlo, Conway Twitty, Lily Tomlin, Barry Gibb, Gloria Estefan. Jerry Reed died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Burnt ends - Starlings TNTruth hurts -LizzoRearview town - Jason AldeanBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/Ami I that easy to forget - Engelbert HumperdinckOpera of Hanzel and Gretel - Engelbert HumperdinckI'll follow you - Yvonne De CarloIt's only make believe - Conway TwittyStayin alive - Bee GeesGet on your feet - Gloria EstefanExit - It's not love - Dokkenhttps://www.coolcasts.cooolmedia.com/show/history-factoids-about-today/
Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether) from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut. Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time. The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m
Opening your eyes to the intricate world of property appraisals and tax rates, we're thrilled to welcome a true authority on the subject, Mike Twitty, the Pinellas County Property Appraiser. With a wealth of experience and deep understanding of the field, Mike offers us a lens into the backstage processes, including decoding the values posted on their website and intricacies of trim notices. But that's not it, he also presents an illuminating post-COVID overview of the value increase for single-family homes over the past two years, something that's reshaping the real estate market in unprecedented ways.Our conversation takes a turn towards understanding the role of technology in property appraisals. Mike recounts his firsthand experience with the recent website redesign and the unique challenges that accompany such system changes. We delve into the specifics of different mobile home parks and the elusive arena of PACE loans. Ever wondered why these loans are missing from their website or tax bills? Mike has the answers. The discourse shifts gear as we explore the often-overlooked complexities of homestead exemptions and property taxes. With Mike at the helm, we walk through the process, discuss the consequences of removing homestead from a property before its sale, and the penalties for homestead fraud. Ever thought about establishing trusts to retain homestead benefits? This episode will guide you on the why and how. Mike also explains how to leverage the tax estimator website for a smoother transition into the upcoming tax year. So, tune in as we dissect the multifaceted world of property appraisal and taxes, promising a conversation full of insights and knowledge you can't afford to miss!
The Fat One has another Nip story to share before he recounts every little thing that happened during his day but still takes a moment to comment about the new Twitty competition. Happy National Blueberry Muffin Day.
I hope you didn't miss out on this past weekend in Hurricane Mills at the lovely Loretta Lynn Ranch for the Tennessee Motorcycle Music Rvival. It was one for the books! Before the weekend got to hectic I had time to catch ups with Loretta Lynn's granddaughter Tayla. If you'd like to catch her on tour check out her and Twitty's dates here. Big thanks to everyone that came out and made this event possible! I look forward to even more new faces in 2024.Danger Dan's Talk ShopMCshopTsLowbrow CustomsMotrcyleSherpa Permalink
#868 - Tayla Lynn Tayla Lynn is a special guest on The Paul Leslie Hour! Are you here? If you're here, there's a few things I should say to you. First of all, it'd be welcome to The Paul Leslie Hour. What else can I tell you, my friend? Let's see, our special guest is a bright-eyed, energetic, talented, beautiful singer and songwriter? Yes, I'm referring to Tayla Lynn: The Coalminers Granddaughter. Many of you know that Tayla Lynn is the granddaughter of country music icon Loretta Lynn. And I suppose I should tell you that this interview was recorded in beautiful Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Oh, oh, oh and it was just minutes before Tayla took the stage with Tre Twitty. Tre is the grandson of Conway Twitty. See, they perform as “Twitty and Lynn.” Okay - so you should know that backstage means you've got to do the interview where you can and that may mean “on the fly,” but side note please subscribe to The Paul Leslie Hour on YouTube and maybe even like us on Facebook. It helps us in a lot of ways. Would you do that? Real quick, remember when we told you about Paul's new pup? Just wanted to update you all. She was at the vet the other day and weighed in at 33 pounds, up from 26 two months ago. A few of you asked so there ya go. Now it's time to start the show with Tayla Lynn. I think you'll like this one. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.
It's not the podcast's birthday, but it's OUR birthday! To celebrate, we're gifting you with a new episode! We share our thoughs on ANEDA Distributing, why you should participate in The Weekly Pint, and what wood furniture tastes best. This episode covers the following podcasts : Cincy Brewcast - S9 E2 - Adena No More? The Weekly Pint - Ep 166 - It's Always Been About Big Beer The Brews Travelers' Outcast Podcast - Ep 23 - Twitty's Table Tasting - Sharonville, OH ----- What we drank : B. Nektar - Black Fang - Mead Rhinegeist - Water Melly Fretboard - Juicy Improv - IPA ----- Episode recorded on 4/18/2023 at our amazing podcast host, Higher Gravity Summit Park! https://highergravitycrafthaus.com/ Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Truth, Beer, and Podsequences are those of the participants alone and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of any entities they may represent. ------ Find us on all the social medias @ TruthBeerPod Email us at TruthBeerPod@gmail.com Subscribe, like, review, and share! Find all of our episodes on your favorite Podcast platform or https://www.youtube.com/@TruthBeerPod ! Buy us a pint! If you'd like to support the show, you can do by clicking the "One-Time Donation" link at http://truthbeerpod.com ! If you want exclusive content, check out our Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/TruthBeerPod If you'd like to be a show sponsor or even just a segment sponsor, let us know via email or hit us up on social media! ----- We want you to continue to be around to listen to all of our episodes. If you're struggling, please reach out to a friend, family member, co-worker, or mental health professional. If you don't feel comfortable talking to someone you know, please use one of the below resources to talk to someone who wants you around just as much as we do. Call or Text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Chat with someone at 988lifeline.org http://www.988lifeline.org ----- Our Intro, Outro, and most of the "within the episode" music was provided by Gnome Creative. Check out www.GnomeCreative.com for all your audio, video, and imagery needs! @gnome__creative on Instagram @TheGnarlyGnome on Twitter https://thegnarlygnome.com/support http://gnomecreative.com http://instagram.com/gnome__creative http://www.twitter.com/TheGnarlyGnome
Another Beer Share!
Welcome to "Good Morning WWE" with Mr. & Mrs. Casual Wrestling Fan. This is a show that consists of this week in WWE in 60 seconds, front page news, rumors, injury reports and guest interviews that will consist of wrestlers, podcast hosts, WWE Superman's and Patreon members.Go AD-FREE and get this show plus hundreds more by heading to Patreon.com/WWEPodcast
The Fat One is back with news about the 2023 #1 Fan Contest, a partial recap of the weekend and several surprise giftettes…. plus he's mad as a snake with the Twitty. Happy MLK Day.
Speaker or Performer: Pastor Stephen Braswell Date of Delivery: November 30, 2022
Speaker or Performer: Pastor Stephen Braswell Date of Delivery: November 30, 2022
What's going on y'all another week another episode of our ignorant opinions join us as we getting into music, news and culture. Today we take a deep dive into numerous topics from music to sports and even the afterlife. Keeping ignorant as ever Aaron is still horny --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
In this episode of WTFW (which stands for What the F Wrestling), Kanye Twitty and for the first time EVER, Mr. Casual Wrestling Fan joins the show to talk about all things WWE including Crown Jewel.Get this episode and hundreds more AD-FREE at Patreon.com/WWEPodcast
It's a train wreck as the Fat One recaps his day in Fat Acres before reading Twitty requests. Happy National Sausage Pizza Pie Day.
In this episode of WTFW (which stands for What the F Wrestling), Nemean Lion and Kanye Twitty return to talk wrestling, putting a fun, unique twist each week. This week a VERY special goes that needs no introduction!Get this episode and hundreds more AD-FREE at Patreon.com/WWEPodcast
Best estimates suggest there are around 140,000 African-American Jewish people living in the United States. James Beard award-winning writer and historian Michael Twitty uses the term "border-crossers" to describe the community, which includes himself."We are people who have always existed but have never really had a voice," he writes in his new book, "Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew."We sit down with Twitty to talk about food, tradition, and identity.Want to support 1A? Give to your local public radio station and subscribe to this podcast. Have questions? Find us on Twitter @1A.
Today on Boston Public Radio: We begin the show by opening phone lines, asking listeners about America's political divide. Dr. Katherine Gergen-Barnett discusses the latest news on COVID-19 and monkeypox vaccines, and answers listeners' questions in another edition of “Ask the Doctor.” Gergen-Barnett is the vice chair of Primary Care Innovation and Transformation and residency director in the Department of Family Medicine at Boston Medical Center and Boston University Medical School. Callie Crossley talks about Meghan Markle's Spotify podcast “Archetypes,” and a new Madame C.J. Walker Barbie doll. Crossley hosts GBH's Under the Radar and Basic Black. Micheal Twitty discusses the Jewish and African diaspora through his new book, “Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew.” Twitty is a James Beard winning author, chef, and cultural historian. His new book is “Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew.” Eric Deggans shares his thoughts on the latest on TV, from “Better Call Saul” to “A League of Their Own.” Deggans is NPR's TV critic and a regular on Boston Public Radio. John Davidson reflects on his life and career, and his time hosting “Hollywood Squares.” He also performs a sampling of his music live at the Boston Public Library. Davidson is an actor, musician, and all-around entertainer who's filled in for Johnny Carson, hosted shows like “Hollywood Squares,” “That's Incredible!,” and “Time Machine.” Nowadays you can catch him performing music up at Club Sandwich in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire. We end the show by asking listeners for their favorite summer drinks.
Mark talks to writer Michael Twitty about the origins of a cuisine, Twitty's days as a Hebrew school teacher, and the significance of Driving Miss Daisy.View this episode's recipe and show notes here: https://www.bittmanproject.com/p/twittySubscribe to Food with Mark Bittman on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and please help us grow by leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts.Follow Mark on Twitter at @bittman, and on Facebook and Instagram at @markbittman. Subscribe to Mark's newsletter The Bittman Project at www.bittmanproject.com.Questions or comments about the show? Email food@markbittman.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
After adding 30 songs to our Ultimate Country Playlist, Danny and Tyler are back with a new Catch-Up and Mustard! As usual with our special Catch-up and Mustard episodes, we do a quick check in, let you know what's coming up, and play some country music games! This month we are playing another round of WHO DUNNIT (as voted by our wonderful patrons over at Patreon!), and we close it out with our third installment of IS IT COUNTRY?—featuring songs from The Shins, The Replacements, Bon Jovi, and more.Get your ears on all past and future bonus episodes by supporting us on Patreon HERE!
www.patreon.com/accidentaldads for bonus content and to support the show AND The Save The Music Foundation! Top police stings A sting operation is a deceitful operation used by law enforcement to apprehend criminals in the act of trying to commit a crime. In order to obtain proof of a suspect's misconduct, a typical sting involves an undercover law enforcement officer, investigator, or cooperative member of the public acting as a criminal partner or prospective victim and cooperating with a suspect's activities. Journalists for the mass media occasionally use sting operations to film and disseminate footage of illegal conduct. Sting procedures are prevalent in many nations, including the United States, but are prohibited in others, like Sweden and France. Certain sting operations are prohibited, such as those carried out in the Philippines where it is against the law for police enforcement to act as drug traffickers in order to catch purchasers of illegal substances. Examples Offering free sports or airline tickets to lure fugitives out of hiding. Deploying a bait car (also called a honey trap) to catch a car thief Setting up a seemingly vulnerable honeypot computer to lure and gain information about hackers Arranging for someone under the legal drinking age to ask an adult to buy an alcoholic beverage or tobacco products for them Passing off weapons or explosives (whether fake or real), to a would-be terrorist Posing as: someone who is seeking illegal drugs, contraband, or child pornography, to catch a supplier (or as a supplier to catch a customer) a child in a chat room to identify a potential online child predator a potential customer of illegal prostitution, or as a prostitute to catch a would-be customer a hitman to catch customers and solicitors of murder-for-hire; or as a customer to catch a hitman a spectator of an illegal dogfighting ring a documentary film crew to lure a pirate to the country where a crime was committed. Whether sting operations constitute entrapment raises ethical questions. Law enforcement might have to be careful not to incite someone who wouldn't have otherwise committed a crime to do so. Additionally, while conducting such operations, the police frequently commit the same crimes, like purchasing or selling narcotics, enticing prostitutes, etc. The defendant may raise the entrapment defense in common law jurisdictions. Contrary to common belief, however, laws against entrapment do not forbid undercover police personnel from pretending to be criminals or deny that they are police officers. Entrapment is normally only a defense when suspects are coerced into confessing to a crime they probably would not have otherwise committed. However, the legal meaning of this coercion differs widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Entrapment might be used as a defense, for instance, if undercover agents forced a possible suspect to manufacture illicit narcotics in order to sell them. Entrapment has often not taken place if a suspect is already producing narcotics and authorities pretend as purchasers to apprehend them. Operation Entebbe The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commandos successfully carried out Operation Entebbe or Operation Thunderbolt, a counterterrorism hostage-rescue mission, at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on July 4, 1976. A week earlier, on June 27, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - External Operations (PFLP-EO) (who had previously split from the PFLP of George Habash) and two members of the German Revolutionary Cells hijacked an Air France Airbus A300 jet airliner carrying 248 passengers. The declared goal of the hijackers was to trade the hostages for the release of 13 detainees in four other countries and the release of 40 Palestinian terrorists and related prisoners who were detained in Israel. The flight, which had left Tel Aviv for Paris, was rerouted after a stopover in Athens through Benghazi to Entebbe, the country of Uganda's principal airport. The ruler Idi Amin, who had been made aware of the hijacking from the start[10], encouraged the hijackers and personally greeted them. The hijackers confined all Israelis and a few non-Israeli Jews into a separate room after transferring all captives from the plane to a deserted airport facility. 148 captives who were not Israelis were freed and taken to Paris over the course of the next two days. Ninety-four passengers—mostly Israelis—and the 12-person Air France crew were held captive and threatened with execution. Based on information from the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, the IDF took action. If the demands for the release of the prisoners were not granted, the hijackers threatened to murder the hostages. The preparation of the rescue effort was prompted by this threat. These strategies included getting ready for armed opposition from the Uganda Army. It was a nighttime operation. For the rescue mission, Israeli transport planes flew 100 commandos to Uganda over a distance of 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles). The operation took 90 minutes to complete after a week of planning. Out of the 106 captives still held, 102 were freed, and three were murdered. In a hospital, the second captive was later slain. Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the unit leader, was one of the five injured Israeli commandos. Netanyahu was Benjamin Netanyahu's elder sibling and the future Israeli prime minister. Eleven Soviet-built MiG-17s and MiG-21s of the Ugandan air force were destroyed, and all five hijackers and forty-five Ugandan troops were killed. Idi Amin gave the command to attack and kill Kenyans living in Uganda after the operation because Kenyan sources supported Israel. 245 Kenyans in Uganda were killed as a consequence, and 3,000 left the nation. In honor of Yonatan Netanyahu, the commander of the force, Operation Entebbe, which had the military codename Operation Thunderbolt, is occasionally referred to retroactively as Operation Jonathan. Operation Valkyrie Senior Nazi military officers and Adolf Hitler convened in the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg, Eastern Prussia, on July 20, 1944. Hitler's body was discovered scattered across the table as the Nazi military chiefs sat down to plan troop deployments on the Eastern Front when an explosion burst through the steamy meeting room. With the Führer's death, the Nazi threat to Europe could have been lifted. or so it seems at first. Claus von Stauffenberg and his accomplices believed they had turned the course of World War II and maybe saved thousands of extra lives for a brief period of time in history. The July Plot, also known as Operation Valkyrie, was the most famous attempt to have Hitler killed, although it was ultimately unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, some of which are still unknown to this day. The July Plot Is Hatched Many Germans, including some of the country's top military figures, had begun to lose faith in Germany's ability to win the war by the summer of 1944. Hitler was widely held responsible for ruining Germany. The Wolfsschanze was one of Hitler's military headquarters. A number of prominent politicians and senior military figures devised a plan to murder the Führer by detonating a bomb at a conference there in order to spark political unification and a coup. Operation Valkyrie was the name of the strategy. The plan was that after Hitler's death, the military would assert that the murder was the result of a Nazi Party coup attempt, and the Reserve Army would take significant buildings in Berlin and detain senior Nazi figures. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler would become Germany's new chancellor, and Ludwig Beck would become its first president. The new administration wanted to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the war, ideally with benefits for Germany. The main conspirators' motives varied, according to Philipp Freiherr Von Boeselager, one of the last remaining participants in the July Plot. Many of them only saw it as a means of avoiding military defeat, while others hoped to at least partially restore some of the nation's morals. They chose Claus von Stauffenberg, a young colonel in the German army, to carry out the assassination. Despite not being a member of the Nazi party in the traditional sense, Stauffenberg was a devoted German patriot. In the end, he came to think that if Germany was to be saved, it was his patriotic duty to expel Adolf Hitler. Hitler, though, had experienced assassination attempts before. Assassination attempts against Hitler had been more frequent since his spectacular ascent to the top of Germany's political scene in the late 1930s. Hitler, who was becoming more and more paranoid, frequently altered his plans without warning and at the last minute. What Went Wrong Stauffenberg entered the bunker at Wolfsschanze on July 20, 1944. The conference was planned to take place in a concrete, windowless subterranean bunker that was closed off by a large steel door. By making sure it happened within one of these facilities, the detonation would be confined and anyone nearby the explosive device would die quickly from the shrapnel. The conference was moved to an above-ground wooden bunker with better air circulation on July 20 due to the oppressively hot weather, according to Pierre Galante's Operation Valkyrie: The German Generals' Plot Against Hitler. Numerous windows, a wooden table, and other beautiful furniture were all present in the area, which meant that the potential explosion would be much diminished since the energy of the blast would be absorbed and diffused. Stauffenberg was aware that this was the case, but he nonetheless proceeded, assuming that two explosives would be sufficient to destroy the room and kill everyone within. Stauffenberg excused himself when he arrived, saying that he needed to change his clothing, and went to a private room. The two explosives needed to be armed and primed. However, he only had time to arm one of the two devices due to an unexpected phone call and a quick knock at his door. Thus, the possibility of a greater blast was cut in half. Stauffenberg realized that in order to cause any kind of harm, the explosive device needed to be placed as near to Hitler as possible. He was able to get a seat as near to Hitler as possible with only one other person between them by claiming that his hearing was impaired due to his wounds. Placing the bag as near to Hitler as possible, Stauffenberg then left the room pretending to take a personal call. The briefcase was accidentally shifted to the opposite side of a large wooden leg that was supporting the meeting room table as another official was taking a seat. The Aftermath Panic broke out after the device exploded at precisely 12:42 pm. Twenty individuals were hurt, including three cops who subsequently died from their injuries, and a stenographer was instantaneously murdered. Stauffenberg and his assistant Werner von Haeften leapt into a staff car and bluffed their way past three different military checkpoints to flee the mayhem at the Wolfsschanze complex because they believed that Hitler was indeed dead. Hitler, however, along with everyone else who was protected by the large wooden table leg, only suffered a few minor cuts and an eardrum perforation. He had fully torn-up pants, and the Nazi leadership would subsequently utilize pictures of them in a propaganda effort. Ian Kershaw, a historian, claims that during the explosion, contradictory news concerning Hitler's fate came. In spite of the disarray, the Reserve Army started detaining senior Nazi officials in Berlin. The entire scheme, however, was eventually thwarted by delays, unclear communication, and the announcement that Hitler was still alive. The conspirators were all given the death penalty in a hastily called court martial the same evening by General Friedrich Fromm. In the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, a makeshift firing squad murdered Stauffenberg, von Haeften, Olbricht, and another officer, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, while Ludwig Beck committed himself. At Berlin's Plötzensee jail, Berthold Stauffenberg was gently strangled while the incident was being recorded for Hitler to see. Hitler's life was ultimately saved that day by a number of interrelated reasons, but the conspirators were right that Germany was headed for disaster. Less than a year later, the Nazi leader and his closest advisers committed suicide. Operation Iceman Ever wonder what its like working undercover with an alleged murderer? Well, let's just say it's not hard to get a stuffy nose around this case… In fact, serial killer Richard Kuklinski's preferred method of murder involved using a nasal spray bottle to spritz cyanide into the faces of his victims. As a result, undercover agent Dominick Polifrone was never more on guard than during the 18 months he spent building a case against the so-called Iceman. “No matter where I went with him, I wore this leather jacket with a pocket sewn inside containing a small-caliber weapon,” recalls Polifrone, who gained his target's confidence and taped dozens of their conversations. “I knew that I was somewhere on his hit list. If he'd pulled out that nasal spray, I'd have to protect myself.” The streetwise New Jersey officer acquired enough proof before Kuklinski had suspicions, preventing that situation from occurring. Finally, the enormous 6-foot-4 gangland killer was apprehended thanks to his evidence. “I've met hundreds of bad guys, but Kuklinski was a totally different type of individual,” he tells The Post. “He was coldhearted — ice-cold like the devil. He had no remorse about anything.” Kuklinski was captured by Polifrone in a combined operation between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the office of the New Jersey attorney general. The criminal, who was a leading suspect in the murder of a mobster whose body was found two years after his disappearance, was posing as a respectable businessman residing in suburban Dumont, New Jersey. The reason the medical examiners discovered ice in the muscle tissue was because Kuklinski, who earned his notoriety for frequently freezing the bodies of his victims and then defrosting them, erred that time. Police made an indirect connection between the deceased man and Kuklinski, who was charged with a number of previous homicides. “We had to get something nobody knew,” recalls Polifrone. The sting only appears briefly on screen in the film. In order to gain Kuklinski's trust, Polifrone, a resident of Hackensack, New Jersey, pretended to be a "bad person" for a whole year and a half. They met in parks and rest areas along highways and discussed the horrific killings Kuklinski had carried out, including a Mafia hit in Detroit for which he was paid $65,000. Additionally, there were "statement killings." To put a dead canary in the mouth of a victim as a warning to other victims, one mafia leader paid him extra. Another occasion, Kuklinski made light of the fact that he saw a gang member consume an entire cheeseburger laced with cyanide before passing away while joking with Polifrone. Recalls the cop: “He told me that cyanide normally works real quick and easy, but that ‘this guy has the constitution of a God damn ox, and is just eating and eating. “He said he almost ate the whole burger and then, bam, he's down!” Polifrone knew exactly how to play his role. “I laughed, of course,” he shrugs. “That's what bad guys do.” Paradoxically, Kuklinski was a committed family man. He led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. “He never socialized, gambled or messed around with other women,” adds Polifrone. “He lived for his wife and kids.” One minute he'd be repairing his daughters' toys, the next, dismembering a body with a chain saw and stuffing it into an oil drum. “He would come home and completely shut off this murderous component and seek security and love from his family,” says “Iceman” director Vromen. “He fulfilled the need to provide for them by killing.” Polifrone finally nailed Kuklinski after tricking him into buying what he thought was pure cyanide. A team of feds and ATF officers arrested him in December 1986. Twenty-eight years later, he reflects on the man who died, apparently of natural causes, in Trenton Prison in 2006 at age 70. Eyebrows were raised because he was due to appear as a witness at the trial of a Gambino family underboss. “I hope he died a slow death because of what he did to families and individuals,” concludes Polifrone. “He had no mercy. And if it was foul play, that's OK with me.” So let's talk about some controversial sting operations you may or may not have heard of. ACORN Sting Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is known as ACORN. ACORN was a group of neighborhood-based organizations in the US that supported low- and middle-income families. They also offered details on affordable housing and voter registration. James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, two young conservative activists, published recordings that had been edited with care in 2009. The two pretended to be a pimp and a prostitute before using a hidden camera to get unflattering answers from ACORN workers that seemed to give them advice on how to hide their prostitution business and avoid paying taxes.The plea for assistance in obtaining funding for a brothel didn't appear to deter the ACORN employees either. This sparked a national debate and led to a reduction in financing from public and private sources. ACORN declared on March 22, 2010, that it was disbanding and shutting all of its connected state chapters as a result of declining funding. Interesting fact: On January 25, 2010, James O'Keefe and three other people were detained on felony charges for allegedly tampering with the phones at Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans. O'Keefe stated that he was looking into claims that Landrieu's staff had dismissed constituent phone calls over the health care issue. O'Keefe recorded the action as they pretended to be telephone repairmen.In the end, they were accused with breaking into a government building under false pretenses, a misdemeanor. Following his admission of guilt, O'Keefe received a three-year probationary period, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine. Operation West End The largest undercover news story in Indian journalism has been described like this. In order to expose the alleged culture of bribery inside the Indian Ministry of Defense, a well-known newspaper from India by the name of Tehelka—which translates as "sensation" in Hindi—started its first significant undercover operation, "Operation West End" in 2001. Two reporters from the publication pretended to be London-based armaments dealers from a fake firm. In the undercover film, numerous politicians and defense officials are shown discussing and accepting bribes in exchange for assisting them in obtaining government contracts, including Bangaru Laxman, secretary of the ruling BJP party. Laxman and Military Minister George Fernandes (shown above) resigned following the release of the tapes, and a number of other defense ministry employees were placed on administrative leave. Interesting Fact: Instead of initially acting on the evidence from the sting operation, the Indian government accused the newspaper of fabricating the allegations. The main financial backers of Tehelka were made targets of investigations, and the newspaper company was almost ruined. In 2003, Tehelka was re-launched as a weekly newspaper, and was funded by faithful subscribers and other well-wishers. In 2007, Tehelka shifted to a regular magazine format. Senator Larry Craig On June 11, 2007, an undercover police officer conducting a sting operation targeting males cruising for sex at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport detained Idaho Senator Larry Craig. Sgt. Dave Karsnia, the arresting officer, claimed that just after noon, the suspect entered a restroom and shut the door. Craig then moved into the stall next to him and propped his suitcase up against the stall door's front. By obscuring the front view, this is frequently done in an effort to hide sexual activity. Several minutes later, the officer claimed to have noticed Craig looking into his stall through a gap, tapping his right foot repeatedly, then moving it till it brushed Karsnia's. Craig then passed his hand under the stall divider into Karsnia's stall with his palm up and guided it along the divider toward the front of the stall three times. Karsnia then waved his badge back, to which the senator responded, “No!” The senator pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a fine, but changed his mind after word of his arrest later became public. Craig claimed he just had a “wide stance”, and he only pleaded guilty to avoid a spectacle.An appeals court rejected his request to change his mind about entering a guilty plea. Craig completed his time in the Senate but was unable to have his case dismissed by the Senate Ethics Committee. Craig departed office on January 3, 2009, having not to run for reelection in 2008. Fascinating Fact: Soon after Craig was arrested, the men's room started to resemble a tourist destination, with people coming to seek directions and take photographs. Even restroom tissue may be purchased on eBay. Listen to the conversation between Senator Craig and Sgt. Karsnia immediately following the arrest here. 7 Sarah Ferguson was victimized by Mazher Mahmood, a reporter for the tabloid daily "News of the World," in May 2010. In order to set up a meeting with Ferguson, Mahmood pretended to be a wealthy international businessman. The Duchess, who was discreetly recorded throughout the encounter, offered to connect the "tycoon" with Prince Andrew's influential inner circle. "500,000 pounds when you can, to me, open doors," Sarah Ferguson is heard saying on the video. She may also be seen removing a briefcase that is holding $40,000 in cash. After the event was reported, Ferguson's spokesman claimed she was both "devastated" and "regretful." She said that she had been drinking before asking for the money and was "in the gutter at that point" in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Mazher Mahmood, the guy who pretended to be the tycoon, is referred to as the "Fake Sheikh" and has conned several famous people. No one is certain if that is his true name or what his real history is since he likes to make things as mysterious as possible. The journalist denies ever allowing his face to appear in any of his pieces and claims to have received several death threats. He also avoids public appearances. Bait Cars The Minneapolis Police Department employed the first bait cars in the 1990s. The largest bait car fleet in North America is now situated in Surrey, British Columbia, which is widely regarded as the continent's "auto theft capital." The cars are carefully modified, equipped with GPS tracking equipment, audio/video surveillance, and an engine-disabling remote control. It has helped to lower car theft by 47% when it was introduced in Surrey, British Columbia, in 2004. In one of the more contentious bait vehicle stings, a lady was murdered nearly instantaneously after a robber driving a bait car drove into her in Dallas, Texas, in 2008. To resolve the litigation, $245,000 was given to the victim's family. Fact: The key to determining whether police are utilizing a bait car improperly and would result in entrapment is if they left it in a way that would tempt someone who would not ordinarily commit a crime. Here, you can view one of the more eye-catching (to put it mildly) bait vehicle stings. Many others will undoubtedly have the same thoughts as I had. “Where the heck was the kill switch?” Marion Barry A well-known politician and former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry. Police were going to conduct an undercover narcotics transaction with former Virgin Islands official Charles Lewis on December 22, 1988, but they were turned back when they discovered Mayor Marion Barry was in Lewis's hotel room. This prompted a grand jury inquiry into potential mayor meddling in the narcotics probe. Barry testified for three hours in front of the grand jury before telling reporters he had done nothing wrong. Then, on January 18, 1990, Barry was arrested in a Washington, D.C. hotel after using crack cocaine in a room with his former girlfriend, who had turned informant for the FBI. This was the result of a sting operation put up by the FBI and D.C. Police. Barry said the now-famous phrase, "Bitch set me up," which has come to be linked with him. Following his arrest and subsequent trial, Barry made the decision not to run for mayor again. He was charged with 14 charges by a grand jury, including suspected grand jury perjury. The mayor could have spent 26 years in prison if found guilty on all 14 counts. Barry was only given a six-month prison term after the jury found him guilty of using cocaine. Barry campaigned for municipal council after being let out of prison. He garnered 70% of the vote due to his widespread popularity and the perception held by many that Marion Barry was the target of a political witch hunt by the government. Then, in 1995, Barry won a fourth term as mayor of Washington, D.C. Barry is currently back in his position on the D.C. city council. Regardless of your opinion on Marion Barry, you have to respect his perseverance and drive to help the people of Washington, D.C. The aforementioned occurrence is only a small portion of his remarkable life. A documentary titled "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" was produced by HBO. Joran Van der Sloot Dutch national Joran Van der Sloot is a key suspect in the case of Natalee Holloway, who vanished on May 30, 2005, while traveling to Aruba to celebrate her high school graduation. On March 29, 2010, Van der Sloot got in touch with Beth Twitty Holloway's mother's attorney John Q. Kelly, reviving the case. Van der Sloot promised to provide details about Holloway's demise and the whereabouts of her remains in exchange for a total of $250,000 with a $25,000 down payment. After Kelly and Twitty made contact with Alabama law enforcement, the FBI launched a sting operation. On May 10, Van der Sloot accepted a wire transfer of $15,000 to his Dutch bank account along with an additional cash payment of $10,000. He drove Kelly to the location of Holloway's remains in exchange for the cash. He indicated a home, saying that his father had assisted in burying the body in the foundation. The home had not yet been constructed when Holloway vanished, therefore this turned out to be untrue. Later, Van der Sloot informed Kelly through email that the entire incident was a fraud. At this point, police might have detained Van der Sloot for wire fraud and extortion, but they chose to wait while they worked to establish a case of murder against him. Van der Sloot was not only let free, he was also given permission to depart Aruba and travel to Bogotá, Colombia, and then Lima, Peru, with the money he had made from the operation. He met Stephany Flores Ramirez, a 21-year-old University of Lima business student, in a casino hotel in the city. Ramirez and Van der Sloot are seen entering a hotel room together on security footage, but only Van der Sloot is seen exiting. On June 2, Ramirez was discovered dead in the hotel room that Van der Sloot had booked, her neck broken and she had been battered to death. On May 30, 2010, precisely five years after Natalee Holloway vanished, Ramirez passed away. A person arrested Van der Sloot He admitted to the murder on June 3 and June 7. Fascinating fact: Van der Sloot is presently detained at Peru's Miguel Castro jail, where murder charges have been brought. He apparently now claims that if he is permitted to move to a jail in Aruba, he would tell the whereabouts of Natalee Holloway's remains. Perverted Justice Stings Perverted-Justice is a group that uses volunteers to masquerade as juveniles online, often between the ages of 10-15, and wait for an adult to message or email the decoy back. If the topic becomes sexual, they won't actively reject it or support it. Then, in order to set up a meeting, they will attempt to identify the males by acquiring their phone numbers and other information. The group then provides law enforcement with the information. Additionally, Perverted-Justice has worked with the American reality show "To Catch a Predator." In Murphy, Texas, one of the more contentious instances took place in 2006. Louis Conradt (seen above), a district attorney in Texas, pretended to be a 19-year-old college student and had sexually explicit internet conversations with a person he thought was a 13-year-old kid. They hired an actress to portray the youngster on the phone when Conradt demanded images of the boy's genitalia. Conradt stopped returning phone calls and instant messages, so police and the reality program decided to conduct a search warrant operation at his residence. A gunshot was heard as the police entered the scene to make an arrest. Conradt was inside with a self-inflicted wound when they arrived, and he eventually passed away at a hospital. 23 people were taken into custody for online solicitation of minors as a consequence of the sting operation in Murphy, Texas. Due to inadequate evidence, none of the 23 instances were prosecuted as of June 2007. Conradt's family launched a $105 million lawsuit against Dateline's To Catch a Predator series. The dispute was ultimately resolved outside of court. All next episodes' development was halted by the network in 2008. Rachel Hoffman On February 22, 2007, a traffic stop in Tallahassee, Florida, resulted in Rachel Hoffman being found in possession of 25 grams of marijuana. Then, on April 17, 2008, police searched her flat and found 4 ecstasy tablets and 151.7 grams of marijuana. Police allegedly threatened to put her in jail unless she worked as an undercover informant for them, according to her account. She was then dispatched untrained to an undercover gathering to purchase a weapon and a significant quantity of narcotics from two alleged drug traffickers. The suspects relocated the drug purchase while she was there. When she departed the buy place in the car with the two suspects, the police officers who were keeping an eye on the sting lost sight of her. The identical gun she was intended to purchase was used to kill her by the two suspects while they were in motion. Two days later, her corpse was discovered close to Perry, Florida. One of the murder suspects was convicted of first-degree murder and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole on December 17, 2009, which would have been Rachel Hoffman's 25th birthday. Trial for the second murder suspect is set for October 2010. Interesting Fact: On May 7, 2009, a law called “Rachel's Law” was passed by the Florida State Senate. Rachel's Law requires law enforcement agencies to (a) provide special training for officers who recruit confidential informants, (b) instruct informants that reduced sentences may not be provided in exchange for their work, and (c) permit informants to request a lawyer if they want one. Mr. Big The Royal Canadian Mounted Police created Mr. Big, sometimes known as "the Canadian method," in the early 1990s in response to unsolved killings. It is employed in Canada and Australia, but many other nations, like the United States and England, view it as entrapment. The technique works something like this: An undercover police unit poses as members of a fictitious gang, into which the suspect is inducted. The suspect is invited to participate in a series of criminal activities (all faked by the police). In addition, the “gang members” build a personal relationship with the suspect, by drinking together and other social activities. After some time, the gang boss, Mr. Big, is presented to him. The police have a fresh interest in the first crime, and the suspect is instructed to provide the gang with further information. They clarify that Mr. Big might be able to affect the course of the police investigation, but only if he confesses to the full extent of the crime. He is also warned that if he conceals any other previous offenses, the gang could decide against working with him in the future since he would be a burden. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are shown in the picture above carrying the hats of the four officers who were killed in Edmonton, Canada, in 2005 at a memorial service. Two of the men serving prison sentences for the murders made confessions to Mr. Big operatives.Interesting Fact: In British Columbia, the technique has been used over 180 times, and, in 80% of the cases, it resulted in either a confession or the elimination of the suspect from suspicion. However, cases of false confessions and wrongful convictions have recently come to the public's attention, and many are starting to question the controversial technique. In 2007, a documentary was made, called Mr. Big, that was very critical of the procedure. You can't talk about undercover operations without talking about the mob. Here are five badasses who infiltrated the mob. In law enforcement, working as an undercover officer carries the high risk of discovery by criminal suspects, leading to violence, torture and death. But the rewards can be huge, with wire recordings and eyewitness testimony that can result in arrests and convictions. A trained officer knows how to strategize, win the confidence of their targets and get them to reveal what's needed to build a case to take to trial. It requires an unusual kind of person, able to work under stress, stay focused, pull off the character he or she is playing and be prepared to tell many lies. What follows here is a list of five remarkable individuals whose undercover operations, despite real dangers, resulted in the convictions of leaders and associates of organized crime, over almost a century. This list leaves out many other famous undercover officers, whom we would like to recognize in the future. Perhaps because of the gravity of the investigations, and the financial resources required, all of these undercover officers worked for agencies of the U.S. government. MICHAEL MALONE Mike Malone worked undercover for the Treasury Department's Intelligence Unit. In the late 1920s, he infiltrated Al Capone's Chicago Outfit and helped convict the crime boss of tax evasion. Michael Malone had all the makings of an undercover agent who would successfully infiltrate Al Capone's Chicago gang for nearly two years. Malone, whose parents came over from Ireland, grew up in New Jersey and meshed well with its European immigrants, eventually learning to speak Gaelic, Italian, Yiddish and Greek. With his “black Irish” dark hair and skin, he resembled someone from southern Europe. After finessing his way into Capone's inner circle in 1929, Malone proved invaluable to his superiors in the Treasury Department pursuing a tax evasion case against the Chicago crime boss. Despite the danger, Malone kept an iron will. Blowing his cover would have proved fatal. But given his skills, it didn't happen. While Malone kept up the charade, he delivered information that proved incriminating not only for Capone, but for his top enforcer, Frank Nitti (aka Nitto). Malone remained disguised within Capone's bootlegging band even for a time after the feds filed tax charges against Capone, Nitti and Capone's brother, Ralph, in 1931. When Capone's jury trial commenced, and the Treasury Department removed Malone from his undercover job, the agent gained a bit of respect from the embarrassed gang chief himself. In the Chicago courthouse, Malone happened to enter an elevator where Capone stood with his defense lawyers. “The only thing that fooled me was your looks,” Capone is said as to have remarked to Malone. “You look like a Wop. You took your chances, and I took mine. I lost.” From 1929 to 1931, Malone fed intelligence about Capone that would culminate in the historic conviction of the nation's most notorious Mob boss. His fascinating story began after his service in World War I. With law enforcement his career goal, Malone joined the Treasury Department's Intelligence Unit later known as the “T-Men.” Early on, in the 1920s, Malone appreciated how donning disguises brought him closer to the suspects. He posed in everyman roles such as garbage man and shoe shiner. Elmer Irey, chief of the Intelligence Unit, had worked with undercover agent Malone on Prohibition cases. Once, Irey enlisted Malone to smash a West Coast version of “Rum Row,” rumrunners selling contraband Canadian liquor from ships off the coast of San Francisco. Malone posed as gangster from Chicago in hiding, with money to invest in illegal booze. He devised a nighttime sting operation. Agents posing as bootleggers drove speedboats out to the booze-laden mother ship and, after money changed hands, Malone fired off a flare, signaling the U.S. Coast Guard, which boarded the mother ship and arrested the astonished bootleggers. President Herbert Hoover entered office in March 1929, a few weeks following the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, where seven men associated with Capone's bitter rival in bootlegging, George “Bugs” Moran, died in gunfire. Hoover conferred with Irey and urged him to compile a team of special agents to “get Capone” on tax charges. Meanwhile, another team of Prohibition Unit agents in Chicago, headed by Eliot Ness, would attack Capone on violations of federal liquor laws under the Volstead Act. Irey appointed Special Agent Frank Wilson, Malone and several others to the get Capone team. Meanwhile, a group of wealthy business executives in Chicago, called the Secret Six, donated large sums of money for expenses to assist the feds in getting Capone. Malone used their largess to purchase some expensive clothing to look the part of a well-heeled hoodlum that Capone would envy. Malone set about infiltrating Capone's underworld at its core – the Lexington Hotel, where the boss and his men lived. Wearing a fancy suit, purple shirt and white hat, Malone sat in the lobby, reading newspapers for days on end. He spoke in an Italian accent, introduced himself as “Mike Lepito,” met Capone men playing craps and played the part of a mobster. He mailed letters to friends in Philadelphia, who wrote back. Capone's guys broke into his room, noted his pricey checkered suits and silk underwear. They opened his mail from Philadelphia, read the letters written, impressively, in underworld lingo they understood. They informed Capone. Finally, Capone sent a cohort down to the lobby to ask “Lepito” about his business in town. “Keeping quiet,” Malone replied in his Italian inflection. In the coming days, over drinks, Malone told the guy he was on the lam for burglary in Philadelphia. That got Malone invitations to play poker and trade gossip with the gang, then dinner at their hangout, the New Florence, and then to attend the birthday party Capone planned for Frank Nitti at the Lexington. Malone met Capone at Nitti's party. The secret agent's new acquaintances included big-shot hoods Nitti, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, Murray “The Camel” Humphreys and Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt. Malone was in. He discreetly phoned Wilson about what he'd overheard within the gang. Wilson and his aides traced signatures on bank checks while pursuing tax evasion cases against Nitti and Guzik. A federal court in Chicago convicted Guzik, who got a five-year sentence. But Nitti skipped town. Malone, assigned to find him, followed Nitti's wife to an apartment building in Berwyn, Illinois. There, the cops nabbed Nitti, later sentenced to 18 months in prison for tax evasion. Then the police pinched Al himself following his 1931 indictment on tax charges. “Mike Lepito” was there at the Lexington when Al Capone arrived back, triumphant about his release on $50,000 bail. Malone listened and reported to Wilson about Capone's scheme to bribe and fix the jury in his favor. The feds moved quickly and a judge created a new list of jurors. Malone then reported Capone's plot to hire five gunman from New York to kill four federal officials in Chicago – including Wilson. With safety measures in place, Capone ordered the gunmen to leave town. Capone's trial, after a judge refused to plea bargain with the Mob boss, started in October 1931. Four days afterward, Malone finally gave up the act. The news spread fast to Capone and his men. Malone had heard that Phil D'Andrea, Capone's bodyguard, planned to bring a concealed gun into the courthouse. Malone and another agent frisked and disarmed D'Andrea, and had him arrested. A jury Capone could not fix found the boss guilty on 22 criminal counts. The judge gave him 11 years in the federal pen and a $50,000 fine, plus court costs. Months later, in early 1932, the Intelligence Unit had Malone, Irey, Wilson and Special Agent A. P. Madden probe the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's son. The team's persistence paid off within two years, with the capture (and conviction) of suspect Bruno Hauptman, who still had some of the marked currency the agents convinced Lindbergh to use as ransom money. Malone had other notable cases. In 1933, Irey assigned him to find fugitive New York gangster Waxey Gordon, wanted for tax evasion. Malone located Gordon in a remote cottage in the Catskill Mountains. Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey took the case, and the court put Waxey away for 10 years. A year later, Malone infiltrated Louisiana Governor Huey “Kingfish” Long's crooked crew. After Long's assassination, the IRS won a tax fraud conviction against Malone's target, Long's close aide, Seymour Weiss. In his last undercover operation before his death, the Intelligence Unit gave Malone a large amount of cash and a Cadillac to use in Miami Beach, disguised as a rich syndicate man. He found and reported what the agency wanted – details of a coast-to-coast illegal abortion ring. After Malone's death in 1960, Wilson described him to a news reporter as “the best undercover agent we ever had.” JOSEPH PISTONE Joe Pistone is one of the FBI's most celebrated undercover agents. Using the name Donnie Brasco, he infiltrated the New York Mafia and helped produce 200 indictments. Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In New York City during the mid-1970s, the FBI investigated a rash of truck hijackings happening each day. The agency assigned agent Joseph “Joe” Pistone to go undercover for six months to find out where the Mob-connected thieves took the stolen cargo. His adopted name was “Donnie Brasco.” He was so effective as a wiseguy that the FBI let him keep it up. No one knew how far the investigation would lead, or what it would mean for Pistone, who started as an agent in 1969. His experience would eventually prompt the mobsters in New York to put out a $500,000 contract for his murder, but it never happened. In the end, the evidence and trial testimony he provided in the 1980s produced 200 indictments of Mob associates and more than 100 convictions. His work decimated the Bonannos, one of New York's five major crime families. Pistone's journey while undercover, impersonating a mobbed-up jewel thief, would last an incredible five years, from 1976 to 1981, during which he penetrated the upper levels of the Bonnano organization. No FBI agent had made it inside the Mob like that. The agency beforehand had to rely on informants. Pistone took a class to learn about jewelry to make his affectation believable. In Brooklyn and Manhattan, he roamed bars and restaurants frequented by Mob types. He communicated using the street smarts he absorbed growing up as a working-class Italian-American kid in Paterson, New Jersey, where he went to Italian social clubs and encountered local hoods. Years in, he had the Bonanno circle so convinced that it moved to have him a “made” man shortly before the FBI ended his assignment. At first he befriended low-level mobsters. He wore a wire to record conversations, and committed to memory names and license plates since taking notes would obviously raise red flags. By 1976, he'd won the trust of important Bonnano members, notably family soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, said to have killed 26 people, and capo Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano. Ruggerio recommended him so that he could join the clan. Pistone's Mob activities centered in New York and Florida, taking him away from his wife and young daughters for extended times. Pistone even had to vacation with his demanding cohorts. He moved his family members out of state for their protection. As “Donnie Brasco,” Pistone helped Ruggerio transfer stolen goods and sell guns. He engaged in loansharking, extortion and illegal gambling. Once, while pretending to be an expert in burglar alarms, angry Mob associates intent on committing burglaries demanded he reveal the name of a mobster who would vouch for him. The FBI used an informant to quell their suspicions. In the 1997 film Donnie Brasco, undercover agent Joe Pistone is played by Johnny Depp, left. Al Pacino, right, plays Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero. In 1981, the situation intensified again when the crime family commanded him to kill an adversary. The FBI pulled him out of the sting. It was time to start making cases, and for him to testify in open court as himself. Starting in 1982, Pistone's testimony over the next several years in racketeering cases sent more than 100 mobsters to long prison terms. Prosecutors considered him crucial to convicting 21 defendants in the “Pizza Connection” case of pizzerias used to traffic in heroin and launder money for the Sicilian Mafia. Pistone went into hiding and later retired from the FBI, unscathed, in 1986. In the 1990s, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, former underboss for the Gambino family who turned FBI informant, said the embarrassment from the “Brasco” case drove bosses in New York's crime families to suspend the Bonanno group from its board of directors. But Pistone couldn't stay retired. In 1992, at age 53, he requested reinstatement with the FBI, which agreed only if he would enter the agency's strict training class, lasting 16 weeks at its base in Quantico, Virginia. Pistone endured the rigorous course alongside recruits in their 20s. He passed and the FBI rehired him, at least until the mandatory retirement age of 57. Pistone's 1988 book on his undercover experiences, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, was a bestseller. Based on the book, actor Johnny Depp portrayed Pistone in the 1997 feature film Donnie Brasco, with Al Pacino as Ruggerio. JACK GARCIA Jack Garcia was an FBI undercover agent of Cuban descent who convinced members of the Italian-American Mafia that he was Italian. He took part in more than 100 undercover investigations over a 26-year career. Before he succeeded in infiltrating New York's Gambino crime family, FBI agent Joaquin “Jack” Garcia had to go school. That is, the FBI's “mob school,” where he received an education in how to hit the ground running with veteran mobsters. His teacher was special agent Nat Parisi. First off, Parisi said, do not carry a wallet – wiseguys carry wads of currency, often bound by the kind of rubber band grocery stores use to keep broccoli together. Also, correctly pronouncing Italian food matters – as Tony Soprano might say, those long pasta shells are not “manicotti,” but “manicote.” Another valuable lesson he learned is that his Mob brethren loved compliments – his favorite one: “Where did you get those nice threads? You look like a million dollars.” In his 26-year career as an FBI agent, Garcia took part in more than 100 undercover investigations, from Miami to New York, Atlantic City and Los Angeles, targeting mobsters, drug traffickers and corrupt politicians and cops. He participated in the highest number of undercover cases in FBI history. In many of his capers, he impersonated a mobster, using the name “Jack Falcone” (in honor of the Italian judge Giovanni Falcone, killed by the Sicilian Mafia in the 1990s). As a backstory, he told his Mob marks about having a Sicilian pedigree (actually he's a native of Havana and grew up in the Bronx) with an expertise in stealing and fencing stolen goods, with jewelry as his specialty. Sometimes, he had to run several undercover roles at once. He took advantage of his fluency in Spanish and Italian, being careful not to mix things up when the phone rang. In the early 2000s, the FBI chose Garcia for what would be the most fruitful infiltration of an organized crime family since Joe Pistone's in the 1970s. While undercover as “Jack Falcone” with the Gambino's family's chapter in Westchester County, New York, for two years, he flashed cash, Rolex watches, diamond rings, flat-screen TVs and other supposed stolen property (items seized in other FBI cases). Much of the cash he held went to pay for expensive dinners – mobsters, he said, are notoriously cheap when the check comes. He gained 80 pounds over the two years. One mobster in particular who liked his money and goods, and would become his almost daily companion, was Gambino capo Gregory DePalma. An “old school” hood who in 2003 finished serving 70 months for racketeering, DePalma right away threatened violence and extorted owners of Westchester-area construction firms, strip joints, restaurants and other businesses. Garcia said he witnessed DePalma commit a crime almost every day. The FBI had Garcia pose as a wiseguy seeking to invest in a topless bar in the Bronx. Garcia's inquiries led him to meet DePalma in 2003. By providing stolen property for DePalma to sell for cash, Garcia convinced him that “Jack Falcone” was an experienced jewelry thief and fencer from Miami. When Garcia hung out with DePalma over the two-year period, he wore a body wire, and the FBI planted bugging devices at DePalma's hangouts. Garcia gave DePalma a cell phone that the talkative mob capo used prodigiously, not knowing the FBI had bugged it. The operation yielded 5,000 hours of recorded conversations used to implicate DePalma and other Gambino men in racketeering. In 2005, DePalma planned to honor “Falcone” by rendering him “made” within the Gambino family. In a recorded conversation, Garcia as “Falcone” replied to DePalma, “I'm honored for that,” he said, in the tape later used in court. “I will never let you down either.” But it wasn't to be. After Garcia witnessed a Gambino soldier beat another member with a crystal candlestick, the FBI shut down the undercover operation. (Garcia and Pistone are the only law enforcement officers ever nominated to be “made.”) Garcia's efforts inside the Gambino crew paid off big time. The evidence he delivered for the FBI resulted in the arrest of 32 Gambino members and associates, including DePalma, Gambino boss Arnold “Zeke” Squitieri and underboss Anthony “The Genius” Megale. DePalma went to trial in 2006. Garcia, who retired from the FBI two months before the trial started, agreed to testify in federal court in Manhattan. The jury found DePalma guilty on 27 counts, and the judge gave the 74-year-old a 12-year prison term. Like Pistone, Garcia's undercover career is chronicled in a memoir, Making Jack Falcone: An Undercover FBI Agent Takes Down a Mafia Family. KIKI CAMARENA Kiki Camarena was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico. After contributing information that led to major drug busts, he was tortured and murdered by drug cartel bosses in 1985. Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, the late Drug Enforcement Administration agent assigned to investigate drug trafficking in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the 1980s, is famous as one of the most heroic DEA agents ever. But he is more well-known in death than in life. His torture-murder in Mexico in 1985 took place at the hands of drug cartel bosses with the complicity of high-level Mexican government officials, law enforcement and, allegedly, the CIA. At the time, the Reagan administration was secretly training and supplying Central American guerilla fighters, known as the “Contras,” against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The U.S. government allegedly granted the cartel bosses free rein to traffic drugs – to the point of using CIA-recruited American pilots to fly cocaine into the United States to sell for cash so the cartel could make donations to buy more weaponry for the Contras. Camarena, born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1947, moved with his impoverished family to Calexico, California. He served as a firefighter in Calexico, and with a strong desire for police work, joined the Imperial County Sheriff's Department, moving up to its narcotics task force. The experience led to his career in the DEA starting in 1975. Assigned to the DEA office in the “narco paradise” of Guadalajara in 1980, Camarena was a convincing undercover officer with his appearance and ability to speak Spanish and barrio “street” language to fit in with the drug underworld. His target was the powerful Guadalajara drug cartel (which later evolved into the Sinaloa cartel). In the early 1980s, in what he called “Operation Padrino,” Camarena arranged for U.S. agents to seize international bank accounts held by wealthy cartel drug lords. He developed evidence of major marijuana plantations in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, based on informants and overflights in a plane flown by his DEA pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar. In November 1984, from his background work, Mexican federal police and the DEA raided enormous pot-growing operations on a ranch in Zacatecas that employed thousands of field hands. The task force confiscated 20 tons of marijuana, burned the crop and made 177 arrests. The bust cost cartel figure Rafael Caro Quintero about $50 million. Caro Quintero believed his operation had the protection of the Mexican army, and the CIA, since he owned a farm used to train the U.S.-backed Contras. He vowed revenge against Camarena. Meanwhile, a DEA force organized by Camarena seized a large cache of cocaine shipped by cartel boss Miguel Felix Gallardo's operation to New Mexico and Texas. Gallardo also believed he had CIA and Mexican official protection. During the fall of 1984, Quintero held meetings with top cartel traffickers Gallardo, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseco Carrillo and Ruben Zuno Arce. Also present, thanks to rampant corruption bought by the Guadalajara cartel, were Mexico's minister of domestic affairs and DFA chief Manuel Bartlett Diaz, plus Mexico's defense minister, the head of Mexico's Interpol office and the governor of the state of Jalisco. The agenda was to kidnap Camarena and get him to reveal his informants and other information. Zuno Arce gave the order. Fonseca only intended to scare and release him, but Quintero wanted to kill the DEA man. On February 7, 1985, Quintero and Gallardo directed their henchmen to kidnap Camarena off a street in Guadalajara. As the agent walked from the U.S. consulate to meet his wife for lunch, they forced him at gunpoint into a car and drove him to a residence used for cartel rendezvous. They bound and blindfolded him, turned on a tape recorder and questioned him, during which he was severely beaten and tortured. The lead interrogator was the crooked head of the secret police in Guadalajara, Sergio Espino Verdin. The cartel men wanted to know what Camarena knew about them, their dealings with Mexican officials and the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking. The gangsters also brought in and beat up Zavala, Camarena's pilot. Both men died about two days later, angering Fonseco, who told Quintero not to kill Camarena. Camarena's wife reported him missing and Washington launched what would be the largest manhunt in the history of the DEA. The cartel had the two men's bodies buried, then dug up and relocated to a farm in another state, where Mexican police found them in early March. During his funeral a week later, Camarena's family interred his ashes in Calexico. His slaying triggered an international incident. U.S. officials ordered all cars from Mexico at the border searched, effectively closing it. The investigation revealed the CIA connection, leading to bitter clashes between CIA and DEA agents. A federal court in Los Angeles charged 22 defendants in the murders of Camarena and Zavala. Under pressure, Mexican authorities acted, arresting 13 men. Mexican courts convicted Fonseco, Quintero and Espino, and sentenced each to 40 years, although Quintero won early release on a technicality in 2013. U.S. officials are still seeking Quintero to face federal charges. Mexican police arrested Gallardo in 1989, and he received 40 years. A court in Los Angeles found Zuno Arce guilty in the murders in 1990, sentenced him to two life terms in prison, where he died in 2012. In Camarena's honor, in 1985 the National Family Partnership started the National Red Ribbon Campaign, a volunteer anti-drug use and education effort that urges youths to recite a pledge to refrain from drugs, and celebrates “Red Ribbon Week” on drug awareness each October. Camarena's is featured as a character, played by actor Michael Pena, in a chapter of the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, about on his actions with the DEA. JAY DOBYNS Jay Dobyns went undercover with the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gang for 20 months in Arizona on behalf of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. His work led to 16 arrests. For Jay Dobyns, fitting in with the infamous biker gang the Hells Angels for almost two years meant adhering to his undercover alter ego, Jay “Bird” Davis, to the point of obsession. To maintain his cover, he had to divert his mind away from his wife and kids. And it all would be worth it – at least that's what he thought at the time. Dobyns had hit on his best clandestine ruse yet while in Arizona in 2001, after 15 years of service as an undercover special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. While working undercover cases in the late 1980s for the ATF, he'd been injured twice – from a gunshot wound to the back from a suspect in Tucson and when gunrunners hit him with a car during an attempted getaway in Chicago. He took part in investigations of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Other undercover roles of his ended in the arrests of a Mexican drug boss and members of the Aryan Brotherhood gang. Altogether, he served in more than 500 undercover operations disguised as a hitman and Mob debt collector. He infiltrated organized crime groups and gangs engaged in drug and arms smuggling. In 2001, to gather intelligence as “Davis” for the ATF in northern Arizona, Dobyns worked in the Bullhead City area, posing as a gun seller and an enforcer for a nonexistent collections agency. But his operation was interrupted in 2002 with the now-famous riot and shootout among members of the Angels and a competing biker gang, the Mongols, at the Harrah's casino in nearby Laughlin, Nevada, during the annual River Run motorcycle rally. Two Angels and one Mongol died and dozens of people were injured. The ATF brass soon redirected him to penetrate the dangerous Hells Angels club. Dobyns certainly had the physical part down with his beard and six-foot, one-inch frame he used as an all-conference football player for the University of Arizona. Later, an Angels member would apply tattoos covering his upper arms. Dobyns teamed with another ATF agent, two other undercover officers and a pair of paid informants. The idea was to create a fake biker gang with the aid of one of the informants who once served in a motorcycle gang based in Tijuana, Mexico. The gangster informant and Dobyns would run the gang, called the Solo Angeles, promote it as a pro-Hells Angels crew and request to join the Angels as a “nomad” chapter. The ATF named the setup “Operation Black Biscuit.” As a convincer, Dobyns and his fellow agent feigned an execution of a Mongol member, tying up an agent, placing cow's brains and bloody Mongol clothing on him and taking a photo. Based on the picture, the Angels took the bait and let them hang out and ride with them. They trusted him so much they offered to make him a member of the Angels' Skull Valley Chapter. He was the first law enforcement officer to infiltrate the Angels. His undercover penetration of the Angels lasted more than 20 months, one of the longest ever for the ATF. His work ended with 16 arrests from the Angels gang. But the criminal case, amid problems between the ATF and Justice Department lawyers, fell through in federal court. Federal prosecutors blamed the ATF, saying the agency did not reveal evidence from informants. In 2006, the feds dropped racketeering enterprise charges – the most serious — against all but four of 42 Angels charged in the Laughlin riot. Dobyns' battle with his own employer, the ATF, soon began. He filed suit in federal court against the agency alleging it did not protect him while he was on duty. He won a $373,000 settlement in 2007. The next year, Dobyns's wife and two kids barely escaped after someone firebombed the family home in Tucson. The ATF investigated Dobyns himself as a suspect in the arson. Investigators cleared him. In 2014, the year he retired after 27 years with the ATF, he filed another suit, for $17.2 million, saying the ATF failed to safeguard his family amid death threats. A judge awarded him $173,000. During an appeal, the judge voided the monetary judgment, but recommended discipline for ATF personnel and barred seven Justice Department attorneys from the case. He ordered a special master to investigate government actions in the case, and possible misconduct by the feds in the arson investigation. But the judge died of cancer. The special master in a report said that the first case was fair enough and required no further probe into the federal government. A new judge accepted the recommendation. Dobyns has authored two books, one on his undercover experiences, another on his travails with the ATF. These days, he delivers lectures on his life to audiences at universities and law enforcement associations nationwide. And now some of our infamous quick hitters: Donald Duck decoy Police in Fort Lee, New Jersey used a Donald Duck costume as a decoy to catch drivers who failed to yield to pedestrians. Drivers who didn't stop for the cartoon duck were ticketed. One woman, Karen Haigh, fought her $230 ticket. "They told me that I was getting a ticket for not stopping for a duck," she told Eyewitness News. "But it scared me. I'm a woman. This huge duck scared me." Coco the Clown These old clips from the show COPS show a strange undercover police sting, and proves the adage that clowns are usually scary or just creepy. One cop dressed up as Coco the Clown, an outfit that kind of resembles John Wayne Gacy, to catch women working as sex workers. Spoiler: he pretty much sprays all of them with silly string and the whole thing is sad to watch. Amish woman At least one cop from the Pulaski Township Police Department in Pennsylvania dressed up as an Amish woman in an attempt to catch a sexual predator. Sgt. Chad Adams of the Pulaski Township Police Department wandered the streets for two months in 2014 after police were tipped off that a predator was masturbating in front of children, according to the Associated Press. He posted on the department's Facebook page, “Hey friends, sometimes being a police officer means going undercover and doing what you have to do to catch the bad guy. Now that our investigation is complete I'll share with you this photo! Back in January we had an individual preying on Amish children walking home from school. The male individual was pulling up to the children and getting out of his car and masturbating in front of them. Although we did not apprehend the individual we believe he was caught in another county. I wanted to share with you that we will use all means available to try and protect our children. That includes dressing up as an Amish woman to attempt to apprehend a pervert! Thanks goes out to the Neshannock police and New Wilmington police in assistance with the investigation! Sincerely, Sergeant Chad Adams.” Sadly, the sting didn't work, but police believe it is because the culprit moved into another county. DVD Prize sting Police in Phoenix, Arizona set up a sting to catch people with outstanding warrants, mostly DUIs, in 2002. The people were told they won a DVD player. People thought they were showing up to pick up their prize. Instead, they walked right into their own arrest. Watch as these suspects went from excited to shocked to sad. Panhandling trick In 2015, undercover cops in California posed as panhandlers to ticket distracted drivers. They stood on the side of the road, posed as panhandlers and holding signs that identified them as police officers. The pieces of cardboard they were holding also stated that they were looking for seatbelt and cellphone violations. For those drivers who weren't paying attention
Mike Twitty joins the show to talk about electrical questions that were accumulated from listener emails. Reuben asks about surge protection devices. He mentions that Structure Tech doesn't add information in reports about surge protectors. Mike explains the types of surge protection devices, what they do, where they are installed, and which appliance or equipment they're used with. He also shares when and how surges occur in houses. They also talk about GFCI and AFCI circuit breakers, as well as nuisance tripping. Reuben also revisits the issue with Challenger panels. They also talk about the Bulldog, ITE, and split bus panels. They discuss why and when panels should be replaced. Mike highlights that there is a big difference between repairing and replacing panels. Learn from Mike Twitty's blog: https://www.iaei.org/page/2020-07-surge-protection-for-smart-homes Continue to send questions to podcast@structuretech.com.
We return our 'For the Love of the Game' series this week, because who better to help us learn more about Virginia players and coaches than from those that know them best. On this episode we invite Virginia first year wide receiver Dakota Twitty's father, Derrick Twitty. The senior Twitty discusses the recruiting process, the coaching search, Tony Elliott and of course what makes Dakota Twitty, Dakota.
Talking 'bout Twitty!A mini-series about country yacht-rock crooner Conway Twitty and his... romantic style. In this episode we're listening to a medley of Twitty songs, all slightly raunchy, slightly bossy and extremely catchy. The first episode looked deep into the eyes of a song called "Don't Take It Away." The MindField MF22 Presented by Zaxby's in Baxley Georgia is a UFO/True Crime/Sasquatch debunking podcast, please visit the archives for the strange and unusual. #HighStrangeness #Comedy #PODCAST #FORCEMEDITATION #forcedMeditation #MindField #UFO- - - - - Excerpted SongsThis episode featured excerpts from the following songs - with links to purchase or stream if available:Don't Cry Joni APPLE MUSICwritten by Conway TwittyHow Much More Can She Stand? APPLE MUSICwritten by Harry ComptonTouch the Hand APPLE MUSIC written by Ron Peterson and Conway TwittyI'd Love to Lay you Down APPLE MUSICwritten by Johnny MacRae Don't Take It Away - Conway Twitty APPLE MUSIC written by Troy Seals and Max D. BarnesHello, Darlin - Conway Twitty. APPLE MUSICwritten by Conway Twitty. Produced by Owen BradleyIf you have a question or a comment email me at themindfieldpodcast@gmail.com and I'll read it on the podcast.YOUTUBE: youtube.com/channel/UCtN4Onj3KAASAnpSWDlcr1w/featuredTWITTER: @MindFPodcastWebsite: themindfield.buzzsprout.comFAIR USE STATEMENT:The MindField does not claim any right over all of the songs and sounds used in this podcast The podcast exists to examine and document pop culture comedy and at times begrudgingly uses unauthorized material to supplement our ongoing study of modern comedy. All rights reserved to the respective copyright owners. #ConwayTwitty #Comedy #CountryMusic
In today's episode, I was joined by our award-winning and lifelong resident of Pinellas County, Mike Twitty, MAI, CFA. He was elected in 2017 as the Pinellas County Property Appraiser. Mike tells us his story of growing up in Pinellas County and how his passion for real estate and development brought him to become one of the most successful private property appraisers in town. IN THIS EPISODE, WE TALK ABOUT:Mike's career in the property appraisal field, and his passion for building and development since his undergraduate studies. He also talks about the greater wealth migration, being cognizant about smart growth and development, and all things around running a property appraising establishment that is big on improvement, adaptability, and growth. Additionally, Mike and his team's goal is to make sure that they are providing fair and equitable property valuations in Pinellas county.Mike also gave us some tips and pertinent processes we need to know when working with property appraisers whether you are buying, selling or refinancing your property.He also gave us a quick run-through of their new and improved website that people can still access alongside the old one but definitely more improved with all the additional functionalities their patrons will love. Mike also discussed the Homestead Portability Act and all other laws which he thinks could be improved to address the pressing situations in the county. CONNECT WITH MIKE TWITTY:Website: Access Pinellas County Property Appraiser's new and improved website with all the functionalities and tools you love from the old one (https://www.pcpao.com/) Mike Twitty, MAI, CFA Pinellas County Property Appraiser Facebook: Pinellas County Property Appraiser (https://www.facebook.com/PCPAO.ORG) CONNECT WITH DONNIE: - Follow Donnie: @donnie.hathaway- Follow Palm Harbor Local: @PalmHarborLocalJOIN THE LOCALS for exclusive discounts and specials from our local business owners and stay up to date on what's happening in Palm Harbor.
Mickey kicks off a Friday show with an incredible story about his run ins with Conway Twitty & Dolly Parton. Alex Daugherty joins B&M to discuss Preds, ownership change, and more. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this week's episode we're featuring a Conway Twitty album taken from smack dab in the middle of his hard country years (approx. 1965-1975): "Darling, You Know I Wouldn't Lie" (1969). Turning again to his go-to hardcore country lyricist Wayne Kemp (an old running mate from his days in Oklahoma City), Twitty scored his third consecutive Top 5 hit with the cheating-themed title track. A further exploration in song of Harlan Howard's "Life Turned Her That Way" theme presents itself on "Bad Girl", promptly followed by the corresponding "Bad Man". Interesting to note both tracks written by Twitty himself, who also added a dynamite hard country shuffle to round out Side A of the album in "Table In The Corner". Even the filler from this period in Conway's career is top-notch: a cover of Tom T. Hall's "Ballad Of Forty Dollars" rips as much as the original and even though it's hard to top a George Jones vocal, the Owen Bradley/Decca arrangement and production on "When The Grass Grows Over Me" and "Window Up Above" makes for superb listening. Quality stuff!
The Fat One returns with a recap of his day in Fat Acres, a delicious giftette and some thoughts about kind comments he's received via the Twitty and e-letters. Happy National Candy Month.
Michael Twitty is a multiple award–winning chef, author and food historian who is proudly Black, gay and Jewish. His star has been rising for years, from his 2010 blog Afroculinaria to his James Beard Award–winning book The Cooking Gene to his latest work, Kosher Soul. But his success hasn't helped him evade judgment or presumptions—mostly because of his Jewish identity. In this personal interview, Twitty sat down with Rivkush for a deep hour-long conversation about race, religion, politics and food, just days after a white nationalist killed 10 Black people and injured three others in a supermarket in Buffalo in May 2022. Credits Rivkush is hosted by Rivka Campbell. Michael Fraiman is the editor and prodcer. Our theme music is by Westside Gravy. We're a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, please watch this video.
School is out and Riley Park is already full of the sounds of baseball! We brought Sumter P-15's head coach Randy Twitty on this week's episode of The Blitz to chat about the season.We went up and down their roster to see how the P-15's are looking this summer and talked about their goals for the American Legion season.You can hear the full episode below, at theitem.com/podcasts or your podcast app of choice.
On today's show, an Eminem/Super Mario mash-up sent us down quite a rabbit hole! For the whole podcast, as well as a ton of other exclusive perks, sign up to be a Fancy Idiot at FreeBeerAndHotWings.com! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
GEORGIA RADIO - Tayla Lynn joins host Matt Jolley to talk about her show "Twitty & Lynn", a salute to Conway Twitty, and her grandmother Loretta Lynn. Take a listen and go see them live!QUICK LINK: Twitty & LynnAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
In our 'New Class' series we introduce Virginia fans to the class of characters that signed in the 2022 class. In this week's episode we introduce you to wide receiver Dakota Twitty, running back Xavier Brown and quarterback Delaney Crawford They discuss the emotions after finding out Bronco Mendenhall stepped down, the coaching search, and what they did to try to keep the class together. **We recorded this interview shortly after the trio signed with UVA**
Your Bluetooth will get arrested for riding dirt bikes and quads in these streets when HLS Legend, S.A. Champion WestGrown power brakes into the PYFC with Big Lucks, Ol' Blue Eyes, Schwartz and Chumhan, hear about hitting Florida and riding, how WestGrown pops wheelies, outruns cops shooting documentaries about urban dirtbikes WestSide Style at the same time, one hand camera, one hand on the bar. BONUS: Hear how bikes are about wild freedom. #bikelife #westgrown #urbanbike #meekmill #freedomwww.hardluckshow.com/podcastSend your crazy shit to: hluckshow@gmail.comHLS: Ep. 287: WestGrown Moto WorldHLS: Ep. 287: WestGrown Moto WorldShareCBHLS: Ep. 287: WestGrown Moto WorldSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerSpeakerWash marry me.Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Maluma, featuring a new song on my way by Jennifer Lopezmarry me directed by . Maybe inappropriate for children under 13 in theaters had streaming. Oh, we on peacock. Sign up now. Visit peacock tv.com.Come on right now. Right now.good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the hard luck show. I'm a certified qualify west side. Host Steve lucky channel. And today I'm talking to all of you from the Pico family center in the city of Santa Monica, California. Hello, citizens of Santa Monica and all California, all over the world.Sitting next to me as my cohost Hartman.Holy moly. Noli. I love it. Oh, top five right here. AmericanAmerican inSouthern California. I was thinkinglet's go. Let's jiggle those niblets let's jiggle those God damn nebulous.Yes. You at the flying J yes. You went loves trucks.put down that H and w hamburger. No, you don't need to listen to any Conway. Twitty. Come on.new eyes himself. Oh yeah. Come on shit back at it's shot. LouisCome on, Danny.talking to you, Taliban.You got the ride. I'm talking to you.extraordinary. And extraordinary show runner. Mr. . Yo, what up fellows? What's up shorty back again? Word you. Good? Good. How are you? Good. I like the black and gold. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of, yeah, I know you like you like a little bits, right? Money. And, uh, ladies and gentlemen on visuals.Ali on the visuals. You already know. No,that didn't wake you up. When we got a hot cup of coffee that will all right. Boom. All right. Re occurring. In-house photography. Uh, Mr. Michelangelo, what's happening. Y'all greetings and salutations everybody out there. Her luck show what's up. Y'all we're hope. And this dude got shot right there. Went up guys, coming out there at greetings and salutations little rock gets his big pick.Mike coming at you. Wouldn't never cut from Jackson stock shit. You know what? Hecome on. Big, big, big, big money. He's the money. Mike's a walk on song should have been. Don't stop believing by journey. Oh dude, we love that song way too much, but listen, let's stop fucking around and come in a boar shit back again. It's been months when you get dark zero.zero, Dar. You never know what to expect.Danny.Danny pulling up on my family mother fucking right. Well, the fucking dude Danny sent, I mean, you were heading, and I don't know if everybody knows along with being motherfucking GI, Joe, and about that, a fucking super dad and a million other things. This mother fucker does. He's an incredible fuck photographer and great video of a great eye.And he was, he liked took off in between. When we last talked in him, he was really starting to kind of like engage and then we just lost sight of Danny. But all of a sudden, we started seeing him emerge on the digital world websites, a social immediately. You start seeing what this dude started, opening up a fucking can of fucking bad-ass shit.Wait a second. W w what did he emerge with, like, what is it fucking that whole modal inner city Moro, meek mill. I don't even know what you call there, riding with all the motor and the quads and everything fucking dropped in deep into that world. He'll tell you you've been bouncing from fucking Florida to fucking Philly, to fucking SF to New York.All the cities dude, like end it with these cats, representing soul assassin, cookies, and fucking capturing all this videos and photography. Correct. How did you come up? How did you come up with. Um, actually right after I did this, I had went to Florida with some friends and they introduced me to it. Cause I was, I just didn't want to be in the same lane as everybody else in our crew and everything.So, you know, I wanted to do my own thing and kind of branch off. Yeah. Even though it wasn't like part of our normal get down, you know what I mean? I seen something that was going to be bigger than people seeing over here. How did it, how did, how did it start out? Like a moon? When did you first, like in your mind, somebody come up and say, bro, you gotta check.No one of my friends at the time, she, uh, told me to come check this out. And I thought it was dope because I'm into extreme shit. So I've rode bikes before I did all that, I almost killed myself on our bikes. I was like, this is right up my alley. Let's go check it out. And I went out there and it was a wrap.After that you go out to check, you know, you talking about Florida. Okay. So when you go out to check something out, how do you, what, what gear do you bring with, are you bringing any gears? It's just, you know, I went out there and I had my camera there. But I just went out there and not knowing like, and it's different, like shooting action stuff is way different than, oh, I'm going to shoot this broad.That's half naked, like standing still, this is like, you have a moment to catch it and then it's gone. You can't replicate that scenario again in traffic live shit. Not like let's set up a whole thing. It's fucking at high speeds, dangerous oncoming traffic on top, all that. Right. So then let's, let's look at it.So it's kind of like it's, I mean, maybe it's a little bit like trying to capture nature. There's no redo it's whatever's happening right in front of you. Like hunts, kills audits, everything falls out. People wrecking, everything. I got all that kind of shit. Cops chasing us. Like every single thing that you could imagine.Uh, I've had it on camera. And how immersed is hip hop into that movement? Oh yeah. You'll see. In every music videos nowadays, it's huge. You'll see music videos. There's people on dirt bikes or these rappers that are, want to get dirt bikes and start doing shit. And, well, wait a second. Now, is it dirt bikes or is it rice rockets?No, no, no. We're talking dirt bikes.and four wheelers. Like how is that? Let me ask you this. How is it a hip hop, dirt bike? Would it be different or tricked out in a different way than a regular dirt bike or is it no, it's not even about the thereby being tricked out or nothing like that. It's about just your style, your riding, the vibe you bring, like everybody on a bike is literally on a bike to get away from shit.That's going on with. You know what I mean? So help me out a second here. All right. Dang. Cause I'm in, I'm in the world from the fashion standpoint or from the apparel standpoint industry, it's all our stuff, but at S so let's just say it was about 2011, maybe 2012, and I'm running, you know, sales marketing over at young and reckless.Right. And we engage in meek and we decide, we think at that point in time, that it's a good idea. We're just kind of being turned on to this whole Moto thing around 2012, but it's coming to us through meek mill where we know that it's in some other places, but there isn't a big face behind it, like meek was right.So we, we were like, you know, some of our guys were out there checking shit out, and then they came out here and brought their bikes. Chickpeas meat comes from Philly to LA and they have all their bikes fucking trucked over. Right. Zach goes to fifties quads and I throw out the idea to drama and D amen.Less. Cause we're going to do a shoot with him for young and records. I go, well, why don't we have a Stefan do the photo shoot and the video let's do it all. So we got to step on and we went out to the fucking dunes and fucking, we filmed this thing and I was blown away in real life. What that shit was when they mobbed out.And there was about, they had about 20 guys and 20 bikes. I mean, quad bikes, everything. And they were in LA and, uh, it was, the shoot was powerful, man. It had, it was dope, man, to see it, man, Steven did it got dope shit. And that's kinda how I got introduced. And that's what started introducing me to looking further into it and seeing.How this, this movement was spreading bro, and very deep and like the Northeast and some of the Southeast and super particular areas, you know, and how engage our, how many mashed hip hop was all this man, the hood, and like all that it's, it comes from that. We graduated from bikes, bicycles, you know, now the hood said, fuck it.We're going to get on a real bikes. Like that's the. Like we don't ride around on a bicycle bicycles, no more, this shit. We're 21, right? The smallest thing they're riding or those little fucking mini bikes. Right. Because I see those, I seen cruiser them that got him going 40 miles an hour yesterday, kids on the, on, in downtown LA where me and Mike been talking about doing something with cookies with them.I rode from downtown yesterday, all the way to, to Venice and fucking through sunset Melrose, everything. And there was a mini bike that was rocking with us the whole time. Really? Yeah. He was just, oh, we slowed down. We don't go fast because we're on quads. So we're just willing and. Yeah. Taking our time.We're not trying to speed Willie. And he was chilling. We'd have to stop a bunch just because it's gas. But after a while he was like, I might head back. We're like, yeah, cool. We were done babysitting running, but yeah, they're outside. Everybody's outside. And that's funny that you said the thing about meek, because one of my boys, one of my really good friends in the shit, he's a clutch, the bike star.He's he's from New York. Right. So me and him got super close. That's my boy clutch. Yeah. Clinton's from New York. Yeah. So there's and there's cliques within all of this shit. So that's what I heard. Yeah. So he's a bike star. So like they're their own click, like, so they got people all across America that they think that I wrapped them, wrap them that put them was for me.Right. It's like a hood, like right. They put them on now. They're whatever their name is. Club. Yeah, exactly. So name plus bikes are so. He's my boy. So he's like come out to New York, come out with me. Boom. He's like, all right, we're going to go do some show and ride that de. Pop up, fly to New York, hop in the car.He's got all kinds of weed for me. He's like here, what do you want? Whatever flavor you want. All right. Go to the mechanic. He's got phentenol Xanax, uh, nothing like that. So then we go, he's like, we're gonna go to the mechanic and leave your bag over there. I was like, all right, cool. Boom. We leave my bag.Don't even go to the house, hop on bikes and heads. Like heads-up really shit. Yeah. Fucking show up, bro. I didn't even sit down. I got hopped right on the bike and we rode all the way at the time. Square met up with meek mill, Jim Jones and all of them and rode through times square and all that shit with me within like hours of getting a fucking bad ass thing.Getting off of the fucking bike off the plane. I was on a bike with me. I was like, this shit is crazy. Mixer for going through times square. Like when you're going through times square like that, you're just like in awe, like, and everybody's there at times square to look, look at times square, but they're all looking at you and you're just like, that's the biggest stage that you, you know what I mean?Look at that shit, bro. It's crazy. I think it's dope, bro. Do you have a up for a camera on your bike so that you can. So you got like a, what? A golfer, like I'm like wondering no, wait, why you ask that? I've been wondering this whole time. What the fuck are you doing? Like, are you doing this shit? That's what, like, even my boy, one of our boys, the other day, we had a huge ride.I went through a huge here for MLK and had like hella bikes, probably a thousand bikes out here, riding with us right from across the nation. Like they came, right. So we're riding out there and we get off the bike and he's like, bro, how the fuck do you do. Because I literally have a camera set up for you to shoot with your right hand.Right. But the throttles on the right hand. So I'm on a quad too. So I use, I, Willie, I do everything too. So I'll fucking be riding, have my camera strapped around my neck, get in position, put my left hand across my body to grab that. And the whole time I'm shifting downshifting with my left foot, just engaging with the, you know what I mean, the gears without a clutch.And then I'm still leaning over lane down, like shooting pictures and doing all that shit at the same exact time, bad ass. So my boy. Bro. How the fuck do you usually people will be like, all right, we'll get a quad. I drive and you'll be on the back and you just shoot. Right, right. But I do it all by myself because, well, I got tired of fucking, I don't want to be a man on another man's back like that.Like, here's on the left side for it. You know what I mean? You could do well. Yeah. But, but, but do you think it changes the quality of your shots that you're engaged in activism? I probably miss some, but I make so many more than you miss a lot, but you know me, nobody can, right. Ain't nobody ain't told me shit.Ain't nobody shooting and doing that shit. Like. Doing the passenger word that I'm doing. Like, I don't give a fuck. Right. That's like some Vernor Hertzog shit, man. That's like, those are the types of documentarians that like get into the actual fucking thing and they're shooting it, directing it, you know, doing it and all that other stuff.Like yesterday, I, I wrote, I wrote, I didn't take my camera. Not nothing even my boys are like, man, west don't even want to fucking take pictures no more. He's just enjoying himself so much. And sometimes it's like the I'm not always out there just to take pictures. I want to go out there and to myself too, it just so happens.That that's what I do. But that's part of your, your lifestyle. Yeah. So you're working in, but you want to be able to put up the worksheet and your people and your shit. Yeah. And so when you go out to Florida and you're kind of, sort of being introduced to this and is that the time that you got hooked up with whoever.That was the time when I clocked in with started seeing this shit and building these relationships. And then once I got back over here, and it's weird though, because over there you see if I go over there right now, they're at the very beginning of their low-rider community really taken off now. So we're at the very beginning of our bike life stuff taken off.So it's like, I seen the exchange of culture starting to grow on both sides right now. Just, you know, I'll say I, because I've written quads all my life. Right. But I was like on a reservation or I was out in the sticks. So I wasn't. Doing anything in the city with it necessarily, and actually dirt, bikes and quads.At that time, when I was coming up was kind of like a kind of, I mean, all redneck thing kinda right. And Florida obviously is kind of famous for its rednecks, but the issue is, is I'm seeing other cultures grab that and put it in other kind of, um, environments and seeing what it can do in other environments.Do you think that the influence came from the Southeast and it, and it's pushing this dynamic? Um, no. I came from the east like Philly and all that shit. We're making them from that's like the, that's like the motherland of where the shit like started. It just grew from there because they don't even like to be honest, the east coast don't even pay attention to us like that on the west coast, on this bike life, shit yet quiet because we're so young, even though we got people out here that can put up with a lot of them, you know what I mean?But we're just so young. There's like so many dynamics behind things that we're not even up to date on, like people that are beefing because of this and that, but that whole bike life shit is like a whole community of, of stuff like that. That we're not even in tune yet without here. And I know because of the relationships that I have out east, you know what I mean?That's the only reason I know a bunch of shit about what the culture is and why people don't fuck with certain people and what the, really, the real dynamic behind the most of the relationships does everything have to have some kind of politics attached to it. Always, always. Oh, it is. That's just how human nature.And I think everybody too, man, like there's a piece of everybody wants to be a part of everybody wants to, once there's a few people want to create a community as something cool. And once that community starts to gain other people, see it and they want to be a part of that. They want to join something and it goes for everything I think goes for it.And that certainly car clubs, motorcycle, gangs, motorcycle club, all these kickoffs neighborhoods. So this, when, and when you have that, then you have. A group of people with a common goal. And that's where you're going to have all the politics that go on. You know what I agree with that in, in obviously every nation, every subculture, all that stuff represented, what does it mean?Who are, you know, all that shit. And Danny makes a good point in human, wherever the humans are. There's going to be some politics. But I am also thinking that while you're right, like there is a common goal. It's like a point at which in the, any culture where the common goal gets overridden by the goals of politics and you start losing the focus.Yeah. The pure that's why like, I've got to see that shit. So like, I, that's why I focus on shit with the guys that I fuck with out here. Like. Companies that I work with, like the bang shit or like cookies or the lit Coco or like solo sassy. I'll get these companies to fork out some bread. And then we go, like we went and handed out Turkey, whole ass Turkey dinners to families.This last Thanksgiving with some of the guys, another time we went out there and fed the homeless. With all the guys from bikes, like we all went out there, went to skid row. The other homie that I have lane, he has no legs. He rides with us. He has prosthetics on a four Wheeler. He went out there, he cooked for all the homeless people and we got together and gave out food, like guy with no legs over there cooking for a bunch of homeless people out of that.Is there an aspect of it that, because I mean, there's a certain kind of spirit that goes with riding a bike and being in the outdoors and feeling the fucking power, feeling the wind in your face and all that shit. At least that's how I feel when I ride bikes. Right? Like there's an aspect of it where you feel real free is any of that.Um, cause you know, does any of that seem like it is healing in a way? Yeah, of course. That's why everybody's out there. They're trying to escape here, get it in a moment away from everybody for freedom. All right. I hear that about car clubs. I hear that about all sources, the social surfing, skateboarding, whatever.But if they're in a group, it's a chance for them to break away from their normal life and almost be a kid or be with, you know what I'm saying? Like it's an escape, some sort, bro, especially our group that are our packs that ride together. We have packs. Our whole pack is a bunch of people that don't even, shouldn't even be in the same room, hanging out chilling.I got hell no, I got, we got bloods, Crips essays. You know what I mean? You got everybody you got every single crew there. That don't fuck with each other on the regular, like, you know what I mean? But then do you have a driver in there too? Somewhere? Probably I'll guarantee there's I was thinking maybe the ups and the FedEx guy get down parking lot.Um, no, but, but so through this, that's almost like this neutral thing where all of them it's, it's a brotherhood amongst. Yeah, exactly. So it, even the people that are there that, you know what I mean, they want to get away from that shit every once in a while. You know what I mean? That's bigger than their yeah.They was actually describes to that. Yeah. Because it's, they're there for that. There's an understanding amongst them because they know that they're there for that one, same reason that same they're there because they understand that, that person's there for the same reason that they're there, that feeling of getting away from all that bullshit that they're dealing with, you know what I mean?Exhilaration, having fun, enjoying your shit, like everybody's there initially to have fun. And then sometimes I, she gets lost into competition and this and that, because everybody wants to be seen, heard. That's why the. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. That's my perspective. At least I can't speak for everybody, but from what I see and what I see in the community, that's what, so we, but we, you feel like, or, you know, Philly was really the ones that really took this shit and really started making this happen.This is the east coast. I'll give it that. I don't want to say specifically, cause I know somebody will listen and be like, nah, my grandmaIf you think about it, you would almost want to say, how did that not come out of the west coast? We have so much more access to this stuff. There's way more. That makes way more sense. On the west coast than it does the east. Well, this is why I was thinking maybe it was like a country thing, right. Or country thing.Right. Or the west. Because the open spaces that you guys like before there was no, there was no like club maybe that never made it special. I don't know. But at blue mountain where my cabin is, right. My LA my whole entire. I've written quads and dirt bikes up and down that shit. And most of the roads are logging trails.So there's no, there's no like pavement or whatever, and you're doing shit and fucking around, but you're having that same experience of being free. No, one's watching you. You want to go fast, you go fast. You want to go? So you want to, you want to try something? You can, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.So I was thinking like maybe, and that's why I said redneck, but I was meaning country. And there's a lot of African-American rednecks, you know, they they're from the country and they might be doing the same shit or hunting I've hunted on quads before. So that's why I was thinking that. But if it started in Philly, this.Uh, east coast, inner city, east coast, and then that's that. But you know, I've read a lot of, uh, books about people who on the east. There's a lot of interchange between, uh, family members that some are living in the city and some are living in the country and they're related and they visit each other in the summers.And so there may be some influence that gets picked up that way. I've also seen situations where dudes that got gaffled up in the night. Then move down to the south, to their cousins that just let shit, you know, whatever cool out. And then they might get exposed to some country living. That's actually something they might enjoy.Yeah. So what, so what, and so where would meek mill, do you think meek mill was able to kind of center in on this? Or how did he around him? It's that whole area is just, and it was probably engulfed in it and there's probably was a couple other, but he was the guy that was hot and chose to take that with him.Right. You got it. You got into it as a kid, too. Right. There's videos of him doing it super young and the guy went to fucking jail for it, bro. Also, but he used that. He brought that with him too. Yeah. And he was hot and he stayed on it like it was around, but there wasn't a face. Stuart is what I'm saying.Meek mill was what I tie and associate the face of it. And it probably needed that to get it out there because, and I'm sure that that was responsible. That was fucking old 2011, 12. I'm talking about right in over that time, this thing has done nothing but grow like cancer. Sure. I'm an also think that like in certain level of economic situations that we're in right now, we're loaned itself to that, right?Absolutely cheaper gas, fucking Bubba, Bubba, Bubba. Right. Well, I, I could ride my bike all day on like $8. You know what I mean? Like why I could be distracted and have fun all day for $8. Y w what do you do for me? $8. That's going to make me have that much fun. You'll be distracted. And meanwhile, motherfucker, Ms.Kim fucking leaving her work or run your ass over. You're not paying attention. So what's up with the falls, man. You said you caught some of that footage. I mean, do these guys fall a lot? Oh yeah. Really? Everybody falls, especially that all trying to push it, like, right. There's a whole, there's a whole culture in it about like, who could do the best tricks, this and that.Right. Or like people that put passengers on the bikes and do stuff with them. Like there's different, like brackets within them. So it's just. When they push it. Yeah. It's inevitable. And I see them fall all the time too. This sometimes it would be really bad sometimes the name too bad, but any hospital trips, like all the time.Yeah. All the time road, rash road rashes. Normal aren't light. Fuck man. And my, my sister she's she's Prager. She's about to deliver a little fucking baby. My nephew in March, her husband, TD Tyler Daniels. If he's listening to this, I'm talking about you, you fucker, country, right? Uh, yeah. Out of Oakleigh, out of Oklahoma, you can't get much more like fucking country crop in that pan away.Good guys. Good to my sister at her baby shower. W it worked. She was in Arizona. He got on a quad in where we're at up in Scottsdale. There's a bunch of like, just desert behind the houses were washes and everything. And this jamoke gets on a and quieter and he's riding around and going with fast. I don't know what by himself, he hit Barb wire.Oh shit. Right. Wrapped around tie flew the thing landed on top of them. Right. A quad landed on tower and the fucking thing. So my, my sister who's like, you know, six months pregnant gets a call from TDSIC. She went to go, she rescued him. The pregnant mom went to rescue the husband and she got him and he was on the ground with a huge cut.Right below his eye, he had to get stitches, broke three ribs, right. And was laid up and his ribs still ain't. Right. And he's got a permanent scar on my sister was like, he's got his guy. I'm like, you're a girl. I know from your perspective of scarring, if it's the worst thing, but he's going to be able to lie about that scar later.And it looked like a tough motherfucker and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Which do you prefer, do you prefer quiet or do you prefer dirt bike or you don't compare the two? Um, I'm just, I prefer a quad because I'm shooting pictures, you know, it's easier for me to manage all that shit on a dirt bike.It's going to be 10 times harder to do all that shit, you know? So I'm just like, fuck. Quads my way to go. And it's, it's less shit I got to worry about. I mean, people think quads are somehow saver, but they're not, they can be there like turning when you're going fast and turning, you can fuck on roller Quatro.Real fucking, yeah. You gotta know how to shift your weight and do all that shit. And then, especially when you're getting chased, it's lot harder too, because then you can't just squeeze between two last cars with the bike. So you got to, you're taking sidewalks, whatever the fuck you gotta do. You haven't chased last night, allegedly nothing.They just try, they can't fuck with us. Like. I got, all I got to do is turn around three times and get in traffic and you're fucked. So allegedly last night you were wrong. Yup. And who was it? Did the lights come on and when the lights come on, does that excite you? Like, yeah, I got this bitch now. I just think this guy's a dickhead and he's stupid.And why is he fucking with us? Cause he was like, bro, you know that you're not going to catch us. But then sometimes they do catch people. Cause there's like, we call them worms, new guys that are, get bikes and they don't know what the fuck they're doing. And then they panic and they're like, oh, freak the fuck out.So then they either like req they fucking stall out or fucking do something else stupid. And then. Right. Those, those are the guys that they're hoping to catch, but the rest, the rest of them just chill. A lot of times, they'll just, I'll just cruise and let them sit behind this for a little bit. And then I'll just like, well, just make one move.And then it's done. Like really they're waiting for it. Yeah. They're, they're sitting there too. They're just, do they ever, is there ever been a time where they chased you a little bit and then like, but it was like in a certain extent, like they were having fun and you're having fun. Um, sometimes here, but I've been in another state, like.Allegedly when I was in Atlanta, whatever your funny peacocks, got it. Exclusively stream classic sitcoms, like the office parks and recreation and Sue and a half net plus cats, peacock, original comedies like AP bio and saved by the bell for all your exclusive comedy phase could have peacock tv.com and get started, bro.That shit was crazy. That shit out there, like, no, they have, they're allowed to hit you there. And they are battering Rams on their shit and they kill people last year. They killed somebody and then my other homie, Joey Glocks, this will he fucking. Hit this full then drove his ass into the curb and crushed his leg, crushed his bike.And he's in, he's in a whole ass thing with them right now over it. He just got better now to where he's. He's cool. He can ride, bro. That shit is crazy that they don't play out there. They try to hit me, try to fuck me up and everything. I was gone. I had to get out on them, their helicopter, everything had to take him to the airport so I could lose the helicopter row.It was that shit was GTA five. George is on some other shit, man, no fly zone. You got to think about shit. This is shit that like people, they come into this bike shit don't know. Like they got to educate themselves on things like this. Like, all right, you're getting chased and you got helicopters are, listen to figure that out.And this world, they just don't know. But I mean, I didn't, there's also a part of me. That's like, you know, maybe you're built for this kind of shit, Danny. Yeah. Just set up for fame. No, no, no. I'm not trying to say it like that. I'm trying to say it like, I mean, go with him. Why can't you roll with them? Roll with them.You know why? I want to be real. I want to say, all right, listen, you want to know why, why you want to know why you're skinny. Ain't dark enough. Boy, my wife that's right. My wife's skin is dark and she gonna fucking rip my Dick off. If I get hurt. Because Tega my daughters, my wife, don't brother, man. I that's a one.My son, my son showed up wanting to ride a motorcycle. I'd be bummed the fuck out. No, no guilt right there, bro. I've lost friends in my life. You've lost friends early on. I lost three friends early on, got taken out and it was on all three. It wasn't even their fault. Right. Two are sitting on both on a bike ride, taken out.The other two ones just got ran over and the other one's got waiting at a light, just got taken out by a motherfucking cab. Listen, I written by X through LA. I've done it and I wasn't married other stuff. Ain't I wasn't trying to do anything crazy either. I wasn't like trying to. Nah, no, but the bike slid out from you at least once or twice.And I definitely fucked up my entire side of the leg and I pretended like it didn't hurt, you know, all the other shit, but every time I took a shower, it was like fucking fire on motherfucker. I laid the ballet at seven 50 triple down all last year, nigga on that on-ramp that fucking, that seven 50 triple Kawasaki.And when you hit a certain amount of RPMs, this VRBO kicked in and I was just getting on the bike, just getting on a bike. Wasn't even my bike, bro. And I was borrowing. Two hours and I got on and I was going too fast on this fucking on-ramp and I go, and I'm going to look and it fucking shout out for my bike man.And back then I ended up having to pay fucking hundreds of dollars. My dad fixed my towel. Shit was fucking, yeah, it was 360 pounds, but he was always trying to like fucking do some fucking buy just shit. So he had a real, a big ass Kawasaki, fucking dirt bikes street, legal right. Big fucker. I don't know what it was, but it was a real dirt bike.And it was in Arizona where they got the washers and all this other stuff. So he will ride around, but he was only on the pavement. Right. And you ride around and he would be mixing this giant fucking or venti size, fucking rum and Cokes, you know, and with the neighbors, right. He, Ron rum and Cokes out there on a fucking fat as fuck.I swear to God now listen for bus. He, he had a monster client, uh, Steve clap, if you're listening to this, uh, you don't pay him my money. So I could say whatever the fuck I want, but Steve clap his son, uh, to the Weyerhaeuser fortunate in Washington, which is the biggest logging. One of the biggest ones in the world guys were 350 million and my dad ingratiated himself.Right? So this guy, Steve clap, who only. To like, you know, like boarding schools and, you know, dah, dah, hair plugs, all that stuff. Want to be a tough guy. So my dad had him and Lou and everybody out in there drinking, and this guy, Steve Klatt got on the bike was going around the neighborhood circle. And then when he went in front of the guy, she was smoking a cigar too.When he went in front of the guys, Steve clacks stood up on the, on the pegs and he lifted his, his head and had the Shugar clenched in his teeth. Right. And he was like, ah, and he ran smack into someone's house. Oh shit. Fucked his whole face up. Fuck everything up. What's his name? Steve, clap to piece to Steve clap.Got clapped on. Got . Have you ever seen guys like show off and maybe they went like a worm showing up? Oh, it's all the time. Everybody that is in bike life that has a camera always says it. As soon as you bust out the camera, everybody tries to go crazy. They're like, this is my big, this is my moment to shine.And then that's when they fucking, they fucked up. That's the moment. Yeah, they got to juiced up on that shit because that shit goes Ziad. Sometime when you pull the camera out. Oh no. I to wait for the crowd has got to keep shooting. The thing is, cause sometimes I was like, oh fuck, I'll be right behind them when they wreck.So I got to look about the way. And not run over the motherfucker. So that's why it's like hard because I'm one hands on the wheel across my body and everything. So it's like, that's it. The reason why I was saying that Danny is built for this, not a gossip up, but I was thinking about the last time we talked to Danny, he was down in the middle of the protests and fucking on the front lines facing crazy fucking, I can only imagine the Drennan that was going on at that time.And then before that dude, you, you were in combat and stuff. So I'm thinking to myself, how does a guy like Danny? You know what I mean? Like, how do you say all right, well, now it's time for you to get your little house and your two car garage and you're going to lay down and chill out. And right now, am I wrong?No, you're right. I that's like, that's the thing that I probably have been battling with right now, like the most in my life. Like, cause since that last thing, like my marriage is gone, the shit is fucking done. So everything's kind of like gone awry. Yeah. I know. That was a, another kind of thing. Without me speaking out of term, you were kind of going through that.And would you say that you. Pursuing, this was, was kind of something that came along with the separation. Like you took advantage of that to kind of find yourself or, yeah, I kind of got out of it and I kinda like, I think I like got involved in it for the same reason everybody else is involved in it, of course, to get away to escape.But then I like complicated it by doing other shit, you know, that wasn't conducive to them part of my life, fucked that all up. Right. Cause you just dove in, I just like went all the way in and fucking use that and just ran right. That shit. Fuck it up. It's not just, it's not just vets or whatever, but I've been, I've read, I've been reading about, I did a lot of reading about the jungle.Not just the guys that sit back in pilot, the drones, and then the intelligence that goes in. But the teams that are working with the drone guys, once they get a target and they get the green light and those guys that are waiting for the drones to give the targets and give the green light, like they're waiting.They're not like, ah, we don't want to go out again. They're pumping up and waiting for the next mission. Cause they want ha that's how they're built. They want to have that fucking situation hunt. And then when these guys come home, right, what I'm like reading about it. And I'm like, you know, and it's a pretty, like, it happens a lot.A lot of these guys have a hard time trying to settle back down into some kind of domestic situation when they've been like three or four years out. They're in a real situation with different things going on. What do you think, do you think. I mean, of course it's possible, but I guess what I'm trying to get to is what kind of work would be required for somebody to be able to let that go so that they would settle down?Or is that maybe not possible? Uh, I don't even know. You see me fidgeting, buttoning up my jacket over here. Yeah, I man, there's a dude. You're on, I'm going to make a, I'm going to make a comparison, right? Go ahead and similarity right now because he is going there and he seeking that. Now, if you were to backtrack and start looking at motorcycle clubs.Yeah, bro. Yeah. When they really started growing in the sixties. Right. And there half of it was compiled of vets, that stuff. Like they had been done wrong and left out that's that we're almost rebels and that we're going to ban up because they showed up and they were shit on. And now all they had was each other and they jumped on these bikes with nowhere to go except their unity.Right. You know what I'm saying? That there's no coincidence that, that looks like this right now for him in this day and age, it's still seeking out. Where do I go to feel comfortable or folk, except I need to find my tribe that also lives on the edge as well. Well, so here's the thing like. Yeah, that and that on the road, nobody could stop me type of mentality.That guy unclench your fists. Okay. That guy, you know what I'm saying? No bond that they need to deal with to live in this world. They've got to have that. Yeah. But there's a disparity between, look what you're saying makes total sense to me. And I've been reading and preparation for black history month because I'm like, all right, Sean was like, well, but the person I'm reading on is a dude from LA.I won't give too many details. It's a dude from LA who fought in world war two and was one of the bravest motherfuckers again, when he came back right now, when he was over there, there were certain things he was fighting. Part of what he was fighting for. There was also the comradery and all that stuff, but there was something that he was fighting for that when he came back the world that he, that there was ready for him.There wasn't really about that. It was a different world. Did, was, does that's a world war two experience. Does that experience translate to you? I'm just like, all right. Remember the last time I was here, I said I had not been with a woman that had loved me remember. Yeah. So that became a whole thing and narrative in my life after I said that.So I had to further explain, like, I'm not a normal person. Like, you know what I mean? I'm not like some dude that didn't have all this craziest shit that we've talked about before happening in my life and I was wrong, you know what I mean? So my, my intention behind saying that is like, Everybody it's well, I think it goes for everybody.Everybody needs to be loved a certain way. Right. And everybody needs to be loved different. We just all have different love languages. Now imagine figuring that out with somebody that's been through all the shit I've been through. Like, it makes it even that more difficult. Not only that, but I'll put it even out here like this, because my girl and I go through this a little bit, and that is this, the expectations that society for the last 30 years has instructed people to think what love looks like is at odds with the realities of a real partnership, right?Like, like you're saying, love languages and dah, dah, dah, dah. And that's true, but there's another piece that's beyond that, which is. And I'm I, and when I say I'm dealing with it, I mean that my girl and I are going through these various stages together. And there's things that I thought when I was 20 things that she thought when she was 20, that love was supposed to be right.And it looks a lot like what's been pumped by the media and to everybody. So you buy silly shit, basically. Yeah. But the reality of it is a working partnership, as you know, would, dude's probably in, in, in a platoon or a fucking outfit, there's sometimes fighting there's sometimes this, that, and the other thing, that's part of it.That has to be part of it. It's not gonna look like, but to get to the place in a, in an outfit where the communication signals are, looks so nobody has to explain themselves and all that other stuff is a lot of actual work. It takes a long time to get there with a group of people and in a, in a relationship, the feeling of love.Doesn't mean that you're going to be able to communicate properly with the other. It's just a feeling. Yeah. Because the way that I've been taught and I'm sure for lucky too, is like, when we're younger, like we were never taught to communicate, like you shut the fuck up, keep that shit to yourself, mind your business.Don't fucking mind, nobody else's business. You know what I mean? And then I went to the military. Military is the same fucking way. Like we don't talk, we use hand signals, like, shut the fuck up, man up. Let's go do this, this and this and this. And then you come back and there are people who are like, Hey, you've had to use your words.You're like, yeah, you got to communicate. Tell me how you're feeling. Yeah. You're like, what the fuck? Like. But to be honest. Yeah. But to be honest, like the people that have been learning the most from about that shit is my kids. Right. Our kids nowadays there's their emotional intelligence is so crazy.It's remarkable. Like I sit down with my daughter and she'll talk to me and I'll be like, what the fuck? I'm like, wow. Right. You're tapped in. I agree with you that they're right there. I did. I'll tell you something. Our generation is still dealing with so much trauma, bro, for real like generational trauma that we've endured because of where we've come from.We've endured and perpetuated and you know, and do think about the amount of knowledge that a 15 year old kid has today. Knowledge. I'm not saying experience knowledge compared to when I was 15. Simply didn't have access to everything you have, but what does that do? Like what it does. It does a couple of things.Number one, this is another thing that I deal with in that regard. And that is, there is a lot of knowledge, right? And so a person can actually feel like I know about this, but the problem with it is, is that it's surface level knowledge. It's not expert experiential, right? So like it's a hard navigation because I have people in my farm that I work with that are like generation Z type people.And they have been exposed to a bunch of knowledge and it's not even necessarily experience, man. There's also a lack in our society of how to critique knowledge. Like you don't need a whole lot of experience to hear these messages or read an article and know like, wait a minute. There's certain elements that are missing or the logic doesn't flow.If you. Educated in understanding like this premise does not lead to the next premise, but you're just reading the information from a surface level. You're not even going to be able to evaluate the intelligence of that art, that article. And you may go back talking about, well, what love is is we're supposed to do X and I'm supposed to do Y and you're supposed to feel this.And, you know, man, I've been thinking about this so much with my girl. I'm building a malware. I look at it now between my wife and I I'm building an empire. And I'm not saying that lightly. I'm not saying like, oh, that's what every man and woman saying when they fucking get married for three years and then divorced.No, I'm talking about what I'm trying to build is more important than my own personal needs. Right, bro. Yes. But it doesn't look like always flowers. It also looks. Letting my family discipline me. Let him trying to take care of family members. You never even met before. No net. Oh, you mean in generations to come, right?Yes. But in order to do that, there are some things that I do that aren't good enough for that. There are some things that's been shown to me. It's not good enough for that. Right. And that's not about an end. It goes the other way too. I'm not some fucking dude that just lets people walk. But the thing of it is is that if what I'm trying to build is something for generations to come.That means my wife's generations to come to. That means my daughter's generations to come to it's beyond what it is that I'm thinking about for me personally, And I'm not perfect at it. I mean, there's pieces that I'm missing from there in my, and now I'm working on, it's kind of what I'm saying. I mean, I don't know about Jeffrey Mr.D's manager, but me personally at this age and where I'm at in life. I have a lot of the things I want on a day to day. Right. You know? Right. Sure. Really nice condo that's paid for no car note. Of course, you know, good Elsa. But I have the things, what I'm doing is I'm building what I'm building is I'm building for Vincent and Sophia, my grandson, right.I'm at this to turn that thing off. Oh, what do I want? Right. This is not about me at this stage. Again, there was time for that in my life that I maybe didn't take care of, but this is now has nothing to do with me. Right. What does that, what does that make you think about Danny? When you hear Stephen? I talk about that.I don't know. I'm just, this whole conversation went a whole different direction. I was like, oh shit. Like this shit guy. He worksfor four man. These kids are gorgeous, bro. He puts up videos with his kids, chasing him around and playing with them. Yeah. That's my light as your light man. Yeah. Is that, is that. This is that what's that dude, you man, when you come out of the real world and you're with your kids, you know, what, what is, that's probably been the hardest thing is like dealing with that whole aspect of co-parenting and like trying to figure that out and like not get into this whole cycle of emotions and trying to like keep it pool and like, you know, and that kids at a small age, when they're young like that, some were in them either.They talk about it when they're young or they wait and they talk about it older, but naturally kids, they want their parents to be together. And when parents split for no matter what it is better or for whatever, it might be, the kids don't understand all that is involved. And I think a lot of times, man, kids are somewhat sad that for sure, I was very happy that my parents.So I didn't believe that everybody felt sad, but I think most kids feel sad about it. Oh yeah. Like cry. Like there'll be with me and credit goes to her, her and the credit to be on me. And then there'll be, so it's like a fucking thing. Like, oh, it's time for you to go back to the mom. I don't want to go back with mom.No, sorry. That shit is the most heartbreaking thing ever. It is. It's like, I don't even think about you go to pick up your kidney. Don't want to come with you. I mean, it goes both ways. It happens. It happened. It happened to me last week. Yeah. That is hard, bro. I don't have to take it personally. Absolutely.Got to be a parent. You to be an adult cartel last week. Didn't want to do that. He didn't want to come with me, but also you wanted him to come with me. So I just took one of them. Let's make everybody happy. I'm like, all right, whatever you want. I want to make it happen. Yeah. When I think about that and I think about my daughter, I think about.Like, uh, I don't put it in terms of happy that they got divorced or sad that they got divorced. I don't really think about it like that because I don't even know if I'd even be honest with myself, like in protecting my own feelings. I don't even know if I'd be honest looking at it and be like, wow, it's glad they got divorced.Or I was, I was sad. They got divorced. I don't know it's but the thing that stuck with me the most more than anything else in terms of just food for thought was, um, a theorist that was talking about one of the crucial questions for every human is where did I come from? Like you, you know, there's millions of theories and we got science also shit.But at the immediate level, you know, as a child, you came from two humans coming together. And bonus or whatever, eventually, you know, that and the issue then becomes that those two make up no matter which if the kid knows it or doesn't know, it acknowledges that a service of his level or doesn't that kid immediately associates their complete being with those two halves.There's no way. So, and that's the first information that comes in. So as the child's developing, whoever they are, they're comparing and contrasting, I'm more like this. I'm more like that. What am I like? Right. So the relationship between those two hives that came together to create the existence of the person, that's actually doing the questioning that relationship without me saying which one is better and where I'm not even gonna say that.That whole thing is highly influential on how the child's identity is developed at how they think their existence or the answer to the question of how did I come about right. Flows from that. So when I think about dude, all right, I'll tell you one, I used to fucking argue with my wife, right. And, uh, and we still do from time to time, but we argue differently now, but there was a time where I took a little bit of man fucking pride and trying to put my wife in her, in her place.And I will be able to, because I'm an argumentative motherfucker and I, and I keep going. Sometimes even when my wife that's part of the, and that's part of the reason why she loves me, I'll tell you that. Or at least respects me on not some fucking punk dude. That's not going to push. And she might not admit it in the moment, but there's times where after she denied everything later, we'll come back and be like, I thought about what you said and it's right.Okay. So in my mind I thought, okay, that's a dance that we do. I wasn't even taking personally the arguments or whatever it was. I'm just saying, this is how she hears, this is how I hear we're going to push both lawyers. Like that's normal. Right. And then, and I was doing that in front of the baby. Right?Nothing major. I mean, I wasn't like throwing fucking plates against the wall, but I was just talking loud and saying shit. Right. And then one day it dawned on me that the baby, whether she thinks she understands or doesn't is being influenced by the way, my wife and I are relating to each other. And of course your energy, hell yeah.She taking notes on all of it. All right. And even though I may, and my wife may be play acting a little bit. The baby and all that. So I, and this is hard for me to do. I took a conscious and I'm telling you, but, oh bro, there are times that I work a full day. I come, we made a conscious decision that you weren't going to do this in front of your kid.Did you make that decision amongst alone that you weren't going to bite? You know why he's not even on that. You know why? Cause I was about to tell her, uh, no, I actually had told her, I said, Hey, watch how you talk to me in front of our daughter because our daughter doesn't know. And you can't be saying shit like that in front of the daughter, right?Hell no. Okay. Never. Right. Like if I talk back to you like that in front of our daughter, you would flip the fuck out. You don't want that shit. So I had said that shit. Right. But I was still engaging in the argument shit. Right. And boy, I'm telling you. And like, I make breakfast for the baby every day. I'm also an attorney and work all day.I lift weights. I come home, I get the shopping, I bring the thing I do at least one third of the fucking cooking and planning. Right. And Karen and the heavy shit. Right. And then there's times where I've done it. Everything that I'm supposed to do and at come in and my wife's first thing will be like, can you please build their data?Like one more fucking task. Fuck that shit, dude, fuck living like that. Listen, this is, I can't, I'm not honoring you because you were honest. So I'm going, I'm going right to fuck that shit. Fuck. I don't know what I'm saying. Listen, all I'm saying is like, listen, to say, she'd be like this, right. She'd be like to hell with that.She'd be like, can you please get some more fucking w the thing is not off the floor or whatever. Right. Getting rid of my fucking fee. You see me? That's probably why I snapped on Schwartz. I'm really yelling at my son. I'm like, Ugh, the cleaning guy, all of a sudden, you're cracking. I said to myself, building an empire and I love this woman.And then unload the baby. There will be a time for us to address that. Maybe she's not, she's putting too much sauce on it, but it's not now when I'm in my feelings. Okay. Cause we will pull her aside and be like, promise I've already done it. Okay. I pulled her aside and said, listen, I want you to understand how it comes off.Yeah. Right. When I come home, what was she doing? Oh, she's working. But she's watching the baby working, but she doesn't, she's my law partner. So she's right there with me. Right. And so in the, in the law firm, I'm the oldest attorney and I'm the most experienced, or I run it. So you guys are together all day though, as we are.And we are, we're fucking working and living and parenting all damn day. And to be honest with you, it works way better than it should. We, don't actually a lot of time to go the, a lot of time together, borough for us. Like it's healthy to have some time. Yeah. I'm in idea comes to this hard luck. That's why I love Saturdays is motorcycle club, bro.That is this hard luck show is the motorcycle club. I come in here and say, whatever, all my among and fucking mind it is. And also when I get up to, when I get up in the morning shorts, this is your motorcycle club, right? When I get up in the morning to Sean,But when I get to Ali to get away from your mom, Mr. And Mrs. Ear, bud, you too. But in the mornings, my way time, when I'm lifting weights, I got four. I get up at four. So that, and I don't you have that? Yeah. I run and get it. That's right. Every day. And I'm in the office, I got the door closed and I'm running the show.So it doesn't, it doesn't. But my point in saying all that is good deflection technique, Danny, Danny was like enough about me. What about your marriage? Bad. Like what's going on, Danny? Yeah, what's happening? What's on the counter. Yeah, come on. And Danny, we are going to do, do some more collab, work menu, some brand building stuff together, and it talk more cookie stopped like these vibe stuff with you.Maybe we figure out some supermax plays with them. And we can collab with you on Mike, but what do you have on the calendar this year? Let us know. Where are you going to be? What's um, this year, um, February, I'm going to Miami huge ride out over there. I just came back from Columbia, setting up stuff in Columbia.So like, I just, um, was the first one trying to like build something there so that everybody from America could just go and it's all taken whores in Columbia. Did you get a horror while you were down there? Fuck. And now it's disgusting. I hear all these great stories and they're just. That's it it's just like, listen, thank God we got that.I don't even like, I put a crazy question. Oh, who likes that buddy? Over there has tits and ass over there. It's crazy. You're just like, it's a factory. That's terrible. Everything over there, you know, that's horrible. What are, you know, what I like is you got coming. I like more natural. Where's the start.Right. Magazines and all the pressure. So what's coming up for 2022, 2022. You go to Miami, Columbia. Unfortunately he's got to go to Columbia. He's only doing it for, so now I'll probably be going to Columbia, like. Promise, right? Like every month or every couple of months, every couple of months. Wondering why you lost all that weight?I don't know. You're looking good. Doing a lot of exercise. I don't even lean though. I'm trying to, I switched my diet and shit. And put you only, only if it's begun.shade grown pussy. What are you planning to do? Trade? Oh, sorry. Oh, blue. I just trying to do a real show. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me stop talking about you planning to do with the footage. So I'm actually building stuff to try to get a movie started like a series from HBO or Netflix. So we already started filming, doing all the other stuff and I've just been building with everybody, everybody, all those teams.Bay area has like two active crew and chicken shit. Like we have Watts, Compton, LA bike, live, all that shit here. And then, yeah. So, but we have, I know everybody from all over the nation now pretty much. And, uh, yeah, it's, I think I could add to the culture, you know, so that's what I want to do with about this.Are you going to be like, once let's say, what about being a director? What about making movies? I think it would get in there. I just, do you have aspirations to do that beyond just you're in this live, but like, do you see yourself becoming like an artist? I don't think that this is my end or I don't think my photography is going to be my end all stuff.I think that my stuff is going to be producing, directing because. That's what I do. My network is crazy. Like I could go anywhere pretty much and I could get entire in and do stuff and develop shit for all the people that we know in our crew. Like I just link people in and, and I feather through like all the people and see who's a piece of shit who's not, and who deserves it?You know? Cause I'm not trying to put everybody on. Like everybody don't get everything. Right. That's the thing everybody doesn't get is everybody thinks that because they know me or they have this and that. And I give something to somebody that they deserve it. No, you don't deserve that shit. Like show me, you deserve it.Show me that you ain't a piece of shit. So me that you're loyal, like all that shit, everything that I try to form my shit around is the same pretense that essay's built around. You know what I mean? We all support each other. We all filter through each other, like bro, I'm the youngest one out of the crew.And I've known these guys for 20 years. Like. You know, like we don't let people in essay. That's not somebody that's valid. Like that's a big thing for everybody here. So I fucking feel like I'm going to carry that on in with what I do. So anybody that fucks with me, I got to make sure you're not a piece of shit.You're not gonna embarrass us. You're not gonna make us look bad and I need to know who you are. Right. So if I can't do that, you don't get shit. Well, you don't get shit if you can't do that. So I love it, man. Yeah. Just one more thing. What's your Instagram? So like people can check out some of that footage.My Instagram is west grown west underscore grown, w E S T underscore G R O w N. Fuck. And then you could see everybody, all my crew, everybody I fuck with is on my page. You go follow them, check them off. Let's see, tap in. You'll see all the collabs coming up this year. Yep. Boy's honest. Some shit. You'll see them on my Instagram as well.I'm going to be doing some things, so let's keep it moving, man. Thank you, Danny, for coming on the show, you know, this is always, this is the, this is like your home too, man. So you let's keep it up. Let's not wait a year. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, uh, and we'll make sure that we tag everybody and add everybody correctly when your post goes up and when the show goes up and yeah, good shit too, mom, what you got?I got go to YouTube to see west grown as well. Yes. You see it. It was that guy. I saw the guy with the prosthetics with the metal prosthetics. Was that, that dude, man, this shit looks fucking fat. Whereas the shot, this is uh, the hood bounty hunters hood. Oh, that's why Christine gardens the gardens.Nickerson gardens way from the trenches. Wow. I love that. Yeah. So you can catch it all on YouTube to Instagram, YouTube boy's son right there. What's his name? Do you remember Billy?he got a Rolex watch. Rolex chain. Don't get the shit fucked up, dude. He's already tolerant and Bushwick. Bill www max hardware.com. Check out some gear, go to cosmic demise, check it out. Let's go to Sean at move mental. Media media for some, you know, podcasts. It's a user for these guys. Mike Angelo photography for Sam.Fantastic film, go to cosmic devise and buy some gear from my boy, Ali Ovando Bowman. Uh, they wear braids to court with man shorts, shorts. It does a number of things. He produces TV music, and Mr. D is here and he wants to say something.Hold on. He just, Hey Mr. D we can't hear you. Can you please speak up? All right, here comes this, this I'm miss V. And you should listen to the hard luck show. Cause that's the realest motherfucking podcast. Bob brown, stop fucking playing. Yeah, with that, I like to say adios, Amigos, heartless. So it is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.Watch marry me.Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Maluma
PART 2!!!! Pinellas County Tax Appraiser Mike Twitty and Mike Webb discuss Homestead Exemptions, Portability, new Amendments for 2021 and more!
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