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John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result. In John Cale's Paris 1919 (Bloomsbury, 2025), Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York - of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol - that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved. Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009). Mark Doyle on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result. In John Cale's Paris 1919 (Bloomsbury, 2025), Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York - of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol - that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved. Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009). Mark Doyle on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result. In John Cale's Paris 1919 (Bloomsbury, 2025), Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York - of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol - that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved. Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009). Mark Doyle on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result. In John Cale's Paris 1919 (Bloomsbury, 2025), Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York - of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol - that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved. Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009). Mark Doyle on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result. In John Cale's Paris 1919 (Bloomsbury, 2025), Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York - of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol - that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved. Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He is the author of The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (2020), Communal Violence in the British Empire (Bloomsbury 2016), and Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God (2009). Mark Doyle on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025). Bradley Morgan on Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
GreenVelvetFarms joins us!Consider the source alwaysWe appreciate you listening to this chaos! Come keep us company!Follow the show on IG https://instagram.com/youraveragegrow?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=Join the Discord https://discord.gg/youraveragegrowwatch us https://www.youtube.com/@youraveragegrow
Resilience and Creativity: A Conversation with Dani Meza of The Crushed Velvets In this episode of The Tragedy Academy Podcast, Jay sits down with Dani Meza of The Crushed Velvets to explore the transformative journey of overcoming personal adversity and reigniting creative passion.
In this episode of The Tragedy Academy Podcast, Jay sits down with Dani Meza of The Crushed Velvets to explore the transformative journey of overcoming personal adversity and reigniting creative passion.
This week, we are joined by Paisley Underground legend MATT PIUCCI (Rain Parade, Crazy Horse) to discuss the TODD HAYNES' documentary, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. We also talk about Haynes' body of work including Velvet Goldmine & Safe, the perfect run of Velvet Underground records, Chris' emotional breakdown after seeing the film in the theater, Roky Music & The Doors, does a biopic need to be truthful, how being on stage is similar to Matt's forensic courtroom work (and would any member of The Velvets been good forensic scientists), the multiple screen and sound work within the film, how so much of art is because of chance encounters, how Andy Warhol's prescence allowed the Velvets to get through the gatekeepers of a label, honoring Warhol's visual identiy in the the film, the NYC underground filmmaking scene, how they edited this film, Lou Reed scrambling the narrative of his life, drones in music, Miles Davis, the mid 60s L.A. rock scene vs the NYC rock scene, seeing John Cale live, Chris hearing the first Velvet's record as a 7 year old & Matt seeing The Byrds live as a child, Mick Ronson & Transformer, Jeff Beck playing with Ziggy Stardust, how without Mo Tucker the Velvets were never the same, the Grateful Dead comparisons that confuses us, Can, Jonathan Richman's presence in the film, The Velvet's love of Neil Young, Matt talks about recording with Billy Talbot of Crazy Horse and smoking bowls with Neil Young, how Haynes' struggled making the film because of lack of archival footage of the band, John Cale's departure from the band and the pain of band lineup changes, Songs For Drella and the vilification of Doug Yule.So let's have The Velvet Underground hypnotize us once again on this episode of Revolutions Per Movie!!!MATT PIUCCI:@mattpiuccihttps://rainparade.bandcamp.comREVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. By joining, you can get weekly bonus episodes, physical goods such as Flexidiscs, and other exclusive goods.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday on any podcast app, and additional, exclusive bonus episodes every Sunday on our Patreon. If you like the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing it on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieBlueSky: @revpermovie Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this episode of Songs of Our Lives, it's amelia courthouse! I loved her last album, “ruby glass,” a lot, but the connection with the new one, “broken things,” runs so much deeper. We talked about growing up with church hymns and the affinity we still feel for a lot of that music before diving into one hell of an episode. We get into why there can only ever be one Leonard Cohen, obsessing over 80s Bob Dylan, finally getting Fleetwood Mac , the magic and catharsis of Larry Young, Beth Nielson Chapman crushing us, Vince Gill, The Handsome Family, The Velvets, and so much more!Listen to all of amelia's picks HEREamelia courthouse “broken things”S P I N S T E RSongs of Our Lives is a podcast series hosted by Brad Rose of Foxy Digitalis that explores the music that's made us and left a certain mark. Whether it's a song we associate with our most important moments, something that makes us cry, the things we love that nobody else does, or our favorite lyrics, we all have our own personal soundtrack. Join Foxy Digitalis on Patreon for extra questions and conversation in each episode (+ a whole lot more!)Follow Foxy Digitalis:WebsitePatreonInstagramTwitterBlueskyMastodonThe Jewel Garden
Many of us have grown up with Claudia Karvan. She's been on our screens since she was 10 years old, starring in films like The Big Steal and The Heartbreak Kid. And we've fallen in love with her on the small screen, in her long running roles on The Secret Life of Us and Love My Way. These days, Claudia is not only an actor but a hugely successful producer behind TV shows like Doctor Doctor and Bump.Through all she does there is a great sense of optimism, so I gave her the theme of hope. And from John & Yoko to The Velvets to BARKAA, she confirmed once again why she is universally loved.John Lennon – ‘Hold On'Ibrahim Ferrer – ‘Marieta'The Velvet Underground – ‘I'm Sticking With You'BARKAA – ‘We Up'Sinéad O'Connor – ‘Thank You for Hearing Me'
SPRINTER BRAIN - Wild Pink THE COUNTRY CLUB - Oso Oso FOOLMUSE - Peter Cat Recording Co.cat I WANNA DIE IN THE SUBURBS - Brigette Calls Me Baby ELECTRICITY - Lael Neale TURTLENECK WEATHER - JW Francis EARTH HATER - The Hard Quartet THE OSTRICH - The Primitives (Lou Reed) IF YOU DON'T LOVE ME ANYMORE - Shivas FORGOT SOMETHING - Heavenly Sweetheart PONY - Freezer LOSS - fantasy of a broken heart WALK THROUGH THE FIRE - Tony Allen COMPOUND SENTENCES - Combat LONSDALE SLIPONS - The Bug Club KITCHEN - Cal in Red, James Mercer JAZZCAZZ - Dan “The Drum,” Emma Noble VIVIENDO EN LOS SEQUALES (LIVIN' IN THE AFTER) - Panda Bear, Sonic Boom, Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Perez STILL CORRIDOR - The Clientele SHE BELONGS TO ME - Bryan Ferry
One of the most important bands to emerge from Akron is The Bizarros. Making records that bridged hard rock to a proto-punk sound, their influence proved important to many bands, and has been regularly noted in such seminal chronicles of American punk rock as Clinton Heylin's “From the Velvets to the Voidoids” and Jon Savages' “England's Dreaming”, and numerous LP and CD compilations. FROM AKRON's own Nick Nicholis was and is the singer and lyricist of the band, who along with Jerry Parkins, Don Parkins, and Martyn Flunoy are still rockin', playing gigs and recording new music. We also pay tribute to original member, the late Terry Walker. In this episode, we go deep into their history, inspirations, and the bond that's kept them going for nearly fifty years. We'll also be playing some of their most noteworthy songs, along with some surprising deep cuts. This is a special episode - Don't miss it! Listen this Thursday, June 6, at 10 pm on The Summit FM, 91.3, or later on Apple, Spotify, Google, Podbean, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts! (Thanks to Brad Savage)
Label: Sundazed 201Year: 2009Condition: MPrice: $75.00Here's a beautiful, limited-edition box set honoring New York's legendary Velvet Underground. This new, sealed set includes all of the group's very rare 7" vinyl output in their original mono versions, featuring exact reproductions of the labels and, in two cases, with their original picture sleeves. The box set includes rare vintage photos and new liner notes by Rolling Stone's David Fricke. The Velvet Underground whose membership included Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Doug Yule and Nico introduced numerous sonic and thematic innovations that laid much of the groundwork for punk and alternative rock. Although they're now acknowledged as one of the most influential bands in rock history, during their existence the Velvets barely registered on mainstream radar, and were often reviled by mainstream observers as well as hippie-era arbiters of cool. But, as Fricke writes in the new set's liner notes, "Somewhere, in another rock & roll universe, the Velvet Underground are more than a legendary band. They are stars, with hit singles, the original seven-inch masterpieces inside this box." Although they never came close to scoring a hit, the Velvet Underground was ideally suited to the 7" single format. "The Velvet Underground were a great singles band," David Fricke notes, adding that the Velvets "invented modern rock with searing guitar distortion, throbbing improvisation and brutally realistic tales of life on the wild side. But they did it all in these classic pop songs�compact miracles of raw drive, intimate beauty and Top 40 ecstasy, heard again in the original, thrilling mono single mixes." The seven singles included in The Velvet Underground Singles 1966�69 comprise the four Velvets singles originally released in the U.S. on the Verve and MGM labels, plus an additional pair of singles that were prepared for release but never made it to the marketplace and a special radio-only promotional single. The singles feature alternate mono versions that differ in significant ways from the songs' better-known stereo album versions. For instance, the band's 1966 debut single "All Tomorrow's Parties" appears here in a special mono edit that amplifies the song's melodic beauty and sonic tension, and a mono mix of their sophomore single "Sunday Morning" emphasizes the song's haunting quality. Meanwhile, the mono single version of "White Light/White Heat" exemplifies the vintage Velvets' stark, distortion-laden fury, while a mono edit of "What Goes On" accentuates that song's inherent pop jangle. Here is a listing of the included singles: All Tomorrow's Parties / I'll Be Your Mirror—Verve VK-10427 Sunday Morning / Femme Fatale—Verve VK-10466 White Light/White Heat / Here She Comes Now—Verve VK-10560 White Light/White Heat / I Heard Her Call My Name—Cancelled single Temptation Inside Your Heart / Stephanie Says—Cancelled single What Goes On / Jesus—MGM K-14057 VU Radio Spot / VU Radio Spot—MGM VU-1
This week I am joined by Wrestler, Cosplayer and Fetish Actress-Producer Jacquelyn Velvets. We dive into her origins in the adult industry, her early years of self discovery and answer emails from fans like yourself! Follow Jacquelyn anywhere below: https://allmylinks.com/missvelvets# Send your questions to me at sinnsagepodcast@gmail.com and maybe you'll hear it read on the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Drawing on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, filmmakers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, this "monumental origin story" celebrates the legacy of the Velvet Underground, which burns brighter than ever in the 21st century ( New York Times bestselling author Bob Spitz). Variety Best Music Book of 2023 · A "Must Read" by Nylon and BookRiot Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen-whether it be the 1960s or the 2020s-the Velvet Underground represents ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang around a psychedelic rock and roll band-a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory-the Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up. They never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone from Sid Vicious to Bobby Gillespie. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love. In that sense they invented punk and then some. It could even be argued that they invented modern New York. Drawing on interviews and material relating to all major players, from Lou Reed, John Cale, Mo Tucker, Andy Warhol, Jon Savage, Nico, David Bowie, Mary Harron, and many more, award-winning journalist Dylan Jones breaks down the band's whirlwind of subversion and, in a narrative rich in drama and detail, proves why the Velvets remain the original kings and queens of edge.
Drawing on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, filmmakers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, this "monumental origin story" celebrates the legacy of the Velvet Underground, which burns brighter than ever in the 21st century ( New York Times bestselling author Bob Spitz). Variety Best Music Book of 2023 · A "Must Read" by Nylon and BookRiot Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen-whether it be the 1960s or the 2020s-the Velvet Underground represents ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang around a psychedelic rock and roll band-a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory-the Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up. They never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone from Sid Vicious to Bobby Gillespie. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love. In that sense they invented punk and then some. It could even be argued that they invented modern New York. Drawing on interviews and material relating to all major players, from Lou Reed, John Cale, Mo Tucker, Andy Warhol, Jon Savage, Nico, David Bowie, Mary Harron, and many more, award-winning journalist Dylan Jones breaks down the band's whirlwind of subversion and, in a narrative rich in drama and detail, proves why the Velvets remain the original kings and queens of edge.
The Jokermen assemble their essential Velvets picks. I'll warn you ahead of time: "Friends" makes it, but "Sweet Jane" doesn't. LISTEN TO "WHAT COMES IS BETTER THAN WHAT CAME BEFORE: Jokermen Selects The Velvet Underground" ON SPOTIFY SUBSCRIBE TO JOKERMEN ON PATREON
Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen—whether it be the 1960s or the 2020s—the Velvet Underground represents ground zero.Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang around a psychedelic rock and roll band—a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory—the Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up. They never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone from Sid Vicious to Bobby Gillespie. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love. In that sense they invented punk and then some. It could even be argued that they invented modern New York.Drawing on interviews and material relating to all major players, from Lou Reed, John Cale, Mo Tucker, Andy Warhol, Jon Savage, Nico, David Bowie, Mary Harron, and many more, award-winning journalist Dylan Jones breaks down the band's whirlwind of subversion and, in a narrative rich in drama and detail, proves why the Velvets remain the original kings and queens of edge.New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author Dylan Jones has written or edited over twenty-five books. In the Eighties, he was one of the first editors of i-D, before becoming a Contributing Editor of The Face and Editor of Arena. He spent the next decade working in newspapers - principally the Observer and the Sunday Times - before embarking on a multi-award-winning tenure at GQ. A former columnist for the Guardian and the Independent, he is a Trustee of the Hay Festival, and a peripatetic television producer. In 2012 he was awarded an OBE for services to publishing. Today, he is the Editor-In-Chief of The Evening Standard.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781538756560
Hi friends, Amy here. As you know we are off for a few weeks, to return on January 4th. But I wanted to give you a little something to listen to and or think about while you wait. As you may know I have another podcast called Volsteadland. It's all about the seedy underworld (aka mafia) that was Minneapolis, MN in the 1920s and 30s.When I was researching this story all I kept thinking is that this needs to be an HBO series (or Netflix or any other network who can produce a quality show). Who would have thought that little old Minneapolis could have such amazing stories in its history?So I'm going to play for you, the first episode of Volsteadland which is an intro to the show, then the next episode right after that.If you're interested in the rest of the story, you can find Volsteadland on any podcast app.I hope you enjoy it.Happy Holidays and we'll see you in 2024.Volsteadland is a podcast about the seedy underworld of the 1920s and 30s in Minneapolis, focusing on notorious mobster Isadore Blumenfeld, a.k.a. Kid Cann. Launching summer 2021.This episode is about Blumenfeld's early years. A look at his humble beginnings, before he ruled the streets of Minneapolis. Video version of this episode: Early Years: https://youtu.be/DoiqK64okQoTranscript of this episode: https://www.podpage.com/volsteadland/blog/transcript-episode-2-the-early-years/if you or your parents, grandparents, etc. have any stories, folklore, or anything really, on Isadore Blumenfeld, aka Kid Cann please let me know. we'd love to get in touch and chat about it or use your story in the podcast. Anonymous of course, unless you want credit!Phone: (612) 424-1684 (leave voicemail or text)Email: Volsteadland@gmail.comLeave voice or text message at https://www.podpage.com/collected-sounds/We'd love to hear from you at any rate, just send us a note to tell us how we're doing!Our website: https://www.podpage.com/volsteadland/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Volstead_landInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/volstead_land/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VolsteadlandHosts: Amy and HeatherTheme Music: "The Last Prayer (to Isadore Blumenfeld)" by Paolo For Leehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvxy2QNc1fvaFTeASVuM-rABackground Music: "The Velvets" (instrumental version) by Cannelle http://www.patreon.com/melissaoliveriVolsteadland is produced by me, Amy, at Collected Sounds Productions and is part of the Collected Sounds Podcast Network. Thanks for listening! A Paranormal PodcastSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/collected-sounds2/donations
Interview with Bill Million of The Feelies Formed in Haledon NJ in the 1970's, The Feelies have now released six albums including their critically acclaimed and influential debut Crazy Rhythms, which was voted 49 in the top 100 albums of the 1980s by Rolling Stone magazine and chosen by Spin Magazine as #49 of the best alternative records of all time. Their music has left an indelible mark on the landscape of rock and roll. Supporting the release of their first four albums the band appeared on the The Late Show With David Letterman and in concerts with The Patti Smith Group, R.E.M., and Bob Dylan as well as touring with Lou Reed. In 2008, the Feelies ended a 17-year sabbatical as a group to open for long-time admirers Sonic Youth at Battery Park and then resurrected their tradition of playing low key gigs at strategic intervals throughout the year rather than doing lengthy tours. In 2009, they were invited by R.E.M. to perform at Carnegie Hall in “The Music of REM” charity concert benefitting music education programs for underprivileged youth, then by the artist Dan Graham to play an acoustic set at the opening of his first American retrospective, held at the Whitney Museum: Dan Graham: Beyond at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year Bar/None re-issued Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth, this being the first band-sanctioned CD release of the former. In 2011, they released a new studio album Here Before of which England's The Wire enthused, “Here Before picks up as though they'd never left. The second line- up is fully present, and the basics of their sound have filtered through so many younger bands (from Yo La Tengo to SF Seals to The Chills) that the music possesses a great kind of faux- familiarity. ‘Time Is Right' sounds something like The Terminals doing a Stooges tribute tune. It - and some of the Velvets riff - lifts that occur during the album's later moments- make me remember how nuts this group seemed 30-plus years ago.” In honor of their 40th Anniversary Bar/None Records re-released their third and fourth albums,Only Life and Time for a Witness in early 2015. The Feelies Info: https://www.facebook.com/ The.Feelies/ http://www.thefeeliesweb.com
FISHERMAN'S BLUES - Waterboys MISS YOU - Rolling StoneS SO. CENTRAL RAIN - R.E.M. GHOST TOWN - SpecIals AKA BECAUSE THE NIGHT - Patti Smith DEAR GOD - XTC ROCK ‘ N ROLL - Velvet Underground REAL ME - The Who THERE IS A LIGHT THAT GOES OUT - The Smiths DAYS - The Kinks HERE COMES YOUR MAN - Pixies PRECIOUS - The Pretenders FADE AWAY AND RADIATE - Blondie SALLY McCLENNANE - The Pogues SAVE IT FOR LATER - English Beat YOU SAID SOMETHING - PJ Harvey BEYOND BELIEF - Elvis Costello DREAMING MY DREAMS - Cowboy Junkies YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME LONESOME WHEN YOU GO - Bob Dylan LAY YOUR HEAD DOWN - Sinead O'Conner
Ian chats with Jarvis Taveniere of Woods about their fantastic new record Perennial, John Cale and the Velvets, and cutting Purple Mountains with David Berman. COP & LISTEN TO "PERENNIAL" NOW SUBSCRIBE TO JOKERMEN ON PATREON WATCH OUR "BOB DYLAN REVISITED" SERIES ON YOUTUBE MERCH AVAILABLE ON JOKERMEN.SHOP FOLLOW JOKERMEN ON INSTAGRAM AND SUBSTACK
In this episode of the ART Informant, Isabelle Imbert welcomes Dr Amanda Phillips, Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Material Culture at the University of Virginia. Amanda specialises in the consumption and trade of textiles in Ottoman Türkiye. It is the topic of her latest book: Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, published in 2021 (University of California Press). In the episode, they talk about the techniques and particularities of Ottoman silks, such as the so-called Studenica silk, and of course of crimson and gold-embroidered velvets made in Bursa, particularly well represented on the market, as well as academic career, book writing, and much more.If you've liked this episode and want to support the Podcast, buy me a coffee!Mentioned in the Episode and Further LinksFollow the Art Informant on Instagram and TwitterFollow Amanda Phillips on Instagram and AcademiaAmanda Phillips, Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, University of California Press, 2021.Amanda Phillips, Everyday Luxury, Art and Objects in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600-1800, Verlag Kettler, 2018 (free access).Nurhan Atasoy, Walter B. Denny, IPEK. The Crescent & the Rose: Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets, Azimuth, 2001Work of Pr Suraiya N. Faroqhi on AcademiaChristie's, "Collecting guide: Ottoman silk velvet panels", 2019Nazanin Hedayat Munroe, "Silks from Ottoman Turkey", MET Museum blog, 2012Click here for more episodes of the ART Informant.Click here to see the reproductions of artefacts discussed in the episode.
The Velvet Underground didn't sell many records at first but everyone who bought one went out and started a band*-- and now YOU can read a graphic novel about the Velvets! I interview cartoonist Koren Shadmi about his new graphic novel, All Tomorrow's Parties: The Velvet Underground Story. His book is about the formation and dissolution of one of our favorite bands, and one of the most important rock bands of all time. Eisner-nominated Koren Shadmi joins me to talk about The Velvet Underground's importance, why we love them and his process in making this new work of music history in comics form. Koren Shadmi is an American-Israeli, Award-winning illustrator and cartoonist. He studied illustration at The School of Visual Arts in New York where he now teaches. His books have been published internationally and include The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, and most recently Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula. All Tomorrow's Parties is published by Humanoids https://www.humanoids.com/y_catalog/book/id/1359 *I am paraphrasing the great Brian Eno on this. https://www.korenshadmi.com/
CLEAN SLATE - The Mountain Goats ROCK ‘N ROLL - The Feelies DRIVING - Bombay Bicycle Club, Holly Humberstone ANYONE COULD BE A BUZZCOCK - The Bluebells STRAYS - Margo Price LIFERS - Spanish Love Songs THE RABBI - Blur HEAVEN'S GATE - Radar Peak enknee1 - hemlock springs CAN WE FORGET - Alexsucks TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE, TOO BAD - Rhiannan Giddens CROSSED THAT LINE - Ratboys LIFE'S A JOKE - Islands ELVIS IN THE ARMY - A. Savage HUNTER - Jess Williamson CONGRATULATIONS, BY THE WAY - The Feeders FALLEN ANGELS OF ROCK ‘N ROLL - Cordovas the way things go - beebadoobee PERFECT DAY - Al Green MEMO FROM TURNER - Mick Jagger
The conversation keeps circling back to highschool in this weekly catch up. One of the V's is super nostalgic about it - the other not so much. Also make sure to listen if you want to hear about Velvets latest "enhancement". Relatable, not educationalPlease like and subscribe. Also connect with us on social media.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thevspotpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thevspotpod/ Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@thevspotpodFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092033462208&mibextid=LQQJ4d
Duran Duran [00:29] "Save a Prayer" Rio Harvest ST-12211 1982 Do you want New Wave or do you want... a ballad? How about both?! The Roland Kirk Quartet featuring Elvin Jones [06:04] "Mystical Dream" Rip, Rig & Panic Limelight LS 86027 1965 Roland Kirk - tenor sax, Jaki Byard - Piano, Richard Davis - Bass, Elvin Jones - Drums. Remember the name of this album when we get to Albums and all that begin with the letter Y as in Yankee. Herb Alpert [08:40] "1980" Rise A&M Records SP-3714 1979 Herb Alpert helps NBC out with a little instrumental for the then upcoming 1980 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Sir Eugene Goossens Conducting The London Symphony [11:06] "Introductio - Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) L'Adoration de la Terre (Adoration of the Earth)" The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) Everest 3047 1960 blah Manfred Mann's Earth Band [15:54] "Blinded by the Light" The Roaring Silence Warner Bros. Records BS 2965 1976 More popular than The Boss's original (https://youtu.be/eJkkMgM1vIQ?t=20). Could definitely edit out the noodly scoodly guitar solo break if you ask me. This album has probably the most disconcerting cover art in my collection. Robert Gordon with Link Wray [23:03] "Red Hot" Robert Gordon with Link Wray Private Stock PS 2030 1977 Solid cover of Billy "The Kid" Emerson's Sun Records stomper (https://youtu.be/Y0nGvIXp_TM). Gordon's first outing following a stint with the Tuff Darts (https://youtu.be/Yc4dT3YI9H8). Roger Miller [25:26] "Whistle Stop" Story and Songs from Robin Hood Disneyland 3810 1973 Tell 'em Roger... er, Alan-a-Dare. Lou Reed [29:22] "White Light/White Heat" Rock 'n' Roll Animal RCA AYL1-3664 1980 (1974 original release) Lou gets all glam with the rendition of the Velvets' excitable number. P.J. Soles [34:27] "Rock 'n' Roll High School" Rock 'n' Roll High School (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Sire SRK 6070 1979 Who else but Riff Randell (https://youtu.be/TYrvJynOoS4) (P.J. Soles)? Robert Gordon [36:40] "Black Slacks" Rock Billy Boogie RCA PL 13294 1979 Indeed, more from Mr. Gordon, this time deftly handling the Joe Bennett & the Sparkletones' classic (https://youtu.be/VcDAlATFK94). The Cramps [38:26] "Heartbreak Hotel" Rockinnreelininaucklandnewzeelandxxx Vengeance Records 669 1987 Lux, Poison Ivy, Candy del Mar, and Nick Knox recorded live at the Galaxy in Auckland NZ in 1986. Tim Curry [43:07] "Sweet Transvestite" The Rocky Horror Picture Show Original Cast Ode Records OSV-21653 1978 (1975 original release) None other than Frank N Furter (https://youtu.be/ZCZDWZFtyWY). Cash Pony [46:28] "Moon Mobile" Roughhousing self-released 2018 The Bay Area's very own. Waylon Jennings [50:41] "I've Always Been Crazy" Rowdy Country K-Tel WU 3680 1983 Same Waylon, same. This single went to number one on the Hot Country songs in 1978, despite Waylon getting busted on possession of cocaine charges the previous year. Outlaw indeed. The Beatles [54:56] "I'm Looking Through You" Rubber Soul Capitol Records SW 2442 1983 (1965 original release) Now there's some stereo separation for you. It was a toss-up between this and "Think for Yourself", but I was feeling this track more. In the key of Ab for those of you playing along at home. Music behind the DJ: "That's a Nice Cap" by George Martin & Orchestra
Nueva entrega del coleccionable "Aquellos maravillosos años", una serie de episodios esporádicos en donde rescatamos algunas de las grandes canciones que dieron forma a la música popular de la primera mitad de los años 60. Playlist; (sintonía) THE REVELS “Intóxica” THE BEATLES “I feel fine” THE SEARCHERS “Love potion nº 9” TONY JACKSON GROUP “Watch your step” THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP “I can’t stand it” JACKIE EDWARDS “Keep on runnin’” THEM “Gloria” JOHN D. LOUDERMILK “Road hog” DORIS TROY “Just one look” MARTHA REEVES and THE VANDELLAS “Quicksand” THE EXCITERS “It’s so exciting” BOBBY DARIN “Not for me” ROBERTO CARLOS “Splish Splash” THE VELVETS “Tonight (could be the night)” DICKEY LEE “I saw Linda yesterday” THE JELLY BEANS “I wanna love him so bad” LESLEY GORE “If that’s the way you want it” LITTLE RICHARD “You better stop” SOLOMON BURKE “You can’t love em all” THE JOHN BARRY ORCHESTRA “Time out” Escuchar audio
Delmore Recording Society is excited to announce the upcoming release of Wild Carnation's Tricycle as a Record Store Day 2023 exclusive on April 22. Tricycle is the long out-of-print debut album from this New Jersey-based trio comprising Brenda Sauter (The Feelies) on vocals and bass, guitarist Rich Barnes and Chris O'Donovan (Grey District) on drums and vocals. This will be a limited 500 copy pressing on 12” Carnation White vinyl LP: Tricycle's first release on vinyl. It'll come with a download code for the remastered album, demos, and a blistering live set recorded in Hamburg, Germany January 27, 1997. The live recording features unreleased originals and a selection of covers including Patti Smith ("Dancing Barefoot"), Ian Tyson ("Four Strong Winds"), and The Grass Roots ("Wait A Million Years”). Tricycle will be released as a download and via streaming platforms on April 28, including the original album, all the live material, demos, etc. Way back in the 1990s, a young Delmore stumbled into now-defunct NYC nightclub Wetlands (during the sadly also now defunct, NYU Independent Music Festival), just as Wild Carnation were about to begin their set. Having lived in NYC / Brooklyn / Hoboken the previous decade, where countless mesmerizing gigs by The Feelies, Yung Wu, Trypes and Speed The Plough, all with Brenda Sauter on bass, had been experienced, it was the chance to see her fronting her new group that drew Delmore in. A few songs into their set, it was apparent however that this trio was more than a Feelies offshoot project, despite melodic similarities, and Brenda's cool vocals / presence. Wild Carnation played raw, loud and fast (and occasionally out of control), with Rich Barnes' distorted, jangly guitar lines perfectly colliding with Brenda's propelling bass notes, while Chris O'Donovan kept it together, pounding the living hell out of his drums. It was a garagey, indie rock mess, more reminiscent of Hib-Tone / Chronic Town era REM, and emergent New Zealand bands like The Bats and The Clean, than The Feelies. Delmore was smitten, and determined to sign them, despite the fact that the Delmore label did not yet exist. In 1993, Wild Carnation's debut 7", "Dodger Blue" b/w "The Lights Are On (But No One's Home)", taken from raw home demos recorded the previous year, became the second Delmore release. A full-length album was then commissioned, and an evolving Wild Carnation holed up at Mix-O-Lydian recording studios with engineer Don Sternecker (The Feelies, Speed The Plough, Wake Ooloo) to record their debut full length, Tricycle, released in 1994. On Tricycle, the pastoral quality of their most beautiful ballads was captured to perfection, while retaining enough of the rawness of the live experience. Waves of critical acclaim followed, from now defunct publications (CMJ Jackpot! Raygun, Trouser Press) followed, including this one by Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover (Still going strong!), written for All Music Guide: "While the hook line for this new local trio would have to be that bassist/leader Brenda Sauter used to be a member of the later-'80s incarnation of the famous Feelies (and its notable offshoot, The Trypes), even if you didn't worship at the altar of that group (and especially if you did!), Wild Carnation is a revelation. While the persistent, pumping beat and hard-played jangle guitars of most of the tracks here emanate from her previous band and from their forerunners, the Velvets (especially), Television, and the Byrds - Sauter's beguiling voice is perfect for the ultra-appealing pop hooks the group writes as well as the thoughtful lyrics she composes. Trading the occasional Feelies drone for sugar-sweet melodies (yes!) and utilizing the pretty ring of the guitars to maximum effect, songs such as Wings are the perfect pop confectionery, too honeyed and delightful to miss capturing your bending heart and too consistently insistent and edgy to be wimpy, kind of like Reckoning-era R.E.M. It's all so well captured with pristine production, with balls to match the heart, too! And though the 12 tracks are largely cut from a similar mode, all seem special just the same on their own. A truly shining, first-rate effort, along with Lotion's and Nyack's early EPs and the last Flower LP, the best release to come out of a New York group this decade, and exceptionally crafted at that! Do not miss." Brenda's Info http://www.wildcarnation.com/home.html http://www.thefeeliesweb.com/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063570834484
Gina Birch is a true trailblazer. Co-founder of the all girl post punk band The Raincoats, the music herself and Ana de Silva headed up, which so often hit the soft spot between experimental, choaotic and melodic in the truest Velvets sense, paved the way for decades of music to come and did so much for female visibility in bands. Along the way, the group picked up fans like Kurt Cobain, who invited them on tour. Now, balancing a life of creativity between music, painting and film, Gina talks with Paul about her debut solo LP I Play My Bass Loud and reflects on everything from seeing The Slits to stilletoes to Zoom ettiquette to creativity.Gina Birch's album I Play My Bass Loud is out now on Third Man Records.Lost and Sound is proudly sponsored by Audio-TechnicaPaul's debut book, Coming To Berlin: Global Journeys Into An Electronic Music And Club Culture Capital is out now on Velocity Press. Click here to find out more. Lost and Sound title music by E.S.O
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. 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/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
Is it real or is it artificial intelligence? Only the A&R guys know for sure. Ben and MP discuss the latest technological advance that's killing music, and why real music made by real people is worth your dollars. Oh, and we decided during the recording of this episode that we would add bonus content, so, MORE real music for you. Episode playlist:Wednesday, "Chosen to Deserve"Billy Nomates, "Vertigo"Wilby, "Birthday"Madam Bombs, "Spiral" Sun Room, "Cadillac"About Bunny, "Teeth"Roxx Revolt & The Velvets, "Shotgun"Tulpa, "Ricochet"Maya Lakhani, "Torn in Two"Lifeguard, "Fifty Seven"Surf Curse, "Self Portrait"BONUS TRACK: Wednesday, "Bull Believer"
Coming from our nation's capital, Monument provided us with the Roy Orbison hit-making machine. Hit after hit from the Big O, while he also made the label for what it would become to be, when he discovered 4 high school students and their teacher Virgil Johnson who would later become the Velvets, and he introduced them to the label. You'll also hear the label's very first release hit "Gotta Travel On" by Billy Grammar, the original "Tobacco Road" by Bobby Brinkley and you'll end up dancing the "Shag", all guaranteed!
It's hard to believe an entire year has gone by since the release of Songs from The Skylark Bell, the official soundtrack to the podcast. In this episode you'll hear details about the songs, such as the inspiration behind them, and gain insight as to how they were recorded. There is a Patreon-exclusive extended version of this episode available to subscribers, you can find my Patreon using the link below.The Skylark Bell is brought to you by: Phaeton Starling Publishing and Things with Wings Productions.All music by Cannelle. Website: http://www.cannellemusic.comIG: @cannelle.musicThe Skylark Bell official website - http://www.theskylarkbell.comThe Skylark Bell on Instagram: @theskylarkbellAuthor/Producer: Melissa Oliveri - http://www.melissaoliveri.comJoin Melissa's Patreon for early access to podcast episodes, music downloads, and more: http://www.patreon.com/melissaoliveriMelissa on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/theskylarkbellMelissa on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@melissaoliveriOfficial Merch Shops: http://www.melissaoliveri.com/storeFULL TRANSCRIPT:Things with Wings productions presents – A Special episode of The Skylark Bell. I'm your host, Melissa Oliveri.Today we celebrate the one-year anniversary of Songs from The Skylark Bell – the official soundtrack to The Skylark Bell podcast, released under my stage name, Cannelle. This episode will feature track-by-track commentary on the album, including notes on the inspiration and method behind the songs. There will be an extended version of the episodes available exclusively to Patreon subscribers that will include unreleased material and additional insight.So, grab a blanket and a warm drink, and may I suggest some headphones... and let's get started.----------------------------------------------Let's begin with the intro music to The Skylark Bell, a short instrumental piece called Nightbridge. This song plays at the beginning of each episode of The Skylark Bell. After taking only 10 minutes to compose a song for my friend Amy's podcast, a song you can hear in the extended version of this episode if you are a Patreon Subscriber, I thought composing music for my own upcoming podcast would be a breeze. Boy was I wrong. Nothing I was coming up with felt right, and after several days of trial and error I was getting frustrated. I took a break from being hyper-focused on trying to compose a new song and sat at the piano to play some of my original songs and a few covers, when suddenly it hit me. One of my songs, Night, had a very intricate, interesting, mildly spooky bridge which just might work as a stand-alone piece of music. Sure enough, it was absolutely perfect for The Skylark Bell, and Nightbridge was born. If you listen carefully to the beginning, you can hear the wind blow, then a door open, then footsteps as if someone is coming in from outside. Hold that thought until we get to the end of the album... PLAY NIGHTBRIDGE – INTRONext up is Jack's Room. This song can be heard in Season 1 Fantome Friday #1, also titled Jack's Room. I composed this song over 20 years ago when I was living in Montreal – it was originally composed on guitar. If you are a Patreon Subscriber you can hear a portion of the original version now. The original version was written after a conversation with my dad about an unexplained encounter I had with a long departed relative about 10 years prior. Fast forward 30 years and I converted the song to the piano and recorded it for a podcast episode telling the story. I get a little emotional with this one because it has so much history. I actually cried after recording the strings in the bridge PLAY JACK'S ROOM.Okay, now we get into the first of what I call the “One-ders”, o-n-e-d-e-r-s. I call them that because they are short little pieces of music, typically about a minute or two, that I love dearly. This one is called The Early Bird, and can be heard in Season 1 Chapter 3, also called The Early Bird. I wanted some music to be playing in the diner when Magpie and Lucas walk in, and since the diner has a “great retro feel” it only seemed appropriate for the music to also have a vintage vibe. Of course, to keep in line with the general feeling of the story, I wanted to music to be somewhat dark and mysterious. What I ended up with was some noir, 1930's private eye movie type music, and I wouldn't have it any other way. PLAY THE EARLY BIRD.Next up is one of my favourite songs on the album – The Velvets. This song first played in Season 1 Fantome Friday #4, The Bootleggers, which tells the story of my encounter with a long-departed mobster at my friend Amy's old house in Minneapolis. Hot off the heels of The Early Bird, I was definitely in a retro, jazzy mode. I started with a baseline PLAY VELVETS BASELINE, then added some trumpet PLAY VELVETS with TRUMPET, the added some rather haphazard piano, PLAY VELVETS with PIANO, and topped it off with some sultry vocals... You can hear an instrumental version of this song in the podcast Volsteadland, which covers the real-life antics of Kid Cann. PLAY THE VELVETSNow we go to our next one-der, Visions. This piece of music is recurring throughout all seasons of The Skylark Bell and generally indicates Magpie is having or is about to have a psychic vision. It first appears in Season 1 Chapter 4 – An Unexpected Guest. This song was composed in a rather unusual, but often times very effective, way. I essentially plugged my keyboard into my laptop and hit record, then spontaneously built the song track by track through improvisation, muting things that didn't work and adding filler where necessary. The entire song was composed and recorded in one evening. My favourite part is how it fades a spooky low growl at the end. PLAY VISIONS.Up next is my favourite track on the album, and one of my favourite compositions to date – The Blue Dress. Before I started composing any songs for the podcast, I had come up with an instrumental tune inspired by the song Lady by Regina Spektor, which had me exploring more jazz type chords. My tune had a soft, cigar lounge kind of vibe, and went in a few different directions before circling back to the soft jazzy part again. When I wrote the story of The Woman I the Window for Season 1 Fantome Friday #2, I immediately knew which song in the making was right for the episode. I jotted down some lyrics and made small adjustments to the song and voila, The Blue Dress was complete. One of my favourite parts of the song is the background vocals – which I made up spur of the moment as I was recording. At first I was inclined to sing Lalalalalala... but generally I prefer to use actual words in my songs, and that's when I converted those simple Lalalas to “colilililiding cololololours”, which had a similar effect but much more meaning, as the two women are both wearing blue dresses, and both have blue eyes, their colours colliding through time PLAY COLLIDING COLOURS PART OF THE BLUE DRESS - Another part of the song I really like is the bridge, which gets quite orchestral – I love when the strings fade in PLAY THE BRIDGE TO THE BLUE DRESS. Lastly, I chose to use this electric piano sound because I'd hear Tori Amos use it effectively in so many of her songs, something I hadn't been able to do until now, but in this case, it seemed to fit perfectly with the vibe. PLAY THE BLUE DRESSNow we come to yet another little one-der, La Fête, French for The Party. This short piece of music first appears in Season 1 Chapter 6, An Accidental Discovery, in which Magpie has a vision that the abandoned house at Meadow Lane is all lit up and filled with light, people, and music. For this piece of music, I researched upbeat 1920s songs. I wanted it to sound like the music was coming from a Victrola, so I downloaded a sound effect and included it at the beginning of the song PLAY LA FETE. Up next is Song for a Loved One. This song was inspired by the sudden passing of a dear family member. Though the inspiration behind the song was a very specific person, the general feeling of it could apply to anyone experiencing loss and grief. Song for a Loved One first aired on the podcast in Season 1, Fantôme Friday #9 – Grandma's Goodbye. PLAY SONG FOR A LOVED ONE.We're just about at the halfway mark, and here is Foreign Emotion, which can be heard in Season 1, Fantome Friday #3 – The Open House. For this song I wanted something upbeat that would circle around the room like the ghost in the story. I took inspiration from the song Raspberry Swirl by Tori Amos. My favourite part of the song is the bridge, which mellows out and has a sound reminiscent of The Blue Dress. PLAY FOREIGN EMOTION.The next song on the track list is Les Soeurs, which translates literally to The Sisters, which in this context refers to nuns. The song was recorded for Season 1, Fantome Friday #10 – The Convent. This instrumental song at its origin was composed as intro music to another original song of mine called The You That You Were, completely unrelated to The Skylark Bell. As I was writing and recording the story of The Convent and what I experienced there, this song kept playing in my mind, and I felt like it was perfect for the mood, it's delicate, feminine, and foreboding... PLAY LES SOEURS.Up next is the most rapidly written song on the album – The Wedding Dress, which was paired with the most rapidly written story of the podcast, also called The Wedding Dress, which was Fantome Friday #12 in Season 1. Both the story and song were spontaneously written and recorded in less than 48 hours and were inspired by my wedding anniversary, which happened to be that same week. Patreon Subscribers can download a remixed and remastered version of the track that was reworked by Pink Flamingo Music Studios. PLAY THE WEDDING DRESS.Now we've come to The Lady in the Room, the feature song for Season 1, Fantome Friday #6 – The House on Edgar Street. If you've listened to the episode, you'll know about the 2 female ghosts I encountered in my childhood home on Edgar Street, one lovely and kind, the other not so much. As a side note, I firmly believe that instruments have music inside of them. Every time I've gotten a new, or new-to-me, instrument, it has provided me with new compositions. It was no different when I first bought a second-hand piano a few years ago. I sat down and spontaneously wrote a very simple, very short piece of music that I instinctively named The Lady in the Room. In my mind, the lady in question was this new piano that was taking up a tremendous amount of space in my house, but later on when pondering the two ghosts in my childhood home, I felt the song title, and the song itself, fit perfectly. PLAY THE LADY IN THE ROOM.Ah, it's time for another of my favourite songs on the album – A Strange New Year, which crowned the final episode of Season 1 of The Skylark Bell. The song was inspired by Magpie and Lucas, and the short bonus episode I wrote for them where they are celebrating the new year in a Scottish Pub, but despite the joyful atmosphere, something feels... off. The song was also inspired, in part, by the strange circumstances we found ourselves in during the pandemic holiday seasons of 2020 and 2021. As I worked through the lyrics of the song, I came to realise that even though the past two years had been highly unusual, each previous year had its own unique set of circumstances. Truly, behind me was a string of strange old years. The song came together and was recorded just in time to be included on the soundtrack. Listening to the recording is a very visual experience for me, I can practically see an entire video: From Magpie and Lucas' faces lit up by a sparkler at the beginning, to the tartan-clad crowd dancing in circles during the orchestral larger-than-life bridge. PLAY A STRANGE NEW YEAR.The last song on the official version of the record released to streaming platforms is a take on The Skylark Bell theme song, Nightbridge, that is used for the outro of each regular episode. This version of the song is more stripped down, and features haunting vocals that aren't in the intro version. Also, fun tidbit – remember at the beginning of this album overview I told you to remember the sound effects at the beginning of the song? At the start of each episode you hear wind, a door, then footsteps, as if someone is coming in from outside to sit and read the story. Then, at the end of each episode, you hear the reverse; footsteps, a door, and wind... as if the person who was reading the story is getting up and leaving. PLAY NIGHTBRIDGE OUTRO.Now, if you were lucky enough to be a Patreon subscriber last year, you received a physical CD of Songs from The Skylark Bell in addition to the digital download. This CD featured 2 bonus songs not available on the official release that can be found on streaming platforms. Here's some top secret info, you can also get a digital version of the album with the 2 bonus songs by purchasing it through Bandcamp. The first of those 2 songs is Kaleidoscope, which plays in Season 1 Fantome Friday #8, The Harlequin. This song was inspired by the loss of a dear friend nearly 25 years ago, this loss is explored in the story featured in that episode. I was inspired to add subtle Harpsichord to the song by my friend Sam on Instagram, who had composed a song on harpsichord right around the time I was recording. It's quite subtle, see if you can spot it. PLAY KALEIDOSCOPE.The second bonus song is an acoustic version of Nightbridge, which was recorded during one of my Instagram Live music shows. This acoustic version aired on the podcast in Season 1 Fantome Friday #7, The Bridge. PLAY NIGHTBRIDGE ACOUSTIC.-----------------------------------This wraps up our episode celebrating one year since the release of Songs from The Skylark Bell. Patreon subscribers, please stick around, there is additional content coming your way after this.Be sure to join me next week for a fantastically scary collaboration with The Haunted UK podcast called Return to Manor Ridge Farm. While you're waiting for the episode to drop, I suggest you listen to The Haunted UK's 2021 Halloween Special Episode, since my upcoming episode will be a tie in with that one. Just check the show notes for a direct link. If you enjoy my music, you can find it on BandCamp and major streaming platforms under my stage name Cannelle. You can also support my work by subscribing to Patreon – there you'll get to hear more about some of the songs I've composed for other podcasts, like A Carefully Built Pretend, Collected Sounds, and The Activity Continues, among many other things. Just check the show notes for links to Patreon, Bandcamp, My Website and social media.Once again, thank you for listening, I'm Melissa Oliveri, also known as Cannelle, and this is The Skylark Bell podcast.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/theskylarkbell/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
The Jokermen are joined by the great Dean Wareham (Luna, Galaxie 500) to cover the only Put It On record the Velvets ever made. FOLLOW DEAN ON INSTAGRAM CATCH LUNA ON TOUR NEXT MONTH SUBSCRIBE TO JOKERMEN ON PATREON NEW MERCH NOW AVAILABLE ON JOKERMEN.NET LISTEN TO OUR BEST OF JOHN + BEST OF LOU 70s PLAYLISTS FOLLOW JOKERMEN ON TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, AND YOUTUBE
In October, 1966, the singer Nico began a residency at a bar in the East Village. She wore a white pantsuit and wielded a tambourine; her drawn vowels hung in the smoky air. She was still playing occasional shows with the Velvet Underground, whose first album would be released the following year. But, to Nico's dismay, the band's leader, Lou Reed, refused to play guitar at her solo shows, and barred the rest of the group from joining her. Onstage, she was forced to sing to a prerecorded backing from a small cassette player. “The tears would roll down her face because she just couldn't remember how the buttons worked,” Andy Warhol, who managed the Velvets, recalled. Humiliation was a theme: four months later, at a club called the Dom, Warhol tried to make her perform inside a Plexiglas box.Nico was used to being treated as a physical spectacle. At the Dom, Leonard Cohen was a regular guest, and he began writing songs in hopes of seducing her. Her improbable bone structure, and her role in “La Dolce Vita,” intrigued prominent rock managers like Albert Grossman, who worked with Bob Dylan. But her songs were less appealing, and the Dom's clientele often laughed through her set. She was eventually accompanied on guitar by Tim Buckley, and then by Jackson Browne, who had just arrived in New York. Browne became enamored with Nico, and before they fell out—she accused him of harassing her with obscene phone calls—he gave her two songs: “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “These Days,” both of which appeared on her 1967 début, “Chelsea Girl.”Few songs so beautifully misrepresent a singer as “These Days.” The clarity of Browne's fingerpicked guitar lines, and the delicacy of Nico's languor, is rendered just alien enough by her vocals, a more tuneful version of the stentorian drawl she used with the Velvets. “Please don't confront me with my failures / I had not forgotten them,” she sings. Since its inclusion in Wes Anderson's 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” where it accompanies a kohl-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow, “These Days” has become Nico's best-known song, a hymn of stifled glamour. It reinforces her popular image, which has been confected from late-sixties publicity stills, bits of blank-stare footage from Warhol films, and photographs of her with Reed and John Cale, the Velvets' Welsh savant. She migrates in the mind between fashion and folk, downtown bohème and Fellini-sponsored stardom. And always, in case you don't know, there is the spectre of her heroin addiction, the protracted ruin of her personal life. -The New Yorker
Writing about the Bedhead career retrospective 1992-1998 for Pitchfork, writer Mark Richardson put it nicely: “Bedhead had no time for or interest in anything extraneous to the music…And this is what it sounded like—serious, intense, smart, beautiful, occasionally frightening...” Today on the show, we are joined by the Kadane Brothers, who founded Bedhead in 1991 in Dallas, Texas. Matt Kadane calls in from his place in New York, where he teaches history, and Bubba Kadane from Texas, where he composes music for film and television. One of the defining bands of the “slowcore” movement, Bedhead had three guitars but was sparse, melding post-punk to humming Velvets-inspired intensity. Following the end of Bedhead, they formed another pioneering indie rock band, The New Year, and they've dabbled in side projects all along the way, including Overseas, with David Bazan of Pedro the Lion and Will Johnson of Centro-matic, and Bubba's ambient project Sigh of Relief. On this episode of Transmissions, we dig into Bedhead's history and idiosyncratic approach, exploring how they worked “remotely” and by telephone long before remote work was standard, the space carved out by Bedhead's unique sound, their cover of Cher's “Believe,” and much more. Thanks for checking out Transmissions. If you dig the show, please consider leaving a five star rating or a review—or just forwarding your favorite episodes to a friend. We're a part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Next week on the show: Kid Congo Powers.
John Cale is 80: no second invitation needed to celebrate the Velvets, his solo work, his musical contributions and his production as well.
PBS, ABCI LOVE History of Vocals n Music, Rock & Roll/Soul & Today I Get to go Back BEFORE my Time on Earth in the Rock & Soul Chart Dial to an AWESOME vocalist in the Music Era. And with New Music From The Heart & a Single "After You". Larry also as a New Jazz Album & a Single with Billy Vera.. And He's Got More Music, Concerts & TV Appearances Too.Larry Chance was the driving force behind the group's formation and success. Chance grew up in Philadelphia and attended high school with Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon, and Danny Rapp of Danny & the Juniors. But it was not until 1957 that he moved with his parents to the Bronx after high school, that his musical career took off.Chance formed a group at the Tecumsa Social Club, known as the Hi-Hatters. The group was Chance, Bob Del Din, Eddie Harder, Larry Palombo and John Wray. Later, in 1961, the Earls lost their original member Larry Palombo in an army skydiving accident. In 1961, Rome released the Earls' first record – "Life is But a Dream" (Rome 101 – 1961)[2] b/w "It's You" (and in the late 1970s released with "Whoever You Are" as the B-side). The group then performed with Murray the K and on Dick Clark's American Bandstand show. They released another record that year, "Looking For My Baby" (Rome 102) b/w "Cross My Heart".In 1962, the group hooked up with Stan Vincent and recorded "Remember Then" for Old Town Records (Old Town 1130) b/w "Let's Waddle".[2] It was a hit, peaking at #24 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963. Chance co-wrote the group's next single "Never" b/w "I Keep A-Tellin You" (Old Town 1133–1963). The group scored another hit in 1963 on Old Town with "Eyes" b/w "Look My Way" (Old Town 1141). Later, a demo "I Believe" was released (Old Town 1149–1963) b/w "Don't Forget".[2] "I Believe" became a much bigger record from the 1970s onward as it received heavy airplay on NYC oldies radio.Chance later had a brief solo career, recording "Let Them Talk". He returned to the Earls who, at that time, had two new members – Bob Moricco and Ronnie Calabrese. The group started playing their own instruments and, in 1967, recorded "If I Could Do It Over" b/w "Papa" (Mr. G 801 – 1967), and a track for ABC Records, "Its Been a Long Time Coming" b/w "In My Lonely Room" (ABC 11109–1967).The group continued performing into the 1970s and, in 1977, they released a disco version of The Velvets' "Tonight (Could Be the Night)." By 1983, the group's personnel were Chance, Ronnie Calabrese, Colon Rello, Bobby Tribuzio and Tony Obert, and they recorded Larry Chance and the Earls – Today.From 1989-1993, the group consisted of: Larry Chance, Bobby Tribuzzio, Bob Coleman, Art Loria (formerly of The Belmonts) and T.J. Barbella. This roster continued a busy performance schedule and studio works. In 1989, they were on Broadway performing in the original production of A Bronx Tale, a one man play by Chazz Palminteri. They recorded the theme song of the production "Streets of the Bronx", which was slated to appear on the soundtrack of the motion picture A Bronx Tale, however a different version of the song was eventually chosen. Two albums were released: Larry Chance and the Earls (Live!) and Earl Change. Another single released in 1989 was "Elvis:He's Alive", which was warmly received by critics and received a BMI Award of Recognition of a Musical Work. They were nominated as "Best Musical Act" in Atlantic City for their eight week run at The Claridge Hotel, starring with Sal Richards.LarryChanceandtheEarls.com© 2022 Building Abundant Success!!2022 All Rights ReservedJoin Me on ~ iHeart Media @ https://tinyurl.com/iHeartBASSpot Me on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/yxuy23baAmazon Music ~ https://tinyurl.com/AmzBASAudacy: https://tinyurl.com/BASAud
"GERMINATING IN THE SOIL"THE WEB OF SOUND by The Seeds (GNP Crescendo, 1966)1966 was probably the high water mark year for Garage Rock: There was Gloria by Shadows of Knight; Psychotic Reaction by Count V; Talk Talk by the Music Machine; We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet by The Blues Magoos, and the Eldorado of the genre: 96 Tears by ? And the Mysterians - just imagine all that Fuzz -Farfisa ripeness! Even yours truly at age 13 had his band The Full House covering all those tunes at the Princeton Hospital Fete that summer.But the undisputed King of Garage Rock was Sky Saxon of The Seeds (one of the house bands at Bido Lito's in Hollywood - also home of Love), and this recording The Web of Sound has all the elements of what one critic called “snotty aggression with some heavier psychedelic flourishes” that made garage rock the indelible statement that it was. The 14 minute “Up in her Room” , with its penetrating bottleneck guitar work by Cooker, has been compared to The Velvet Underground's “Sister Ray”, and the influence of The Seeds, like their east coast counterparts, the Velvets, was enormous. Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and many other credit Sky and his band to be their inspirations.Sky, born Richard Elven Marsh to a Mormon family in 1937, had traveled a long distance spiritually when he joined the Yahowha vegetarian cult following Father Yod, taking the additional name of “Sunlight.” Enroute, he masterminded some of the most infectiously growling proto- punk ever, and on this set he leads us through its many mansions with slimy yet sinuous renditions of Tripmaker, Farmer John, and Rolling Machine.Interesting note: this cartridge is not an 8, but a 4 track - the format that preceded the 8. The carts have no pinch roller, and the tape is engaged by a lever on the player. Ancient technology for the most primitive of wonderments.Side One:1. | "Mr. Farmer" | Sky Saxon | 2:522. | "Pictures and Designs" | Daryl Hooper, Saxon | 2:443. | "Tripmaker" | Hooper, Marcus Tybalt | 2:484. | "I Tell Myself" | Tybalt | 2:315. | "A Faded Picture" | Hooper, Saxon | 5:206. | "Rollin' Machine" | Saxon, Tybalt | 2:32Side Two:1. | "Just Let Go" | Hooper, Jan Savage, Saxon | 4:212. | "Up in Her Room" | Saxon | 14:45
Despite some identifiable influences (Velvets, Modern Lovers, Eno…), the Feelies are a band like no other. Their sound is crisp, their playing precise and explosive, their songs indelible in an often-mysterious way. Glenn Mercer and Bill Million provide the jittery, chiming guitars, while Brenda Sauter delivers melodic bass lines amid the propulsive thunder of Stan Demeski's drums and Dave Weckerman's percussion. Singer-songwriter-lead-guitarist Mercer, who views his voice as just another instrument, takes us through the Feelies' pursuit of its unique vision over 40-plus years, including such brilliant albums as Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth, that Something Wild appearance, an early shakeup and later breakup, and a triumphant last roundup that will last...how long?
In 1978, UK industrial and experimental music pioneers Nurse With Wound, then a collaborative effort between multiple musicians before Steven Stapleton would turn the project into his braintrust some years later, released its debut album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. That record, the title of which references an excerpt of Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, is one of the primary influences on all that which would later be known as industrial, experimental, or noise music from that point on. More important than the album, however, is its liner notes. What has become known as the Nurse With Wound list was printed in the liner notes of the record: a list of over 200 avant-garde and outsider artists and groups that were influential on the development of Nurse with Wound in particular but that also can be used to historicize the avant-garde tendency in music writ large. From ground zero avant-rock like the Velvets to obscure European Jazz like Thrice Mice to pioneers of avant-garde composition like Karlheinz Stockhausen, the NWW list opens the floodgates to a new method of engagement with sound. In this episode, the boys invite Joey from the Easy Listening podcast to journey through the NWW list with all three of them finding three artists from it that appeal to their own sensibilities. OST Joe Potts "Airway" Robert Ashley "Automatic Writing" Chrome "SS Cygni" Le Forte Four "To the Crow" Pere Ubu "Small Was Fast" Horrific Child "Angoisse" The Decayes "Breeding in Captivity" Alvin Lucier "Bird & Person Dyning" Selten Gehorte Musik "Untitled" LINKS: Easy Listening podcast with John Duncan NWW List NWW Brainwashed doc Steven Stapleton interview Bob Nickas on NWW
Roxx Revolt of the great new rock band Roxx Revolt and the Velvets makes her show debut to discuss her love of glam rock, why she thinks it's poised to make a comeback, coming to America to chase her dreams, trying to find a band in the open mic circuit, and why being an opener is an uphill battle.
Punk Rock Month '22 continues with a re-release of one of our best episodes of the last year, Lou & The Velvets! Follow the story of Lou Reed and how his intersection with the rest of The Velvet Underground changed Rock History! Learn how Syracuse University is part of the story of how it all happened!This classic episode was originally presented in July '21 as part of Listener Episode Month, and suggested by Frank McKenzie from the UK! (If you'd like to be part of this year's Listener Episode Month, hit us here via our web site or email us with your idea at: imbalancedhistory@gmail.com)PRM '22 wraps up April with a new episode all about The Sex Pistols!!!Find all of our episodes (and more) here: https://imbalancedhistory.com/
Punk Rock Month '22 continues with a re-release of one of our best episodes of the last year, Lou & The Velvets! Follow the story of Lou Reed and how his intersection with the rest of The Velvet Underground changed Rock History! Learn how Syracuse University is part of the story of how it all happened! This classic episode was originally presented in July '21 as part of Listener Episode Month, and suggested by Frank McKenzie from the UK! (If you'd like to be part of this year's Listener Episode Month, hit us here via our web site or email us with your idea at: imbalancedhistory@gmail.com) PRM '22 wraps up April with a new episode all about The Sex Pistols!!! Find all of our episodes (and more) here: https://imbalancedhistory.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Punk Rock Month '22 continues with a re-release of one of our best episodes of the last year, Lou & The Velvets! Follow the story of Lou Reed and how his intersection with the rest of The Velvet Underground changed Rock History! Learn how Syracuse University is part of the story of how it all happened!This classic episode was originally presented in July '21 as part of Listener Episode Month, and suggested by Frank McKenzie from the UK! (If you'd like to be part of this year's Listener Episode Month, hit us here via our web site or email us with your idea at: imbalancedhistory@gmail.com)PRM '22 wraps up April with a new episode all about The Sex Pistols!!!Find all of our episodes (and more) here: https://imbalancedhistory.com/
Get set to slam! For the next few weeks, there's an extra dose of sneer in here! It's Punk Rock Month #2! Before L.A. Punk became synonymous with Skaters and Hardcore, someone had to established a beach head in the land of sun, Zen and beaches! This week's new episode, as part of Punk Rock Month '22, tells the story of the band, X - how they came together, forged their own path, and set the bar, before influencing countless other bands over the decades. Next week: It's a re-release of Lou & The Velvets originally presented in July '21 as part of Listener Episode Month, and suggested by Frank McKenzie from UK! If you'd like to be part of this year's Listener Episode Month, hit us here via our web site or email us with your idea at: imbalancedhistory@gmail.com PRM '22 wraps up with a fanf**kingtastic, new episode about The Sex Pistols!!! Find all of our episodes (and more) here: https://imbalancedhistory.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Get set to slam! For the next few weeks, there's an extra dose of sneer in here! It's Punk Rock Month #2! This week we re-present a fave classic episode that's also kind of recent, CBGB: Birthplace Of Punk! The story of Hilly and the club that spawned Punk in the U.S., and created a scene, is fun, and kind of sad in places. But mainly, it's about the music, live and raw, presented in The Bowery nightly... The rest of PRM '22 (#PRM22) shakes out this way: Next week: A fresh, new episode dedicated to L.A.'s Punk scene founders, X! Then it's a re-release of Lou & The Velvets originally presented in July '21 as part of Listener Episode Month, and suggested by Frank McKenzie from UK! If you'd like to be part of this year's Listener Episode Month, hit us here via our web site or email us with your idea at: imbalancedhistory@gmail.com PRM '22 wraps up with a fanf**kingtastic, new episode about The Sex Pistols!!! Find all of our episodes (and more) here: https://imbalancedhistory.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode we welcome the excellent Kate Mossman to our state-of-the-art recording suite and ask her about her writing career and musical passions. She talks about working with Mark Ellen at The Word and about her current employer the New Statesman, and Jasper quotes from a recent Statesman piece she wrote about her secret passion for jazz fusion.Kate's interview with "mean old daddy" Cary Raditz affords her the chance to talk about her beloved Joni Mitchell and the classic Blue song Raditz inspired. Joni's request to follow Neil Young's lead and have Blue and other albums removed from Spotify prompts discussion of the streaming platform's headaches in the wake of Joe Rogan's COVID disinformation.Another of Kate's Statesman pieces, about Lou Reed, gives her and co-hosts Mark & Barney the perfect excuse to riff on Reed's notoriously sadistic treatment of British interviewers — and the cue for Mark to talk about Martin Aston's 1989 audio interview with the ex-Velvets man. From there we turn to Lou's fellow contrarian Morrissey and the "severed alliance" between him and former Smiths bandmate Johnny Marr. With the latter releasing a new album this month, Kate and the RBP crew reflect on the very different personalities (and values) of the two Mancunians.After noting the passing of folk matriarch Norma Waterson, Mark references recently-added library pieces about Sam Cooke, Todd Rundgren and the late Janice Long. Jasper then finishes things off with observations on pieces about Glass Animals and Adele.Many thanks to special guest Kate Mossman; find her writing in the New Statesman and on RBP.Pieces discussed: Jazz fusion, Carey Raditz, Lou Reed, Lou Reed audio, Johnny Marr, the Smiths, Morrissey, Norma Waterson, Sam Cooke, Scott Walker, Steve Paul, Nona Hendryx, Vicki Wickham, Black Sabbath, Todd Rundgren, Janice Long, Laura Barton's heckler's guide, Glass Animals and Adele.
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