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32.029 The stars at night, are big and ROCKIN' deep in the heart of TEXAS! Enjoy our incredible 22nd Annual Lonestar Roundup episode of "Go Kat, GO!" featuring rockin' music from ALL of the band performing at the Lonestar Roundup. PLUS we get an up-close-and-personal interview with festival organizer Steve Wertheimer of the Continental Club. Hear fresh new rockin' music from Union Avenue, Bloodshot Bill, Tami Neilson & JD McPherson and The Hot Rod Gang plus plenty of powerful picks from the Motorbilly vaults including Johnny Burnette, Joe Poovey, Vince Taylor & The Playboys, Alvis Wayne, Jape Richardson, Roy Orbison & Jerry Lee Lewis. Enjoy a huge 3+ hour blast of retro-styled roots of rock n' roll with the Aztec Werewolf™, DJ Del Villarreal and his Wednesday night platter party, "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" -good to the last bop!™Please follow on FaceBook, Instagram & Twitter!
• Sponsored by BudDocs.org for medical marijuana licenses • BudDocs offers easy, same-day telemedicine appointments • Dr. Chanlatte curates BudDeals and dispensary discounts • Live from the JustCallMoe.com studio • Rauce joins the Friday Free Show • Rauce plugs “Good Sauce with Rauce and Joel” and their Fringe show • Recap of chaotic BDM $5 shirt-stuffing party at Hourglass Brewing • Koozie stuffing chaos and Tony Rage's Minecraft-style table slide • Tom stresses over organizing volunteer events • Vince Taylor arrives on wrong date after Tom typo • Vince left his sick mom, showed up in BDM gear, found only fishermen • “Getting Tommied” becomes shorthand for careless screwups • Tom offers to pay Vince's gas, Vince jokes about his 18-wheeler • Vince plugs his podcast and May 4 Star Wars brunch at Funny Bone • Tom & Dan join Temu affiliate program for cheap party gear • Tom orders tiny gardening shears from Temu, slow shipping • Dan never uses Uber Eats, agrees with Rauce that $5 is a solid tip • Uber Eats vs. old-school pizza delivery and tipping debates • Grocery bag strength becomes a pride topic • Ikea story: listener scans 59 items at self-checkout, gets mocked • Dan prefers real cashier interaction, jokes he brightens their day • Frustration over unpaid labor at self-checkout • Poop story from workplace where someone smeared it on a wall • Hot take: fondue sucks, Tom tips himself • Dan's daughter loves taquitos, nostalgia for junk food athletes • Temu bag delivery compared to opium ships • Song “Catch These Fizz” by Wet Leg played during break • StreamlineFlorida.com plug for mortgage help from Brian ZIML • Rauce & Joel's Fringe show titled “10 More Sketches” • Joke about flaunting past awards like Super Bowl rings • Tom wants to be a Kratos-style cool dad • Max learns card tricks on a camping trip • Tom teaches TikTok magic and finds comfort in math-based tricks • David Blaine nostalgia: 1997 special, studio visit after cursing • Listeners revealed levitation secret, Masked Magician reference • Magician Jeff Kaylor sells tricks to pros, Kostya Kimlat shoutout • Tooth Fairy talk leads to joke about Tooth Fairy porn • Celebrities like The Rock and Larry the Cable Guy played Tooth Fairy • Dan mentions hanging with a teen curious about podcasting • Teasers: cruise godmothers, Island Boys, Epic Universe • Song “Apocalypse Soon” by local band Debt Neglector • Fairvilla event plugs: Oral 101, Bootylicious Anal, Sex Toys 101 • Sanford Food Truck Fiesta judged by Angel and Brian Grimes • Dan forgets a studio visit, wears Crocs post-surgery • Dan hides when visitors knock unexpectedly • Student visits about radio but actually loves jazz and R&B • Dan recommends OrlandoBands.com and Ben Gardner • Internships: how Dan got his job after “Apple Annie” incident • Modern interns expect pay; Rauce says timing still matters • Dan jokes Tom's kids have no dreams, but offers help to listeners' kids • Dan says he has industry connections to make dreams come true • Rauce confirms Dan has Carrot Top in his phone • Dan compares himself to Willy Wonka of Orlando networking • Rauce visited Epic Universe three times, says it beats Disney • Highlights: Stardust Racers coaster, drink-around-the-universe • Praise for How to Train Your Dragon show and Dark Universe land • Dan wants to dress like Toad and ride Mario Kart drunk • Cruise guy Tony attends MSC christening with celebs • Drew Barrymore named godmother of the ship • Cruise godmother role explained: honorary, free cruise • Listener suggests D-Generation X crotch chop as dream fan moment • Tom dreams of catching an NFL pass • Dan shot on the Magic court thanks to Jeff Turner • Foo Fighters and Green Day inviting fans to play onstage discussed • Parenting efforts often go unnoticed until kids grow up • Moe DeWitt sponsors Rauce's podcast and Fringe show • Promo for Moe DeWitt Bowling Tournament (sold out) • Tease for April 19 BDM event with erotic magic and DJ Sharp ### **Social Media:** [Website](https://tomanddan.com/) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/tomanddanlive) | [Facebook](https://facebook.com/amediocretime) | [Instagram](https://instagram.com/tomanddanlive) **Where to Find the Show:** [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-mediocre-time/id334142682) | [Google Podcasts](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2FtZWRpb2NyZXRpbWUvcG9kY2FzdC54bWw) | [TuneIn](https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy/A-Mediocre-Time-p364156/) **The Tom & Dan Radio Show on Real Radio 104.1:** [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-corporate-time/id975258990) | [Google Podcasts](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2Fjb3Jwb3JhdGV0aW1lL3BvZGNhc3QueG1s) | [TuneIn](https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy/A-Corporate-Time-p1038501/) **Exclusive Content:** [Join BDM](https://tomanddan.com/registration) **Merch:** [Shop Tom & Dan](https://tomanddan.myshopify.com/)
No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie's London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and generally raised the temperature. We talk here about many of those old haunts and the stories attached to them, which include… … mysterious manager Ralph Horton who got him to change his name to Bowie and then vanished from the face of the earth. … the fate of Heddon Street, home of K-West and the Ziggy phone-box. … Marc Bolan refusing to let him sing at an all-night benefit at Middle Earth. … “the Fairy Godmother of the New Romantics” at the WAG Club. … when Lionel Bart came to Haddon Hall. … Bowie and Steve Marriott auditioning for the Lower Third. … how he levered his way into a Fabulous magazine fashion shoot. … “the end of the age of Showbiz”: performing Chim Chim Cher-ee at the Marquee when at a crossroads between rock and roll and cabaret. … the magical piano at the Trident Studios. … a chance encounter with the otherworldly Vince Taylor whose ‘UFO map' helped inspire the concept of Ziggy Stardust. … the legend of Mr Fish, creator of the man-dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World. … the days when people had a white Rolls Royce and matching Alsatian – and “the Great Sarong Scare of the ‘90s”. … and various fringe figures including his art teacher Owen Frampton, Konrads agents Bob Knight and Eric Easton, muse and heartbreaker Hermione Farthingale, producers Shel Talmy and Tony Hatch (“the original Mr Nasty from Opportunity Knocks”) and slum landlord and racketeer Peter Rackman. Order Paul's street-map here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowies-London-Paul-Gorman/dp/1068523476Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie's London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and generally raised the temperature. We talk here about many of those old haunts and the stories attached to them, which include… … mysterious manager Ralph Horton who got him to change his name to Bowie and then vanished from the face of the earth. … the fate of Heddon Street, home of K-West and the Ziggy phone-box. … Marc Bolan refusing to let him sing at an all-night benefit at Middle Earth. … “the Fairy Godmother of the New Romantics” at the WAG Club. … when Lionel Bart came to Haddon Hall. … Bowie and Steve Marriott auditioning for the Lower Third. … how he levered his way into a Fabulous magazine fashion shoot. … “the end of the age of Showbiz”: performing Chim Chim Cher-ee at the Marquee when at a crossroads between rock and roll and cabaret. … the magical piano at the Trident Studios. … a chance encounter with the otherworldly Vince Taylor whose ‘UFO map' helped inspire the concept of Ziggy Stardust. … the legend of Mr Fish, creator of the man-dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World. … the days when people had a white Rolls Royce and matching Alsatian – and “the Great Sarong Scare of the ‘90s”. … and various fringe figures including his art teacher Owen Frampton, Konrads agents Bob Knight and Eric Easton, muse and heartbreaker Hermione Farthingale, producers Shel Talmy and Tony Hatch (“the original Mr Nasty from Opportunity Knocks”) and slum landlord and racketeer Peter Rackman. Order Paul's street-map here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowies-London-Paul-Gorman/dp/1068523476Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
No musician is more closely associated with London or left more footprints than Bowie, and you can trace its influence on his life and work (and vice versa) through a series of landmarks from the suburbs to the centre. Author and curator Paul Gorman has just published an annotated street-map – David Bowie's London - listing the places that played a formative role in his world and music, the places he rehearsed, performed, filmed and recorded, the homes of friends and managers, his schools and the addresses where he lived, worked and was photographed, made connections, bought clothes and generally raised the temperature. We talk here about many of those old haunts and the stories attached to them, which include… … mysterious manager Ralph Horton who got him to change his name to Bowie and then vanished from the face of the earth. … the fate of Heddon Street, home of K-West and the Ziggy phone-box. … Marc Bolan refusing to let him sing at an all-night benefit at Middle Earth. … “the Fairy Godmother of the New Romantics” at the WAG Club. … when Lionel Bart came to Haddon Hall. … Bowie and Steve Marriott auditioning for the Lower Third. … how he levered his way into a Fabulous magazine fashion shoot. … “the end of the age of Showbiz”: performing Chim Chim Cher-ee at the Marquee when at a crossroads between rock and roll and cabaret. … the magical piano at the Trident Studios. … a chance encounter with the otherworldly Vince Taylor whose ‘UFO map' helped inspire the concept of Ziggy Stardust. … the legend of Mr Fish, creator of the man-dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World. … the days when people had a white Rolls Royce and matching Alsatian – and “the Great Sarong Scare of the ‘90s”. … and various fringe figures including his art teacher Owen Frampton, Konrads agents Bob Knight and Eric Easton, muse and heartbreaker Hermione Farthingale, producers Shel Talmy and Tony Hatch (“the original Mr Nasty from Opportunity Knocks”) and slum landlord and racketeer Peter Rackman. Order Paul's street-map here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowies-London-Paul-Gorman/dp/1068523476Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
December 2024 Dante's Old South Prince Stash: Stanislas Klossowski de Rola is an author, entrepreneur, actor, singer, and music producer. He performed and worked with various bands including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Vince Taylor & The Playboys, during the Swinging Sixties in London, Rome, Paris, and Los Angeles. Made infamous for his arrest with The Rolling Stones founder, Brian Jones, his engagement to Italian superstar, Romina Power, and for being a fashion icon launching the New Romantic look that was all the rage in the ‘70s, Prince Stash comes from a line of scandalous and very colorful figures in his ancestry. Prince Stash currently spends his time between his Italian castle, Californian beach house, and other exotic international locations. www.princestash.com Warren Haynes - A Grammy Award-winning artist, Warren Haynes has been recognized as a cornerstone of the American music landscape and revered as one of the finest guitar players in the world. Throughout his prolific career as part of three of the greatest live groups in rock history – Allman Brothers Band, Gov't Mule and the Dead –his virtuosic artistry has led to thousands of unforgettable performances and millions of album and track sales. Despite all of the ground that Haynes has covered on his musical journey, the impressive thing is that he still has many miles to explore. On his newest solo album Ashes & Dust, he puts forth one of his most gorgeous, musically rich and personal albums to date. It is endlessly exciting to see one of the most brilliant minds in modern music shine an entirely new light on the depths of his creativity. www.warrenhaynes.net Andrew Mack is the Founder and Managing Editor of Loblolly Press. His commitment to fostering emerging writers particularly those from marginalized or underrepresented communities drives Loblolly Press's mission to showcase contemporary poetry, short fiction, and novels with a distinctly Southern voice. Andrew has published two collections of his own poetry, Weekend Revival and What the River Was. He lives in Asheville, NC with his partner. www.loblollypress.com Justin Johnson has been hailed by Guitar World as a "must-see act", dubbed "The Wizard" for his mastery of stringed instruments, and recognized as Slidestock International Slide Guitar Champion. In 2014, Justin Johnson recorded his debut double album, "Smoke & Mirrors"; a celebration of the art, history, and traditions behind handmade roots instruments. The album saw its official release in March of 2014, as Johnson took the stage to present his signature approach to Roots music to thousands of fans at Port Fairy Folk Festival, Australia's largest and longest-running Folk Festival, thus ushering in the 2014/2015 Smoke & Mirrors World Tour, which spanned mainland Australia and Tasmania, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom Additional Music by: Six One Five Collective: www.sixonefivecollective.com Our Sponsors: Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com Whispers of the Flight: www.amazon.com/Whispers-Flight-Voyage-Cosmic-Unity- ebook/dp/B0DB3TLY43 The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com Bright Hill Press: www.brighthillpress.org We Deeply Appreciate: UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org NPR: https: www.npr.org WUTC: www.wutc.org Alain Johannes for the original score in this show: www.alainjohannes.com The host, Clifford Brooks', The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. Find them all here: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order Check out his Teachable courses, The Working Writer and Adulting with Autism, here: brooks-sessions.teachable.com
On est tous debout... toute la journée au Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean
Ce matin, lundi 18 novembre avec Vincent, Marie-Ève et Jean-Michel : Jean-Michel revient sur le spectacle de Taylor Swift qu'il a vu en fin de semaine. Les crushs de Vincent : La série The Bear Comment mesurez-vous le temps dans L'à-côté de Jean-Michel ! Aimez-vous votre prénom ? On adresse les rumeurs sur une candidate d'OD Croyez-vous aux sciences occultes ? Êtes-vous bons avec le long terme ? Bonne écoute !
Sermon Synopsis As believers in God, we are called to live our lives God's way, being willing to align with God's word. As we live God's way, we demonstrate the attributes of the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Also, as we live our lives God's way and follow Jesus, we share our faith with neighbors and nations and reflect Jesus Christ, our Savior, to the world.
TUESDAY HR 5 The K.O.D. - His highness with guest Vince Taylor wrap up the experience and the sexually charged lifestyle club. More Lifestyle club Monster Messages & Hot Takes We get called out because we ain't about that Bonsai Life!!
There is a duty that every believer is called to. This duty is to live a godly life and share the Good News of the Gospel with neighbors and nations. We are given the commandment by Jesus in Matthew 28:18-20 to ”Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
The Harbour Bazaar: Vehicles & Vessels 03/03/2024 All aboard as The Harbour Bazaar rolls out of the dock with a theme of Vehicles & Vessels plus new music from Fran Ashcroft, Milkweed and John Bramwell plus a Cover Uncovered, A Glorious 6os Pop Moment and chat with Steven Hastings & Davey Hal in the studio; so Rolling Stones royalties, hot rods, horsey business, ships, shanties, wind and Davey's Vince Taylor connections! We have a hoot and hope you enjoy! PLAYLIST Chickie Run – Homer Denison Jnr Airbag – Radiohead If I Had A Boat - Lyle Lovett Take The A Train – Duke Ellington Car Song – Woody Guthrie Car Song – Elastica Clay Pigeon – Blaze Foley A13, Trunk Road To The Seas – Billy Bragg Vehicle – Ides Of March Leave No Traces – John Bramwell My Father's Sheep Is Dead – Milkweed Waiting For The Britpop Revival – Fran Ashcroft Hot Rod Lincoln – Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airman Roll The Old Chariot Along – David Coffin Greenland Whale Fisheries – The Pogues I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself – Dusty Springfield I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself – White Stripes Land: Horses/Land Of A Thousand Dances/La Mer(de) – Patti Smith Bike – Pink Floyd LINKS FRAN ASHCROFT ‘The Songs That Never Were' https://franashcroft.bandcamp.com/album/the-songs-that-never-were MILKWEED ‘Folklore 1979' https://milkweedfolk.bandcamp.com/album/folklore-1979-2 Support Ship Full Of Bombs Thames Delta Independent Radio If you would like to support the station and are able to do so then please pledge only what you can genuinely afford at www.patreon.com/sfob Please like and subscribe from wherever you stream your music and podcasts. Thank you from The Harbour Bazaar
On continue à rendre hommage à Tai Luc et La Souris Déglinguée… On démarre avec le live au Glaz’Art (concert de 2006), suivi de Strychnine, Stinky Toys, Asphalt Jungle, et pour illustrer les propos de Tai Luc à Toulouse, Ramones et Vince Taylor. On poursuit avec les Olivensteins, Stalag (encore Bordeaux), avant de bifurquer vers […] L'article Maggot Brain – Traiter de bourgeois les gens moins riches que soi est apparu en premier sur Radio Campus Tours - 99.5 FM.
Vince is in the studio to talk about the Christmas Lights at Hidden Hollow!
The far more censored version of the award-winning and unparalleled "A Mediocre Time with Tom and Dan." - "A Corporate Time" is a daily companion and terrestrial radio show heard nationally on iHeartRadio. It's silly.
Prince Stash in conversation with David Eastaugh https://princestash.com/ Stanislas Klossowski de Rola is an Author, Entreprenuer, Actor, Singer, and Music Producer. He performed and worked with a various bands including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Vince Taylor & The Playboys, during the Swinging Sixties in London, Rome, Paris, and Los Angeles. Known for his infamous arrest with The Rolling Stones founder, Brian Jones, his engagement to Italian superstar, Romina Power, and for being a deluxe hippie during the ‘60s, Prince Stash comes from a line of scandalous and very colorful figures in his ancestry. Prince Stash currently spends his time between his Italian castle, Californian beach house, and other exotic international locations.
Join Pastor Josh as he welcomes Vince Taylor, Joe Curtis, Matt Shiles, and Pastor Derwin Anderson into the studio for a discussion of Juneteenth. This is part of the Cultural Engagement series, where we are looking at the Broadway show "Hamilton" through the eyes of the Gospel. This is a special edition of the Podcast.
Join us as our special guest Vince Taylor takes over. Vince delves deep into the offseason needs of the Buffalo Bills and explores the potential free agent targets who can fill the gaps in their roster. As one of the top contenders in the NFL, the Bills are determined to make a championship run, and suitable acquisitions in free agency can play a crucial role in their success. Join us as we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Bills' current roster, analyzing the positions that require reinforcement. From running back upgrades to bolstering the defense, we leave no stone unturned in identifying the key areas where the Bills need to add talent and who may or may not be able to fill those holes. The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast for June 5th, 2023. --------------------------------------------------- If you like the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Bills news today, and other Buffalo Bills content, connect with us! Stay up to date with all things Buffalo Bills: https://www.wanderingbuf.com/ Support The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/TheWanderingBuf Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TheWanderingBuf Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWanderingBuf Subscribe to The Wandering Buffalo Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wandering-buffalo-podcast/id1553575732 Subscribe to The Wandering Buffalo Podcast on Spotify Podcasts: https://open.spotify.com/show/7HCluqByJZqhUQD9DJE0Iq --------------------------------------------------- Justin: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/jgods22 Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/jgods22 Andrew: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/2chiangs_ Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/2chiangs_ --------------------------------------------------- The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is a part of the Buffalo FAMBase, the originators of #BillsMafia. Buffalo FAMBase is your #1 source for all of your Buffalo Bills news, Buffalo Bills updates, and everything else to do with the Buffalo Bills. Buffalo FAMBase Podcast Network: https://anchor.fm/buffalofambase Buffalo FAMBase on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu_JTz1SmD0Ml3D10HVQ50g Buffalo FAMBase on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buffalofambase/ Buffalo FAMBase on Twitter: https://twitter.com/buffalofambase Buffalo FAMBase on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BuffaloFAMbase Analyzing the Buffalo Bills' Needs: Which Free Agents Can Fill the Gaps? #BuffaloBills #BillsMafia #GoBills --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wandering-buffalo-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support
Join us as our special guest Vince Taylor takes over. Vince delves deep into the offseason needs of the Buffalo Bills and explores the potential free agent targets who can fill the gaps in their roster. As one of the top contenders in the NFL, the Bills are determined to make a championship run, and suitable acquisitions in free agency can play a crucial role in their success. Join us as we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Bills' current roster, analyzing the positions that require reinforcement. From running back upgrades to bolstering the defense, we leave no stone unturned in identifying the key areas where the Bills need to add talent and who may or may not be able to fill those holes. The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast for June 5th, 2023. --------------------------------------------------- If you like the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Bills news today, and other Buffalo Bills content, connect with us! Stay up to date with all things Buffalo Bills: https://www.wanderingbuf.com/ Support The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/TheWanderingBuf Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TheWanderingBuf Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWanderingBuf Subscribe to The Wandering Buffalo Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wandering-buffalo-podcast/id1553575732 Subscribe to The Wandering Buffalo Podcast on Spotify Podcasts: https://open.spotify.com/show/7HCluqByJZqhUQD9DJE0Iq --------------------------------------------------- Justin: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/jgods22 Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/jgods22 Andrew: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/2chiangs_ Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/2chiangs_ --------------------------------------------------- The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is a part of the Buffalo FAMBase, the originators of #BillsMafia. Buffalo FAMBase is your #1 source for all of your Buffalo Bills news, Buffalo Bills updates, and everything else to do with the Buffalo Bills. Buffalo FAMBase Podcast Network: https://anchor.fm/buffalofambase Buffalo FAMBase on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu_JTz1SmD0Ml3D10HVQ50g Buffalo FAMBase on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buffalofambase/ Buffalo FAMBase on Twitter: https://twitter.com/buffalofambase Buffalo FAMBase on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BuffaloFAMbase Analyzing the Buffalo Bills' Needs: Which Free Agents Can Fill the Gaps? #BuffaloBills #BillsMafia #GoBills
Dave Palumbo and Chris Aceto explore what makes Nick Walker the most popular pro on the circuit. Plus, who was a bigger genetic freak? Paul Dillett, Kevin Levrone or Vince Taylor?
In this episode, we go for a wild ride with a golden oldie that still smells factory fresh, "Brand New Cadillac" by Vince Taylor & His Playboys (1:53). Hear how this 1959 bopper is a "crossroads", deal-with-the-devil ditty, as signalled by the otherwordly opening string strumming. In 1964, The Renegades took the song to Finland, renaming it "Cadillac" and passing it off as an original - a clearcut case of grand theft auto (1:01:04) !! This model goes from 0 to 95 in seconds, flirting with near-silence before they put the pedal to the metal. In 1971, Mungo Jerry also performed a heist, making it to #1 in England (the song's birthplace) with a cool chop-shop job called "Baby Jump" - the very definition of a stomper (1:27:21). The end of our journey comes with The Clash, who put the vampy vehicle in pole position for their 1979 album, "London Calling" (2:00:57). But which tune will take the victory lap after winning the coveted Grand Prix, the Bo Diddley Award? and will the tires come off before we get there?!?!
Clint Mephisto's Shit Kickin’ Road Show Episode 276, week of April 17th. Sit a spell with your ol’ drankin’ buddy as we go on an hour long bender of vintage classics and modern barn burners from Coffin Nails, Janis Martin, Vince Taylor & His Playboys, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Eddie Cochran, and more!
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
La guitarrista de los Cramps, Poison Ivy, citó hace años algunos de sus riffs favoritos. Aderezamos su lista con unas cuantas propuestas de nuestra cosecha que esperamos mantengan esas atmósferas malvadas y amenazantes que tanto disfrutaba esta reina del rocknroll. Playlist; (sintonía) THE CRAMPS “Peter Gunn” THE SCARLETS “Stampede” THE GEE CEES “Buzz saw” THE SONICS “The witch” THE MARKETTS “Out of Limits” THE VENTURES “The bat” LINK WRAY “Ace os spades” VINCE TAYLOR and HIS PLAYBOYS “Brand new Cadillac” JOHNNY KIDD and THE PIRATES “Shakin’ All Over” BO DIDDLEY “I’m a man” THE PRETTY THINGS “Come see me” THE KINKS “You really got me” THEM “Baby please don’t go” JOHNNY BURNETTE “The train kept a rollin’” DALE HAWKINS “Suzie Q” DUANE EDDY “Ramrod” ROLAND JANES “Guitarville” MUDDY WATERS “You need love” HOWLIN’ WOLF “Smokestack Lightning” THE COASTERS “Poison Ivy” Escuchar audio
Saul's Conversion | Vince Taylor by Northland Church
To celebrate the upcoming 35th annual Arnold Classic on March 3rd-5th, 2023, the Bodybuilding Legends Podcast looks back at previous interviews done with former Arnold Classic winners including Rich Gaspari (1989), Mike Ashley (1990), Shawn Ray (1991), Vince Taylor (1992) and Mike Francois (1995). All these legendary bodybuilders talk about winning their Arnold Classic titles, the competitors they faced and what the title meant to their careers. At the end of the Podcast, host John Hansen reads an article he wrote for the RXMuscle website called "The First Arnold Classic". (Time Stamps below) Time Stamps: 5:28 - New Workout Program 9:40 - Emails 15:15 - Rich Gaspari talks about winning the first Arnold Classic 25:50 - Shawn Ray talks about winning the Arnold Classic and the drug test 33:24 - Mike Ashley talks about his Arnold Classic win 40:38 - Vince Taylor talks about winning the Arnold Classic in 1992 57:30 - Mike Francois talks about his Arnold Classic win in 1995 1:11:11 - John Hansen reads his article "The First Arnold Classic" Links: Become a Patreon Sponsor John's Online Coaching John's articles on RX Muscle Bodybuilding Legends website John's YouTube Channel John Hansen Fitness John's Email - naturalolympia@gmail.com
Writer Jerry Brainum is the guest on this episode of the Bodybuilding Legends Podcast to review the year 1992. On Part Three of his interview, Jerry joins host John Hansen to talk about the 1992 Mr. Olympia contest won by Dorian Yates in Helsinki, Finland. Jerry and John discuss the top competitors from this historic event as well as the return of Lou Ferrigno to the bodybuilding stage. At the end of the podcast, John Hansen reads the article "Finale in Finland" written by Julian Schmidt for the February, 1993 issue of Flex Magazine. (Time Stamps below). Time Stamps: 3:34 - Old Bodybuilding Magazines for sale 4:13 - "Dream Big" on Amazon Prime 5:16 - Patreon Sponsors upgrade 7:05 - Raquel Welch passes away 7:54 - 1992 Mr. Olympia Review with Jerry Brainum 9:19 - Dorian Yates wins the Mr. Olympia 11:11 - Lou Ferrigno takes a fall 12:15 - Reviewing Dorian's physique 24:12 - Assessing the top six of the 1992 Mr. Olympia 29:40 - Lee Labrada at the 1992 Olympia 32:40 - Hunter Labrada 41:40 - Memorable posing routines 43:20 - Mohamed Benaziza 45:00 - Vince Taylor and his eye patch 49:48 - The rest of the Top 10 in the 1992 Mr. Olympia 50:34 - The return of Lou Ferrigno 1:04:36 - Ronnie Coleman's first Mr. Olympia contest 1:05:54 - The Grand Prix tour after the Olympia 1:08:53 - Genetic freaks 1:19:20 - Host John Hansen reads the article "Finale in Finland" written by Julian Schmidt for the February, 1993 issue of Flex Magazine. Links: Jerry's Newsletter - Applied Metabolics Become a Patreon Sponsor Bodybuilding Legends website John Hansen Fitness John's YouTube Channel
The Bodybuilding Legends Podcast welcomes guest Jerry Brainum to review the year 1992 in Bodybuilding. In Part Two of his interview, Jerry and host John Hansen talk about some of the biggest professional competitions from 1992 including the 1992 Arnold Classic won by Vince Taylor and the 1992 Night of the Champions won by Kevin Levrone. At the end of the podcast, John Hansen reads the article "Haney on the Hot Seat...Will He or Won't He?" written by John Little, Peter McGough and Bob Wolff from the March, 1993 issue of Flex Magazine. (Time Stamps below). Time Stamps: 4:15 - Kurt Marnul passes away 6:30 - New Bodybuilding Videos up on YouTube 8:30 - The Year 1975 in Bodybuilding 12:00 - Changing my workout program 12:47 - Listener emails 20:00 - Start of interview with Jerry Brainum - 1992 in Review, Part Two 20:40 - 1992 Arnold Classic 37:00 - Recent deaths in bodybuilding 37:25 - Shawn Rhoden's physique 42:00 - The art of bodybuilding 50:00 - Arnold and Rachel McLish 51:53 - Surprising placings at the 1992 Arnold Classic 54:22 - The 1992 Night of the Champions 55:54 - Wayne DeMelia Promoter 57:00 - Former Mr. Olympia winners at the Olympia 1:02:54 - Kevin Levrone and Porter Cottrell 1:05:00 - Nasser's prediction 1:08:00 - Bodybuilders competing past their prime 1:14:20 - John Hansen reads the article "Haney on the Hot Seat..Will He or Won't He?" written by John Little, Peter McGough and Bob Wolff from the March, 1993 issue of Flex Magazine. Links: Jerry's Newsletter Become a Patreon Donor Bodybuilding Legends Podcast John's YouTube Channel John Hansen Fitness
188. Keeping you rockin' with only the finest roots music ever made! DJ Del Villarreal is here to serve up some incredibly cool sounds for your Tuesday night of radio fun! Coming at you LIVE from the Motorbilly Studios on both 88.3 FM, WCBN and Rockabilly-Radio, it's a big blast of hot new action including the Djordgie Stipevovic single "Hurtless," the crazy cool "Corona Bop" from the Nite Howlers, the ragin' "Wolfman" by Mike Badger, the authentic "Route Stone" from The Glad Rags and the groovy bop of Lucky 7.5.7.'s "Completely Sweet"! Loads of classic vintage songs from the likes of Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, "Little" Jimmy Dickens, Hayden Thompson and Vince Taylor to name a few. Plenty of fun requests to keep things lively so why not hit the PLAY button and set right back and enjoy DJ Del's "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" -good to the last bop!™
All Greasers Soundtrack Greasers Hangout (Greasers Safehouse) The Tenements (High) The Tenements (Mid) The Tenements (Low) The Rumble (Epic Confrontation) Vendetta Greasers Greasers Fight (Mid-1) Fighting Johnny Vincent (Bike Ride) Fighting Johnny Vincent (Boss Fight) Finghting Johnny Vincent (Boss Fight 2) original: https://youtu.be/f9bu967JyJ4 Greasers were a working class youth subculture that originated in the 1950s among teenagers in northeastern and southern United States. Rock-and-roll music was a major part of the culture, and styles were influenced by singers, like Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, Vince Taylor and Ritchie Valens, but the two main figures of the look were Marlon Brando and James Dean. Greasers in Bullworth is a gang that we faced in Chapter III, is led by Johnny Vincent that we do some work for him at the beginning of the Chapter, their rivals are the Preppies think they are better than Greasers just because they are rich and the Greasers are poor!!! Greasers is Bully's 3rd strongest gang, second only to Townies/DropOuts and Jocks.
Today: Rams game, Early season schedule, Titans game, Roster construction - who isn't coming back? #BuffaloBills #BillsMafia #BillsvsTitans
Vince is back! No, he does not have any additional charisma. No he isn't smarter or more knowledgeable than before. Vince might even have less talent. There is a good chance he is even dumber than the previous version. 100 percent unimproved! Guaranteed! But he will be shorter and now is offering his rantscompletely free. That's right Mafia! A lesser version of your least favorite podcaster is now absolutely free! As a bonus: If you listen now and you don't like what you hear, DOUBLE your money back. What are people saying? "It's a podcast!" -Anonymous "I heard this podcast" -Anonymous "I really enjoyed this podcast" -Nobody
While I'm still on hiatus, I invited questions from listeners. This is an hour-long podcast answering some of them. (Another hour-long Q&A for Patreon backers only will go up next week). 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/ There is a Mixcloud of the music excerpted here which can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-qa-edition/ Click below for a transcript: Hello and welcome to the Q&A episode I'm doing while I'm working on creating a backlog. I'm making good progress on that, and still hoping and expecting to have episode 151 up some time in early August, though I don't have an exact date yet. I was quite surprised by the response to my request for questions, both at the amount of it and at where it came from. I initially expected to get a fair few comments on the main podcast, and a handful on the Patreon, and then I could do a reasonable-length Q&A podcast from the former and a shorter one from the latter. Instead, I only got a couple of questions on the main episode, but so many on the Patreon that I had to stop people asking only a day or so after posting the request for questions. So instead of doing one reasonable length podcast and one shorter one, I'm actually doing two longer ones. What I'm going to do is do all the questions asked publicly, plus all the questions that have been asked multiple times, in this one, then next week I'm going to put up the more niche questions just for Patreon backers. However, I'm not going to answer *all* of the questions. I got so many questions so quickly that there's not space to answer them all, and several of them were along the lines of "is artist X going to get an episode?" which is a question I generally don't answer -- though I will answer a couple of those if there's something interesting to say about them. But also, there are some I've not answered for another reason. As you may have noticed, I have a somewhat odd worldview, and look at the world from a different angle from most people sometimes. Now there were several questions where someone asked something that seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but contains a whole lot of hidden assumptions that that person hadn't even considered -- about music history, or about the process of writing and researching, or something else. Now, to answer that kind of question at all often means unpacking those hidden assumptions, which can sometimes make for an interesting answer -- after all, a lot of the podcast so far has been me telling people that what they thought they knew about music history was wrong -- but when it's a question being asked by an individual and you answer that way, it can sometimes, frankly, make you look like a horribly unpleasant person, or even a bully. "Don't you even know the most basic things about historical research? I do! You fool! Hey everyone else listening, this person thinks you do research in *this* way, but everyone knows you do it *that* way!" Now, that is never how I would intend such answers to come across -- nobody can be blamed for not knowing what they don't know -- but there are some questions where no matter how I phrased the answer, it came across sounding like that. I'll try to hold those over for future Q&A episodes if I can think of ways of unpicking the answers in such a way that I'm not being unconscionably rude to people who were asking perfectly reasonable questions. Some of the answers that follow might still sound a bit like that to be honest, but if you asked a question and my answer sounds like that to you, please know that it wasn't meant to. There's a lot to get through, so let's begin: Steve from Canada asks: “Which influential artist or group has been the most challenging to get information on in the last 50 podcasts? We know there has been a lot written about the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown as an entity, the Monkees and the Rolling Stones, but you mentioned in a tweet that there's very little about some bands like the Turtles, who are an interesting story. I had never heard of Dino Valenti before this broadcast – but he appeared a lot in the last batch – so it got me curious. [Excerpt: The Move, “Useless Information”] In the last fifty episodes there's not been a single one that's made it to the podcast where it was at all difficult to get information. The problem with many of them is that there's *too much* information out there, rather than there not being enough. No matter how many books one reads on the Beatles, one can never read more than a fraction of them, and there's huge amounts of writing on the Rolling Stones, on Hendrix, on the Doors, on the Byrds... and when you're writing about those people, you *know* that you're going to miss out something or get something wrong, because there's one more book out there you haven't read which proves that one of the stories you're telling is false. This is one of the reasons the episodes have got so much longer, and taken so much more time. That wasn't the case in the first hundred episodes -- there were a lot of artists I covered there, like Gene and Eunice, or the Chords, or Jesse Belvin, or Vince Taylor who there's very little information about. And there are some coming up who there's far less information about than people in the last fifty episodes. But every episode since the Beatles has had a surfeit of information. There is one exception -- I wanted to do a full episode on "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass, because it would be an interesting lens through which to look at how Chess coped with the change in Black musical styles in the sixties. But there was so little information available about her I ended up relegating it to a Patreon bonus episode, because she makes those earlier artists look well-documented. Which leads nicely into the next question. Nora Tillman asks "Forgive this question if you've answered it before: is there literally a list somewhere with 500 songs you've chosen? Has the list changed since you first composed it? Also, when did you first conceive of this list?" [Excerpt: John Reed and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, "As Someday it May Happen"] Many people have asked this question, or variations upon it. The answer is yes and no. I made a list when I started that had roughly two hundred songs I knew needed to be on there, plus about the same number again of artists who needed to be covered but whose precise songs I hadn't decided on. To make the initial list I pulled a list out of my own head, and then I also checked a couple of other five-hundred-song lists -- the ones put out by Rolling Stone magazine and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- not because I wanted to use their lists; I have very little time for rock critical orthodoxy, as most of my listeners will likely have realised by now, but because I wanted to double-check that I hadn't missed anything obvious out, and that if I was missing something off their lists, I knew *why* I was missing it. To take a ludicrous example, I wouldn't want to get to the end of the 1960s and have someone say "Wait a minute, what about the Beatles?" and think "I *knew* I'd forgotten something!" Then, at the start of each fifty-episode season, I put together a more rigorous list of the fifty songs coming up, in order. Those lists *can* still change with the research -- for example, very early on in the research for the podcast, I discovered that even though I was completely unfamiliar with "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice, it was a hugely important and influential record at the time, and so I swapped that in for another song. Or more recently, I initially intended to have the Doors only have one episode, but when I realised how much I was having to include in that episode I decided to give them a second one. And sometimes things happen the other way -- I planned to do full episodes on Jackie Shane and Fontella Bass, but for both of them I couldn't find enough information to get a decent episode done, so they ended up being moved to Patreon episodes. But generally speaking that fifty-song list for a year's episodes is going to remain largely unchanged. I know where I'm going, I know what most of the major beats of the story are, but I'm giving myself enough flexibility to deviate if I find something I need to include. Connected with this, Rob Johnson asks how I can be confident I'll get back to some stories in later episodes. Well, like I say, I have a pretty much absolute idea of what I'm going to do in the next year, and there are a lot of individual episodes where I know the structure of the episode long before we get to it. As an example here... I don't want to give too much away, and I'm generally not going to be answering questions about "will artist X be appearing?", but Rob also asked about one artist. I can tell you that that artist is one who will not be getting a full episode -- and I already said in the Patreon episode about that artist that they won't -- but as I also said in that episode they *will* get a significant amount of time in another episode, which I now know is going to be 180, which will also deal with another artist from the same state with the same forename, even though it's actually about two English bands. I've had the structure of that episode planned out since literally before I started writing episode one. On the other hand, episode 190 is a song that wasn't originally going to be included at all. I was going to do a 1967 song by the same artist, but then found out that a fact I'd been going to use was disputed, which meant that track didn't need to be covered, but the artist still did, to finish off a story I'd started in a previous episode. Patrick asks:"I am currently in the middle of reading 1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth and I'm aware that Apple TV have produced a documentary on how music changed that year as well and I was wondering what your opinion on that subject matter? I imagine you will be going into some detail on future podcasts, but until recently I never knew people considered 1971 as a year that brought about those changes." [Excerpt: Rod Stewart, "Angel"] I've not yet read Hepworth's book, but that it's named after an album which came out in 1972 (which is the album that track we just heard came from) says something about how the idea that any one year can in itself be a turning point for music is a little overstated -- and the Apple documentary is based on Hepworth's book, so it's not really multiple people making that argument. Now, as it happens, 1971 is one of the break points for the podcast -- episodes 200 and 201 are both records from July 1971, and both records that one could argue were in their own way signifiers of turning points in rock music history. And as with 1967 it's going to have more than its fair share of records, as it bridges the gap of two seasons. But I think one could make similar arguments for many, many years, and 1971 is not one of the most compelling cases. I can't say more before I read Hepworth's book, which won't be for a few months yet. I'm instinctively dubious of these "this year was the big year that changed everything" narratives, but Hepworth's a knowledgeable enough writer that I wouldn't want to dismiss his thesis without even reading the book. Roger Pannell asks I'm a fairly recent joiner-in too so you may have answered this before. What is the theme tune to the podcast please. [Excerpt: The Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The theme song to the podcast is "Rock and Roll" by the Boswell Sisters. The version I use is not actually the version that was released as a single, but a very similar performance that was used in the film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round in 1931. I chose it in part because it may well be the first ever record to contain the phrase "rock and roll" (though as I've said many times there's no first anything, and there are certainly many records which talk about rocking and/or rolling -- just none I know of with that phrase) so it evokes rock and roll history, partly because the recording is out of copyright, and partly just because I like the Boswell Sisters. Several people asked questions along the lines of this one from Christopher Burnett "Just curious if there's any future episodes planned on any non-UK or non-North American songs? The bonus episodes on the Mops and Kyu Sakamoto were fascinating." [Excerpt: Kyu Sakamoto, "Sukiyaki"] Sadly, there won't be as many episodes on musicians from outside the UK and North America as I'd like. The focus of the podcast is going to be firmly on British, American, Irish, and Canadian musicians, with a handful from other Anglophone countries like Australia and Jamaica. There *are* going to be a small number of episodes on non-Anglophone musicians, but very few. Sadly, any work of history which engages with injustices still replicates some of those injustices, and one of the big injustices in rock history is that most rock musicians have been very insular, and there has been very little influence from outside the Anglophone world, which means that I can't talk much about influential records made by musicians from elsewhere. Also, in a lot of cases most of the writing about them is in other languages, and I'm shamefully monolingual (I have enough schoolboy French not to embarrass myself, but not enough to read a biography without a dictionary to hand, and that's it). There *will* be quite a few bonus episodes on musicians from non-Anglophone countries though, because this *is* something that I'm very aware of as a flaw, and if I can find ways of bringing the wider story into the podcast I will definitely do so, even if it means changing my plans somewhat, but I'm afraid they'll largely be confined to Patreon bonuses rather than mainline episodes. Ed Cunard asks "Is there a particular set of songs you're not looking forward to because you don't care for them, but intend to dive into due to their importance?" [Excerpt: Jackie Shane, "Don't Play That Song"] There are several, and there already have been some, but I'm not going to say what they are as part of anything to do with the podcast (sometimes I might talk about how much I hate a particular record on my personal Twitter account or something, but I try not to on the podcast's account, and I'm certainly not going to in an episode of the podcast itself). One of the things I try to do with the podcast is to put the case forward as to why records were important, why people liked them at the time, what they got out of them. I can't do that if I make it about my own personal tastes. I know for a fact that there are people who have come away from episodes on records I utterly despise saying "Wow! I never liked that record before, but I do now!" and that to me shows that I have succeeded -- I've widened people's appreciation for music they couldn't appreciate before. Of course, it's impossible to keep my own tastes from showing through totally, but even there people tend to notice much more my like or dislike for certain people rather than for their music, and I don't feel anything like as bad for showing that. So I have a policy generally of just never saying which records in the list I actually like and which I hate. You'll often be able to tell from things I talk about elsewhere, but I don't want anyone to listen to an episode and be prejudiced not only against the artist but against the episode by knowing going in that I dislike them, and I also don't want anyone to feel like their favourite band is being given short shrift. There are several records coming up that I dislike myself but where I know people are excited about hearing the episode, and the last thing I want to do is have those people who are currently excited go in disappointed before they even hear it. Matt Murch asks: "Do you anticipate tackling the shift in rock toward harder, more seriously conceptual moves in 1969 into 1970, with acts like Led Zeppelin, The Who (again), Bowie, etc. or lighter soul/pop artists such as Donna Summer, Carly Simon or the Carpenters? Also, without giving too much away, is there anything surprising you've found in your research that you're excited to cover? [Excerpt: Robert Plant, "If I Were a Carpenter"] OK, for the first question... I don't want to say exactly who will and won't be covered in future episodes, because when I say "yes, X will be covered" or "no, Y will not be covered", it invites a lot of follow-up discussion along the lines of "why is X in there and not Y?" and I end up having to explain my working, when the episodes themselves are basically me explaining my working. What I will say is this... the attitude I'm taking towards who gets included and who gets excluded is, at least in part, influenced by an idea in cognitive linguistics called prototype theory. According to this theory, categories aren't strictly bounded like in Aristotelian thought -- things don't have strict essences that mean they definitely are or aren't members of categories. But rather, categories have fuzzy boundaries, and there are things at the centre that are the most typical examples of the category, and things at the border that are less typical. For example, a robin is a very "birdy" bird -- it's very near the centre of the category of bird, it has a lot of birdness -- while an ostrich is still a bird, but much less birdy, it's sort of in the fuzzy boundary area. When you ask people to name a bird, they're more likely to name a robin than an ostrich, and if you ask them “is an ostrich a bird?” they take longer to answer than they do when asked about robins. In the same way, a sofa is nearer the centre of the category of "furniture" than a wardrobe is. Now, I am using an exceptionally wide definition of what counts as rock music, but at the same time, in order for it to be a history of rock music, I do have to spend more time in the centre of the concept than around the periphery. My definition would encompass all the artists you name, but I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree that the first three artists you name are much closer to the centre of the concept of "rock music" than the last three. That's not to say anyone on either list is definitely getting covered or is definitely *not* getting covered -- while I have to spend more time in the centre than the periphery, I do have to spend some time on the periphery, and my hope is to cover as many subgenres and styles as I can -- but that should give an idea of how I'm approaching this. As for the second question -- there's relatively little that's surprising that I've uncovered in my research so far, but that's to be expected. The period from about 1965 through about 1975 is the most over-covered period of rock music history, and so the basic facts for almost every act are very, very well known to people with even a casual interest. For the stuff I'm doing in the next year or so, like the songs I've covered for the last year, it's unlikely that anything exciting will come up until very late in the research process, the times when I'm pulling everything together and notice one little detail that's out of place and pull on that thread and find the whole story unravelling. Which may well mean, of course, that there *are* no such surprising things. That's always a possibility in periods where we're looking at things that have been dealt with a million times before, and this next year may largely be me telling stories that have already been told. Which is still of value, because I'm putting them into a larger context of the already-released episodes, but we'll see if anything truly surprising happens. I certainly hope it does. James Kosmicki asks "Google Podcasts doesn't seem to have any of the first 100 episodes - are they listed under a different name perhaps?" [Excerpt: REM, "Disappear"] I get a number of questions like this, about various podcast apps and sites, and I'm afraid my answer is always the same -- there's nothing I can do about this, and it's something you'd have to take up with the site in question. Google Podcasts picks up episodes from the RSS feed I provide, the same as every other site or app. It's using the right feed, that feed has every episode in it, and other sites and apps are working OK with it. In general, I suggest that rather than streaming sites like Google Podcasts or Stitcher or Spotify, where the site acts as a middleman and they serve the podcast to you from their servers, people should use a dedicated podcast app like RadioPublic or Pocketcasts or gPodder, where rather than going from a library of podcast episodes that some third party has stored, you're downloading the files direct from the original server, but I understand that sometimes those apps are more difficult to use, especially for less tech-savvy people. But generally, if an episode is in some way faulty or missing on the 500songs.com webpage, that's something I can do something about. If it's showing up wrong on Spotify or Google Podcasts or Stitcher or whatever, that's a problem at their end. Sorry. Darren Johnson asks "were there any songs that surprised you? Which one made the biggest change between what you thought you knew and what you learned researching it?" [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Goodbye Surprise"] Well, there have been a few, in different ways. The most surprising thing for me actually was in the most recent episode when I discovered the true story behind the "bigger than Jesus" controversy during my reading. That was a story I'd known one way for my entire life -- literally I think I first read about that story when I was six or seven -- and it turned out that not one thing I'd read on the subject had explained what had really happened. But then there are other things like the story of "Ko Ko Mo", which was a record I wasn't even planning on covering at first, but which turned out to be one of the most important records of the fifties. But I actually get surprised relatively little by big-picture things. I'll often discover fun details or new connections between things I hadn't noticed before, but the basic outlines of the story never change that much -- I've been reading about music history literally since I learned how to read, and while I do a deep dive for each episode, it's very rare that I discover anything that totally changes my perspective. There is always a process of reevaluation going on, and a change in the emphases in my thought, so for example when I started the project I knew Johnny Otis would come up a fair bit in the early years, and knew he was a major figure, but was still not giving him the full credit he deserved in my head. The same goes for Jesse Belvin, and as far as background figures go Lester Sill and Milt Gabler. But all of these were people I already knew were important, i just hadn't connected all the dots in my head. I've also come to appreciate some musicians more than I did previously. But there are very few really major surprises, which is probably to be expected -- I got into this already knowing a *LOT*, because otherwise I wouldn't have thought this was a project I could take on. Tracey Germa -- and I'm sorry, I don't know if that's pronounced with a hard or soft G, so my apologies if I mispronounced it -- asks: "Hi Andrew. We love everything about the podcast, but are especially impressed with the way you couch your trigger warnings and how you embed social commentary into your analysis of the music. You have such a kind approach to understanding human experiences and at the same time you don't balk at saying the hard things some folks don't want to hear about their music heroes. So, the question is - where does your social justice/equity/inclusion/suffer no fools side come from? Your family? Your own experiences? School/training?” [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "Little Triggers"] Well, firstly, I have to say that people do say this kind of thing to me quite a lot, and I'm grateful when they say it, but I never really feel comfortable with it, because frankly I think I do very close to the absolute minimum, and I get by because of the horribly low expectations our society has for allocishet white men, which means that making even the tiniest effort possible to be a decent human being looks far more impressive by comparison than it actually is. I genuinely think I don't do a very good job of this at all, although I do try, and that's not false modesty there. But to accept the premise of the question for a moment, there are a couple of answers. My parents are both fairly progressive both politically and culturally, for the time and place where they raised me. They both had strong political convictions, and while they didn't have access to much culture other than what was on TV or in charting records or what have you -- there was no bookshop or record shop in our town, and obviously no Internet back then -- they liked the stuff out of that mix that was forward-thinking, and so was anti-racist, accepting of queerness, and so on. From a very early age, I was listening to things like "Glad to be Gay" by the Tom Robinson Band. So from before I really even understood what those concepts were, I knew that the people I admired thought that homophobia and racism were bad things. I was also bullied a lot at school, because I was autistic and fat and wore glasses and a bunch of other reasons. So I hated bullying and never wanted to be a bully. I get very, very, *very* angry at cruelty and at abuses of power -- as almost all autistic people do, actually. And then, in my twenties and thirties, for a variety of reasons I ended up having a social circle that was predominantly queer and/or disabled and/or people with mental health difficulties. And when you're around people like that, and you don't want to be a bully, you learn to at least try to take their feelings into consideration, though I slipped up a great deal for a long time, and still don't get everything right. So that's the "social justice" side of things. The other side, the "understanding human experiences" side... well, everyone has done awful things at times, and I would hope that none of us would be judged by our worst behaviours. "Use every man to his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" and all that. But that doesn't mean those worst behaviours aren't bad, and that they don't hurt people, and denying that only compounds the injustice. People are complicated, societies are complicated, and everyone is capable of great good and great evil. In general I tend to avoid a lot of the worst things the musicians I talk about did, because the podcast *is* about the music, but when their behaviour affects the music, or when I would otherwise be in danger of giving a truly inaccurate picture of someone, I have to talk about those things. You can't talk about Jerry Lee Lewis without talking about how his third marriage derailed his career, you can't talk about Sam Cooke without talking about his death, and to treat those subjects honestly you have to talk about the reprehensible sides of their character. Of course, in the case of someone like Lewis, there seems to be little *but* a reprehensible side, while someone like Cooke could be a horrible, horrible person, but even the people he hurt the most also loved him dearly because of his admirable qualities. You *have* to cover both aspects of someone like him if you want to be honest, and if you're not going to be honest why bother trying to do history at all? Lester Dragstedt says (and I apologise if I mispronounced that): "I absolutely love this podcast and the perspective you bring. My only niggle is that the sound samples are mixed so low. When listening to your commentary about a song at voice level my fingers are always at the volume knob to turn up when the song comes in." [Excerpt: Bjork, "It's Oh So Quiet"] This is something that gets raised a lot, but it's not something that's ever going to change. When I started the podcast, I had the music levels higher, and got complaints about that, so I started mixing them lower. I then got complaints about *that*, so I did a poll of my Patreon backers to see what they thought, and by about a sixty-forty margin they wanted the levels to be lower, as they are now, rather than higher as they were earlier. Basically, there seem to be two groups of listeners. One group mostly listens with headphones, and doesn't like it when the music gets louder, because it hurts their ears. The other group mostly listens in their cars, and the music gets lost in the engine noise. That's a gross oversimplification, and there are headphone listeners who want the music louder and car listeners who want the music quieter, but the listenership does seem to split roughly that way, and there are slightly more headphone listeners. Now, it's literally *impossible* for me to please everyone, so I've given up trying with this, and it's *not* going to change. Partly because the majority of my backers voted one way, partly because it's just easier to leave things the way they are rather than mess with them given that no matter what I do someone will be unhappy, and partly because both Tilt when he edits the podcast and I when I listen back and tweak his edit are using headphones, and *we* don't want to hurt our ears either. Eric Peterson asks "if we are basically in 1967 that is when we start seeing Country artists like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings - the Man who Survived the Day the Music Died - start to bring more rock songs into their recordings and start to set the ground work in many ways for Country Rock ... how do you envision bringing the role they play in the History of Rock and Roll into the podcast?" [Excerpt: The Del McCoury Band, "Nashville Cats"] I will of course be dealing with country rock as one of the subgenres I discuss -- though there's only one real country-rock track coming up in the next fifty, but there'll be more as I get into the seventies, and there are several artists coming up with at least some country influence. But I won't be looking at straight country musicians like Jennings or Cash except through the lens of rock musicians they inspired -- things like me talking about Johnny Cash briefly in the intro to the "Hey Joe" episode. I think Cocaine and Rhinestones is already doing a better job of covering country music than I ever could, and so those people will only touch the story tangentially. Nili Marcia says: "If one asks a person what's in that room it would not occur to one in 100 to mention the air that fills it. Something so ubiquitous as riff--I don't know what a riff actually is! Will you please define riff, preferably with examples." Now this is something I actually thought I'd explained way back in episode one, and I have a distinct memory of doing so, but I must have cut that part out -- maybe I recorded it so badly that part couldn't be salvaged, which happened sometimes in the early days -- because I just checked and there's no explanation there. I would have come back to this at some point if I hadn't been thinking all along that I'd covered it right at the start, because you're right, it is a term that needs definition. A riff is, simply, a repeated, prominent, instrumental figure. The term started out in jazz, and there it was a term for a phrase that would be passed back and forth between different instruments -- a trumpet might play a phrase, then a saxophone copy it, then back to the trumpet, then back to the saxophone. But quickly it became a term for a repeated figure that becomes the main accompaniment part of a song, over which an instrumentalist might solo or a singer might sing, but which you remember in its own right. A few examples of well-known riffs might include "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water"] "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] "Last Train to Clarksville" by the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The bass part in “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie: [Excerpt: Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure”] Or the Kingsmen's version of "Louie Louie": [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Basically, if you can think of a very short, prominent, instrumental idea that gets repeated over and over, that's a riff. Erik Pedersen says "I love the long episodes and I suspect you do too -- thoroughness. of this kind is something few get the opportunity to do -- but have you ever, after having written a long one, decided to cut them significantly? Are there audio outtakes you might string together one day?" [Excerpt: Bing Crosby and Les Paul, "It's Been a Long, Long Time"] I do like *having* done the long episodes, and sometimes I enjoy doing them, but other times I find it frustrating that an episode takes so long, because there are other stories I want to move on to. I'm trying for more of a balance over the next year, and we'll see how that works out. I want to tell the story in the depth it deserves, and the longer episodes allow me to do that, and to experiment with narrative styles and so on, but I also want to get the podcast finished before I die of old age. Almost every episode has stuff that gets cut, but it's usually in the writing or recording stage -- I'll realise a bit of the episode is boring and just skip it while I'm recording, or I'll cut out an anecdote or something because it looks like it's going to be a flabby episode and I want to tighten it up, or sometimes I'll realise that because of my mild speech impediments a sentence is literally unspeakable, and I'll rework it. It's very, very rare that I'll cut anything once it's been recorded, and if I do it's generally because when I listen back after it's been edited I'll realise I'm repeating myself or I made a mistake and need to cut a sentence because I said the wrong name, that sort of thing. I delete all the audio outtakes, but even if I didn't there would be nothing worth releasing. A few odd, out of context sentences, the occasional paragraph just repeating something I'd already said, a handful of actual incorrect facts, and a lot of me burping, or trying to say a difficult name three times in a row, or swearing when the phone rings in the middle of a long section. Lucy Hewitt says "Something that interests me, and that I'm sure you will cover is how listeners consume music and if that has an impact. In my lifetime we've moved from a record player which is fixed in one room to having a music collection with you wherever you go, and from hoping that the song you want to hear might be played on the radio to calling it up whenever you want. Add in the rise of music videos, and MTV, and the way in which people access music has changed a lot over the decades. But has that affected the music itself?" [Excerpt: Bow Wow Wow "C30 C60 C90 Go!"] It absolutely has affected the music itself in all sorts of ways, some of which I've touched on already and some of which I will deal with as we go through the story, though the story I'm telling will end around the time of Napster and so won't involve streaming services and so forth. But every technology change leads to a change in the sound of music in both obvious and non-obvious ways. When AM radio was the most dominant form of broadcasting, there was no point releasing singles in stereo, because at that time there were no stereo AM stations. The records also had to be very compressed, so the sound would cut through the noise and interference. Those records would often be very bass-heavy and have a very full, packed, sound. In the seventies, with the rise of eight-track players, you'd often end up with soft-rock and what would later get termed yacht rock having huge success. That music, which is very ethereal and full of high frequencies, is affected less negatively by some of the problems that came with eight-track players, like the tape stretching slightly. Then post-1974 and the OPEC oil crisis, vinyl became more expensive, which meant that records started being made much thinner, which meant you couldn't cut grooves as deeply, which meant you lost bass response, which again changed the sound of records – and also explains why when CDs came out, people started thinking they sounded better than records, because they *did* sound better than the stuff that was being pressed in the late seventies and early eighties, which was so thin it was almost transparent, even though they sounded nowhere near as good as the heavy vinyl pressings of the fifties and sixties. And then the amount of music one could pack into a CD encouraged longer tracks... A lot of eighties Hi-NRG and dance-pop music, like the records made by Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, has almost no bass but lots of skittering high-end percussion sounds -- tons of synthesised sleighbells and hi-hats and so on -- because a lot of disco equipment had frequency-activated lights, and the more high-end stuff was going on, the more the disco lights flashed... We'll look at a lot of these changes as we go along, but every single new format, every new way of playing an old format, every change in music technology, changes what music gets made quite dramatically. Lucas Hubert asks: “Black Sabbath being around the corner, how do you plan on dealing with Heavy Metal? I feel like for now, what is popular and what has had a big impact in Rock history coincide. But that kind of change with metal, no? (Plus, prog and metal are more based on albums than singles, I think.)” [Excerpt: Black Sabbath, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”] I plan on dealing with metal the same way I've been dealing with every other subgenre. We are, yes, getting into a period where influence and commercial success don't correlate quite as firmly as they did in the early years -- though really we've already been there for quite some time. I've done two episodes so far on the Byrds, a group who only had three top-twenty singles in the US and two in the UK, but only did a bonus episode on Herman's Hermits, who had fourteen in the US and seventeen in the UK. I covered Little Richard but didn't cover Pat Boone, even though Boone had the bigger hits with Richard's songs. In every subgenre there are going to be massive influences who had no hits, and people who had lots of hits but didn't really make much of a wider impact on music, and I'll be dealing with the former more than the latter. But also, I'll be dealing most with people who were influential *and* had lots of hits -- if nothing else because while influence and chart success aren't a one-to-one correlation, they're still somewhat correlated. So it's unlikely you'll see me cover your favourite Scandinavian Black Metal band who only released one album of which every copy was burned in a mysterious fire two days after release, but you can expect most of the huge names in metal to be covered. Though even there, simply because of the number of subgenres I'm going to cover, I'm going to miss some big ones. Related to the question about albums, Svennie asks “This might be a bit of a long winded question so just stick with me here. As the music you cover becomes more elaborate, and the albums become bigger in scale, how do you choose a song which you build the story around while also telling the story of that album? I ask this specifically with the White Album in mind, where you've essentially got four albums in one. To that end, what song would you feel defines the White Album?” [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Revolution #9”] Well, you'll see how I cover the White Album in episode one hundred and seventy-two -- we're actually going to have quite a long stretch with no Beatles songs covered because I'm going to backfill a lot of 1967 and then we're getting to the Beatles again towards the end of 1968, but it'll be another big one when we get there. But in the general case... the majority of albums to come still had singles released off them, and a lot of what I'm going to be looking at in the next year or two is still hit singles, even if the singles are by people known as album bands. Other times, a song wasn't a single, but maybe it was covered by someone else -- if I know I'm going to cover a rock band and I also know that one of the soul artists who would do rock covers as album tracks did a version of one of their songs, and I'm going to cover that soul artist, say, then if I do the song that artist covered I can mention it in the episode on the soul singer and tie the two episodes together a bit. In other cases there's a story behind a particular track that's more interesting than other tracks, or the track is itself a cover version of someone else's record, which lets me cover both artists in a single episode, or it's the title track of the album. A lot of people have asked me this question about how I'd deal with albums as we get to the late sixties and early seventies, but looking at the list of the next fifty episodes, there's actually only two where I had to think seriously about which song I chose from an album -- in one case, I chose the title track, in the other case I just chose the first song on the album (though in that case I may end up choosing another song from the same album if I end up finding a way to make that a more interesting episode). The other forty-eight were all very, very obvious choices. Gary Lucy asks “Do you keep up with contemporary music at all? If so, what have you been enjoying in 2022 so far…and if not, what was the most recent “new” album you really got into?” [Excerpt: Stew and the Negro Problem, "On the Stage of a Blank White Page"] I'm afraid I don't. Since I started doing the podcast, pretty much all of my listening time has been spent on going back to much older music, and even before that, when I was listening to then-new music it was generally stuff that was very much inspired by older music, bands like the Lemon Twigs, who probably count as the last new band I really got into with their album Do Hollywood, which came out in 2016 but which I think I heard in 2018. I'm also now of that age where 2018 seems like basically yesterday, and when I keep thinking "what relatively recent albums have I liked?" I think of things like The Reluctant Graveyard by Jeremy Messersmith, which is from 2010, or Ys by Joanna Newsom, which came out in 2006. Not because I haven't bought records released since then, but because my sense of time is so skewed that summer 1994 and summer 1995 feel like epochs apart, hugely different times in every way, but every time from about 2005 to 2020 is just "er... a couple of years ago? Maybe?" So without going through every record I've bought in the last twenty years and looking at the release date I couldn't tell you what still counts as contemporary and what's old enough to vote. I have recently listened a couple of times to an album by a band called Wet Leg, who are fairly new, but other than that I can't say. But probably the most recent albums to become part of my regular listening rotation are two albums which came out simultaneously in 2018 by Stew and the Negro Problem, Notes of a Native Song, which is a song cycle about James Baldwin and race in America, and The Total Bent, which is actually the soundtrack to a stage musical, and which I think many listeners to the podcast might find interesting, and which is what that last song excerpt was taken from. It's basically a riff on the idea of The Jazz Singer, but set in the Civil Rights era, and about a young politically-radical Black Gospel songwriter who writes songs for his conservative preacher father to sing, but who gets persuaded to become a rock and roll performer by a white British record producer who fetishises Black music. It has a *lot* to say about religion, race, and politics in America -- a couple of the song titles, to give you some idea, are "Jesus Ain't Sitting in the Back of the Bus" and "That's Why He's Jesus and You're Not, Whitey". It's a remarkable album, and it deals with enough of the same subjects I've covered here that I think any listeners will find it interesting. Unfortunately, it was released through the CDBaby store, which closed down a few months later, and unlike most albums released through there it doesn't seem to have made its way onto any of the streaming platforms or digital stores other than Apple Music, which rather limits its availability. I hope it comes out again soon. Alec Dann says “I haven't made it to the Sixties yet so pardon if you have covered this: what was the relationship between Sun and Stax in their heyday? Did musicians work in both studios?” [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] I've covered this briefly in a couple of the episodes on Stax, but the short version is that Sun was declining just as Stax was picking up. Jim Stewart, who founded Stax, was inspired in part by Sam Phillips, and there was a certain amount of cross-fertilisation, but not that much. Obviously Rufus Thomas recorded for both labels, and there were a few other connections -- Billy Lee Riley, for example, who I did an episode on for his Sun work, also recorded at the Stax studio before going on to be a studio musician in LA, and it was actually at a Billy Lee Riley session that went badly that Booker T and the MGs recorded "Green Onions". Also, Sun had a disc-cutting machine and Stax didn't, so when they wanted to get an acetate cut to play for DJs they'd take it to Sun -- it was actually Scotty Moore, who was working for Sun as a general engineer and producer as well as playing RCA Elvis sessions by 1962, who cut the first acetate copy of "Green Onions". But in general the musicians playing at Stax were largely the next generation of musicians -- people who'd grown up listening to the records Sam Phillips had put out in the very early fifties by Black musicians, and with very little overlap. Roger Stevenson asks "This project is going to take the best part of 7 years to complete. Do you have contingency plans in case of major problems? And please look after yourself - this project is gong to be your legacy." [Excerpt: Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, "Button Up Your Overcoat"] I'm afraid there's not much I can do if major problems come up -- by major problems I'm talking about things that prevent me from making the podcast altogether, like being unable to think or write or talk. By its nature, the podcast is my writing and my research and my voice, and if I can't do those things... well, I can't do them. I *am* trying to build in some slack again -- that's why this month off has happened -- so I can deal with delays and short-term illnesses and other disruptions, but if it becomes impossible to do it becomes impossible to do, and there's nothing more I can do about it. Mark Lipson asks "I'd like to know which episodes you've released have been the most & least popular? And going forward, which episodes do you expect to be the most popular? Just curious to know what music most of your listeners listen to and are interested in." [Excerpt: Sly and the Family Stone, "Somebody's Watching You"] I'm afraid I honestly don't know. Most podcasters have extensive statistical tools available to them, which tell them which episodes are most popular, what demographics are listening to the podcast, where they are in the world, and all that kind of thing. They use that information to sell advertising spots, which is how they make most of their money. You can say "my podcast is mostly listened to by seventy-five year-olds who google for back pain relief -- the perfect demographic for your orthopedic mattresses" or "seven thousand people who downloaded my latest episode also fell for at least one email claiming to be from the wallet inspector last year, so my podcast is listened to by the ideal demographic for cryptocurrency investment". Now, I'm lucky enough to be making enough money from my Patreon supporters' generosity that I don't have to sell advertising, and I hope I never do have to. I said at the very start of the process that I would if it became necessary, but that I hoped to keep it ad-free, and people have frankly been so astonishingly generous I should never have to do ads -- though I do still reserve the right to change my mind if the support drops off. Now, my old podcast host gave me access to that data as standard. But when I had to quickly change providers, I decided that I wasn't going to install any stats packages to keep track of people. I can see a small amount of information about who actually visits the website, because wordpress.com gives you that information – not your identities but just how many people come from which countries, and what sites linked them. But if you're downloading the podcast through a podcast app, or listening through Spotify or Stitcher or wherever, I've deliberately chosen not to access that data. I don't need to know who my audience is, or which episodes they like the most -- and if I did, I have a horrible feeling I'd start trying to tailor the podcast to be more like what the existing listeners like, and by doing so lose the very things that make it unique. Once or twice a month I'll look at the major podcast charts, I check the Patreon every so often to see if there's been a massive change in subscriber numbers, but other than that I decided I'm just not going to spy on my listeners (though pretty much every other link in the chain does, I'm afraid, because these days the entire Internet is based on spying on people). So the only information I have is the auto-generated "most popular episodes" thing that comes up on the front page, which everyone can see, and which shows the episodes people who actually visit the site are listening to most in the last few days, but which doesn't count anything from more than a few days ago, and which doesn't count listens from any other source, and which I put there basically so new listeners can see which ones are popular. At the moment that's showing that the most listened episodes recently are the two most recent full episodes -- "Respect" and "All You Need is Love" -- the most recent of the Pledge Week episodes, episodes one and two, so people are starting at the beginning, and right now there's also the episodes on "Ooby Dooby", "Needles and Pins", "God Only Knows", "She Loves You" and "Hey Joe". But in a couple of days' time those last five will be totally different. And again, that's just the information from people actually visiting the podcast website. I've deliberately chosen not to know what people listening in any other way are doing -- so if you've decided to just stream that bit of the Four Tops episode where I do a bad Bob Dylan impression five thousand times in a row, you can rest assured I have no idea you're doing it and your secret is totally safe. Anyway, that's all I have time for in this episode. In a week or so I'll post a similar-length episode for Patreon backers only, and then a week or two after that the regular podcast will resume, with a story involving folk singers, jazz harmony, angelic visitations and the ghost of James Dean. See you then.
The Bodybuilding Legends Podcast continues its celebration of our 5th Anniversary with Part Two of this special episode featuring some of our favorite interviews over the last five years. Included in this episode are clips of interviews with Chris Cormier, Vince Taylor, Samir Bannout, Tim Kimber of Gold's Gym, Mike Katz, Earl Maynard and Danny Padilla. (Time Stamps below). Time Stamps: 3:20 - Pro Physique Transformation Challenge 4:40 - California Trip 5:20 - Old Bodybuilding Magazines 8:00 - Chris Cormier talks about training with Flex Wheeler and how he almost got into a fight with Mike Tyson 17:10 - Vince Taylor remembers when he met John Brown for the first time 19:15 - Vince Taylor talks about visiting California and competing in his first contest 25:35 - Samir Bannout talks about winning the Mr. Universe in 1979 and competing in his first three Mr. Olympia competitions (1980-1982) 34:20 - Tim Kimber, manager of Gold's Gym in the 1980's, talks about when Hollywood wanted to shoot a television show at Gold's Gym 40:20 - Earl Maynard talks about competing in the NABBA Mr. Universe compared to the IFBB and being on stage with his idol Bill Pearl 54:24 - Mike Katz remembers when Sergio Oliva wanted to compete in the 1970 Mr. America contest and some stories about training with Arnold 1:02:14 - Danny Padilla shares his thoughts about Sergio Oliva 1:07:04 - Danny Padilla talks about losing the 1979 Night of the Champions after scoring a perfect 300 points Links: John's Online Training Bodybuilding Legends Website Support us on Patreon Pro Physique Transformation Challenge John's YouTube Channel John Hansen Fitness website Muscle Maturity Podcast Bodybuilding Legends Facebook Page Bodybuilding Legends Instagram Page
On this episode of Chaos, Rocky and Aaron sit down with touring Comic and host of the New Blerd Order podcast, Vince Taylor. Vince and Rocky catch up on a mutual friend adventure, Aaron helps out the boys as they breakdown the latest nerd porn (no, not actual porn) And the boys talk about accountability.Welcome to the Chaos... We have the high ground
145. Survived my trip to the 24th annual Rockabilly Rave! Not only that, but I managed to smuggle back into the USA a small fortune in records, LPs and CDs to share with YOU folks here on "Go Kat, GO! The Rock-A-Billy Show!" Great rockin' time with great rockin' friends in the UK (big THANKS to Jerry Chattabox, Robin, Ruby Ann & the Rave crew) but it's also great to be back in the Motorbilly Studios again to serve up a fresh new show! Turn it up loud and enjoy tunes from Lew Lewis and his All Star Trio, Darrel Higham, The Sundown Boys, The Boneshakers, Toto & The Raw Deal, The Dice Cubes, Belle Starr and the Boot Jacks, Dave Bennett, The Radions, Lily Locksmith, The Kickers, Red Hot Riot, Legacaster, The Crawdads & The Hi-Fi Lowdowns. As usual, we deliver up a generous portion of incredible vintage songs, favorites from the 50's including Ricky Coyne, Little Richard, Trini Lopez, Buddy Holly, LaVerne Baker, Roy Orbison, Sammy Salvo, Jack Scott, The Cochran Brothers and Vince Taylor. The Aztec Werewolf's gots the greasy goods to make you howl with pleasure on a Tuesday nite! "Go Kat, GO!" -good to the last bop!™
Vince Taylor is our guest on this episode and he brings with him an immense amount of knowledge, and experience, in the real estate market. Having seen 5 major market cycles in his life, and as someone who bought his first Vancouver home for $67,000, Vince provides an almost contradictory outlook on the market then what you will hear on the news. He gives his opinion on how prices will fall, and when and by how much they will rise after, he shares the key fundamentals that point to his predictions and shares where the true opportunities are in this type of market. For more information on Vince Taylor, President of Pilothouse Projects, please visit: https://pilothouseprojects.com/---- www.thevancouverlife.com
Supersax, Aldo Romano,Dee Dee Bridgewater, Rod Stewart,Jammie Callum. La boum avec: Johnny Halliday, les Chaussettes noires, Chats Sauvages, Ronnie Bird, Dany Logan et les Pirates, Elvis, Camillo, Brenda Lee, Vince Taylor et Gene Vincent et Shubby Cheker .
Cultural Transitions: From Monoethnic to Multiethnic | Vince Taylor by Northland Church
In this Evolutionary.org episode for Itunes your hosts Stevesmi and Da Mobster have a look at the 90's bodybuilder Vince Taylor. We get into: • • His still looking amazing at age 65 • That great terminator routine – • Light weight lifting, average sets and reps yet amazing hyper response. • The number of competitions he entered • Why he retired and his comeback at 50 • Bicep injury and recovery • Another John Brown pupil and what that means • Why he didn't do as well as he thought he ought to have done – • And, as always, we get into his AAS cycles. Social media Youtube: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vince.taylor.148 (12,500 followers) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vincetaylor50/ (58,000 followers) For 1-on-1 coaching/consultation/source help requests hit up Stevesmi https://www.elitefitness.com/forum/members/stevesmi.html https://www.evolutionary.org/forums/members/stevesmi.html Where to get blood tests: https://www.evolutionary.org/forums/source-talk/bloodwork-private-md-5695.html Search for #coachedbymobster on Instagram Please note we're not doctors and the opinions are ours. It's our view and is based on our experience and views on the topic. Our Podcasts are for informational purposes and entertainment only. The Freedom of speech and 1st amendment applies.
With over 20+ years experience, almost 20,000 homes sold, and over 100 presale projects launched, few people understand real estate markets like our guest today! Vince Taylor, President of Pilothouse & Author of Beyond the Blindfold, sits down with Matt & Adam and offers up some bold predictions about the future of the Vancouver real estate market. Will prices go down in 2022? Are we currently sitting at the peak? When will be the best opportunities for buyers? And where will prices go in the next decade? All these questions answered (and a dose of tough love Vancouverites) in this jam-packed episode. Let's go!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Vince Taylor is the author of Beyond the Blindfold: Harnessing the Secret Power of Context. In this episode of Seeking Context, we discuss the author's experience of writing a book on the topic of context, and how his views and outlook on life have evolved over time.Support the show
THE 2020 AFC CHAMPIONSHIP REVENGE GAME. The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is back with another episode! In Episode 35 of The Wandering Buffalo Podcast, Vince Taylor and Andrew preview the Buffalo Bills vs. Kansas City Chiefs in Week 5 2021. This game will be played in primetime on Sunday night. This includes the players to watch on the Kansas City Chiefs. Including Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Tyreek Hill, and many more. How can the Buffalo Bills stop the Kansas City Chiefs? What are the Kansas City Chiefs' biggest weaknesses? How can the Buffalo Bills capitalize on them? Do we the Buffalo Bills come out with a win? Find out now in The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast for 10/07/2021 SPECIAL THANKS TO VINCE TAYLOR FOR COMING ON THE SHOW Buffalo on the Brain w/ Vince Taylor: Twitter -- https://twitter.com/PodcastVince Spotify -- https://open.spotify.com/show/2TgFmaLIPDoe07AqWWHvt2 --------------------------------------------------- If you like Buffalo Bills content, Buffalo Bills news, and entertainment, connect with The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast. Support The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: A Buffalo Bills Podcast! -- https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support Follow us on Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/TheWanderingBuf Follow us on Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/TheWanderingBuf Like us on Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/TheWanderingBuf Subscribe to our Apple Podcast -- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wandering-buffalo-podcast/id1553575732 Subscribe to our Spotify Podcast -- https://open.spotify.com/show/7HCluqByJZqhUQD9DJE0Iq The rest of our socials: https://linktr.ee/thewanderingbuffalopodcast --------------------------------------------------- Justin: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/jgods22 Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/jgods22 Andrew: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/2chiangs_ Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/2chiangs_ --------------------------------------------------- The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is a part of the Built in Buffalo Network. Built in Buffalo is your #1 source for all of your Buffalo Bills news, Buffalo Bills updates, and everything else to do with the Buffalo Bills. Built in Buffalo: https://linktr.ee/BuiltinBuffalo AFC Championship Rematch Preview: Buffalo Bills vs Kansas City Chiefs #BuffaloBills #KansasCityChiefs #BillsMafia --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support
Les feuilles mortes, Eric Clapton, Michel Legrand & Stéphane Grappelli, The Animals, Paul Breslin, Vince Taylor, Ximo Tebar, Molly Johnson, Lou Benett , .....
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The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is also back with another episode! In Episode 30 of The Wandering Buffalo Podcast, Justin, Andrew talk about Buffalo Bills football. Specifically, Week 1 vs. Pittsburgh Steelers. The Buffalo Bills are coming off a 3 game win streak in the preseason. Will the Buffalo Bills match up with the Pittsburgh Steelers? Can the Buffalo Bills get the win their first game of the season? Find out now what the boys think about the Buffalo Bills vs. Pittsburgh Steelers - Week 1 in Episode 30 of the Wandering Buffalo Podcast. The Wandering Buffalo Podcast for 09/09/21 Outro music by Vince Taylor. Host of the "Buffalo on the Brain" Podcast on the Built in Buffalo Network --------------------------------------------------- Connect with The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: Support The Wandering Buffalo Podcast! -- https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support Follow us on Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/TheWanderingBuf Follow us on Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/TheWanderingBuf Subscribe to our Apple Podcast -- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wandering-buffalo-podcast/id1553575732 Subscribe to our Spotify Podcast -- https://open.spotify.com/show/7HCluqByJZqhUQD9DJE0Iq The rest of our socials: https://linktr.ee/thewanderingbuffalopodcast --------------------------------------------------- Justin: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/jgods22 Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/jgods22 Andrew: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/2chiangs_ Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/2chiangs_ --------------------------------------------------- The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is a part of the Built in Buffalo Network. Built in Buffalo is your #1 source for all of your Buffalo Bills news, Buffalo Bills updates, and everything else to do with the Buffalo Bills. Built in Buffalo: https://linktr.ee/BuiltinBuffalo Know Thy Enemy: Week 1 - Buffalo Bills vs Pittsburgh Steelers Preview #BuffaloBills #GoBills #BillsMafia #TheWanderingBuffaloPodcast --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support
NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the controversy over Dylan going electric, Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. 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/ Erratum A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't. While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out. But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again, someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago. So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger. At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome". To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do. He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make. The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes. Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four. Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew. And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth, a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all. But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ. Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles. It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out. Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll? I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.
Episode 129 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, and how they went from being a moderately successful beat group to being the only serious rivals to the Beatles. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eleven-minute bonus episode available, on "I'll Never Find Another You" by the Seekers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Two resources that I've used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. When in doubt, the version of the narrative I've chosen to use is the one from Davis' book. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards' Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. Sympathy for the Devil: The Birth of the Rolling Stones and the Death of Brian Jones by Paul Trynka is, as the title might suggest, essentially special pleading for Jones. It's as well-researched and well-written as a pro-Jones book can be, and is worth reading for balance, though I find it unconvincing. This web page seems to have the most accurate details of the precise dates of sessions and gigs. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones' singles up to 1971, including every Stones track I excerpt in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at one of the most important riffs in rock and roll history -- the record that turned the distorted guitar riff into the defining feature of the genre, even though the man who played that riff never liked it. We're going to look at a record that took the social protest of the folk-rock movement, aligned it with the misogyny its singer had found in many blues songs, and turned it into the most powerful expression of male adolescent frustration ever recorded to that point. We're going to look at "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction"] A note before we start this -- this episode deals with violence against women, and with rape. If you're likely to be upset hearing about those things, you might want to either skip this episode, or read the transcript on the website first. The relevant section comes right at the end of the episode, so you can also listen through to the point where I give another warning, without missing any of the rest of the episode. Another point I should make here -- most of the great sixties groups have very accurate biographies written about them. The Stones, even more than the Beatles, have kept a surprising amount of control over their public image, with the result that the only sources about them are either rather sanitised things made with their co-operation, or rather tabloidy things whose information mostly comes from people who are holding a grudge or have a particular agenda. I believe that everything in this episode is the most likely of the various competing narratives, but if you check out the books I used, which are listed on the blog post associated with this episode, you'll see that there are several different tellings of almost every bit of this story. So bear that in mind as you're listening. I've done my best. Anyway, on with the episode. When we left the Rolling Stones, they were at the very start of their recording career, having just released their first big hit single, a version of "I Wanna Be Your Man", which had been written for them by Lennon and McCartney. The day after they first appeared on Top of the Pops, they were back in the recording studio, but not to record for themselves. The five Stones, plus Ian Stewart, were being paid two pounds a head by their manager/producer Andrew Oldham to be someone else's backing group. Oldham was producing a version of "To Know Him is to Love Him", the first hit by his idol Phil Spector, for a new singer he was managing named Cleo Sylvester: [Excerpt: Cleo, "To Know Him is to Love Him"] In a further emulation of Spector, the B-side was a throwaway instrumental. Credited to "the Andrew Oldham Orchestra", and with Mike Leander supervising, the song's title, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones", gave away who the performers actually were: [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "There Are But Five Rolling Stones"] At this point, the Stones were still not writing their own material, but Oldham had already seen the writing on the wall -- there was going to be no place in the new world opened up by the Beatles for bands that couldn't generate their own hits, and he had already decided who was going to be doing that for his group. It would have been natural for him to turn to Brian Jones, still at this point the undisputed leader of the group, and someone who had a marvellous musical mind. But possibly in order to strengthen the group's identity as a group rather than a leader and his followers -- Oldham has made different statements about this at different points -- or possibly just because they were living in the same flat as him at the time, while Jones was living elsewhere, he decided that the Rolling Stones' equivalent of Lennon and McCartney was going to be Jagger and Richards. There are several inconsistencies in the stories of how Jagger and Richards started writing together -- and things like what the actual first song they wrote together was, or when they wrote it, will probably always be lost to the combination of self-aggrandisement and drug-fuelled memory loss that makes it difficult to say anything definitive about much of their career. But we do know that one of the earliest songs they wrote together was "As Tears Go By", a song that wasn't considered suitable for the group -- though they did later record a version of it -- and was given instead to Marianne Faithfull, a young singer with whom Jagger was about to enter into a relationship: [Excerpt: Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"] It's not entirely clear who wrote what on that song -- it's usually referred to as a Jagger/Richards collaboration, but it's credited to Jagger, Richards, and Oldham, and at least one source claims it was actually written by Jagger and the session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan -- and if so, this would be the first time of many that a song written by Jagger or Richards in collaboration with someone else would be credited to Jagger and Richards without any credit going to their co-writer. But the consensus story, as far as there is a consensus, seems to be that Oldham locked Jagger and Richards into a kitchen, and told them they weren't coming out until they had a song written. And it had to be a proper song, not a pastiche of something else, and it had to be the kind of song you could release as a single, not a blues song. After spending all night in the kitchen, Richards eventually got bored of being stuck in there, and started strumming his guitar and singing "it is the evening of the day", and the two of them quickly came up with the rest of the song. After "As Tears Go By", they wrote a lot of songs that they didn't feel were right for the group, but gave them away to other people, like Gene Pitney, who recorded "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday": [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday"] Pitney, and his former record producer Phil Spector, had visited the Stones during the sessions for their first album, which started the day after that Cleo session, and had added a little piano and percussion to a blues jam called "Little by Little", which also featured Allan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals. The songwriting on that track was credited to Spector and Nanker Phelge, a group pseudonym that was used for jam sessions and instrumentals. It was one of two Nanker Phelge songs on the album, and there was also an early Jagger and Richards song, "Tell Me", an unoriginal Merseybeat pastiche: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Tell Me"] But the bulk of the album was made up of cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and other Black American musicians. The album went to number one in the UK album charts, which is a much more impressive achievement than it might sound. At this point, albums sold primarily to adults with spending money, and the album charts changed very slowly. Between May 1963 and February 1968, the *only* artists to have number one albums in the UK were the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Monkees, the cast of The Sound of Music, and Val Doonican. And between May 63 and April 65 it was *only* the Beatles and the Stones. But while they'd had a number one album, they'd still not had a number one single, or even a top ten one. "I Wanna Be Your Man" had been written for them and had hit number twelve, but they were still not writing songs that they thought were suited for release as singles, and they couldn't keep asking the Beatles to help them out, so while Jagger and Richards kept improving as songwriters, for their next single they chose a Buddy Holly B-side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away"] The group had latched on to the Bo Diddley rhythm in that song, along with its machismo -- many of the cover versions they chose in this period seem to have not just a sexual subtext but to be overtly bragging, and if Little Richard is to be believed on the subject, Holly's line "My love is bigger than a Cadillac" isn't that much of an exaggeration. It's often claimed that the Stones exaggerated and emphasised the Bo Diddley sound, and made their version more of an R&B number than Holly's, but if anything their version owes more to someone else. The Stones' first real UK tour had been on a bill with Mickie Most, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, and Keith Richards in particular had been amazed by the Everlys. He said later "The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect". Don Everly, of course, was himself very influenced by Bo Diddley, and learned to play in open-G tuning from Diddley -- and several years later, Keith Richards would make that tuning his own, after being inspired by Everly and Ry Cooder. The Stones' version of "Not Fade Away" owes at least as much to Don Everly's rhythm guitar style as to that of Holly or Diddley. Compare, say, the opening of "Wake Up Little Suzie": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] The rhythm guitar on the Stones version of "Not Fade Away" is definitely Keith Richards doing Don Everly doing Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] That was recorded during the sessions for their first album, and was, depending on whose story you believe, another track that featured Phil Spector and Gene Pitney on percussion, recorded at the same session as "Little by Little", which became its B-side. Bill Wyman, who kept copious notes of the group's activities, has always said that the idea that it was recorded at that session was nonsense, and that it was recorded weeks later, and Oldham merely claimed Spector was on the record for publicity purposes. On the other hand, Gene Pitney had a very strong memory of being at that session. Spector had been in the country because the Ronettes had been touring the UK with the Stones as one of their support acts, along with the Swinging Blue Jeans and Marty Wilde, and Spector was worried that Ronnie might end up with one of the British musicians. He wasn't wrong to worry -- according to Ronnie's autobiography, there were several occasions when she came very close to sleeping with John Lennon, though they never ended up doing anything and remained just friends, while according to Keith Richards' autobiography he and Ronnie had a chaste affair on that tour which became less chaste when the Stones later hit America. But Spector had flown over to the UK to make sure that he remained in control of the young woman who he considered his property. Pitney, meanwhile, according to his recollection, turned up to the session at the request of Oldham, as the group were fighting in the studio and not getting the track recorded. Pitney arrived with cognac, telling the group that it was his birthday and that they all needed to get drunk with him. They did, they stopped fighting, and they recorded the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] "Not Fade Away" made number three on the UK charts, and also became the first Stones record to chart in the US at all, though it only scraped its way to number forty-eight, not any higher. But in itself that was a lot -- it meant that the Stones had a record doing well enough to justify them going to the US for their first American tour. But before that, they had to go through yet another UK tour -- though this isn't counted as an official tour in the listings of their tours, it's just a bunch of shows, in different places, that happened to be almost every night for a couple of months. By this time, the audience response was getting overwhelming, and shows often had to be cut short to keep the group safe. At one show, in Birkenhead, the show had to be stopped after the band played *three bars*, with the group running off stage after that as the audience invaded the stage. And then it was off to the US, where they were nowhere near as big, though while they were over there, "Tell Me" was also released as a single to tie in with the tour, and that did surprisingly well, making number twenty-four. The group's first experience of the US wasn't an entirely positive one -- there was a disastrous appearance on the Dean Martin Show on TV, with Martin mocking the group both before and after their performance, to the extent that Bob Dylan felt moved to write in the liner notes to his next album “Dean Martin should apologise t'the Rolling Stones”. But on the other hand, there were some good experiences. They got to see James Brown at the Apollo, and Jagger started taking notes -- though Richards also noted *what* Jagger was noting, saying "James wanted to show off to these English folk. He's got the Famous Flames, and he's sending one out for a hamburger, he's ordering another to polish his shoes and he's humiliating his own band. To me, it was the Famous Flames, and James Brown happened to be the lead singer. But the way he lorded it over his minions, his minders and the actual band, to Mick was fascinating" They also met up with Murray the K, the DJ who had started the career of the Ronettes among others. Murray had unilaterally declared himself "the fifth Beatle", and was making much of his supposed connections with British pop stars, most of whom either had no idea who he was or actively disliked him (Richards, when talking about him, would often replace the K with a four-letter word usually spelled with a "c"). The Stones didn't like him any more than any of the other groups did, but Murray played them a record he thought they'd be interested in -- "It's All Over Now" by the Valentinos, the song that Bobby Womack had written and which was on Sam Cooke's record label: [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "It's All Over Now"] They decided that they were going to record that, and handily Oldham had already arranged some studio time for them. As Giorgio Gomelsky would soon find with the Yardbirds, Oldham was convinced that British studios were simply unsuitable for recording loud blues-based rock and roll music, and Phil Spector had suggested to him that if the Stones loved Chess records so much, they might as well record at Chess studios. So while the group were in Chicago, they were booked in for a couple of days in the studio at Chess, where they were horrified to discover that their musical idol Muddy Waters was earning a little extra cash painting the studio ceiling and acting as a roadie, helping them in with their equipment. (It should be noted here that Marshall Chess, Leonard Chess' son who worked with the Stones in the seventies, has denied this happened. Keith Richards insists it did.) But after that shock, they found working at Chess a great experience. Not only did various of their musical idols, like Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry, as well as Waters, pop in to encourage them, and not only were they working with the same engineer who had recorded many of those people's records, but they were working in a recording studio with an actual multi-track system rather than a shoddy two-track tape recorder. From this point on, while they would still record in the UK on occasion, they increasingly chose to use American studios. The version of "It's All Over Now" they recorded there was released as their next single. It only made the top thirty in the US -- they had still not properly broken through there -- but it became their first British number one: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "It's All Over Now"] Bobby Womack was furious that the Stones had recorded his song while his version was still new, but Sam Cooke talked him down, explaining that if Womack played his cards right he could have a lot of success through his connection with these British musicians. Once the first royalty cheques came in, Womack wasn't too upset any more. When they returned to the UK, they had another busy schedule of touring and recording -- and not all of it just for Rolling Stones work. There was, for example, an Andrew Oldham Orchestra session, featuring many people from the British session world who we've noted before -- Joe Moretti from Vince Taylor's band, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Andy White, Mike Leander, and more. Mick Jagger added vocals to their version of "I Get Around": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "I Get Around"] It's possible that Oldham had multiple motives for recording that -- Oldham was always a fan of Beach Boys style pop music more than he was of R&B, but he also was in the process of setting up his own publishing company, and knew that the Beach Boys' publishers didn't operate in the UK. In 1965, Oldham's company would become the Beach Boys' UK publishers, and he would get a chunk of every cover version of their songs, including his own. There were also a lot of demo sessions for Jagger/Richards songs intended for other artists, with Mick and Keith working with those same session musicians -- like this song that they wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, demoed by Jagger and Richards with Moretti, Page, Jones, John McLaughlin, Big Jim Sullivan, and Andy White: [Excerpt: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "We're Wastin' Time"] But of course there were also sessions for Rolling Stones records, like their next UK number one single, "Little Red Rooster": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] "Little Red Rooster" is a song that is credited to Willie Dixon, but which actually combines several elements from earlier blues songs, including a riff inspired by the one from Son House's "Death Letter Blues": [Excerpt: Son House, "Death Letter Blues"] A melody line and some lines of lyric from Memphis Minnie's "If You See My Rooster": [Excerpt: Memphis Minnie, "If You See My Rooster"] And some lines from Charley Patton's "Banty Rooster Blues": [Excerpt: Charley Patton, "Banty Rooster Blues"] Dixon's resulting song had been recorded by Howlin' Wolf in 1961: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] That hadn't been a hit, but Sam Cooke had recorded a cover version, in a very different style, that made the US top twenty and proved the song had chart potential: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Little Red Rooster"] The Rolling Stones version followed Howlin' Wolf's version very closely, except that Jagger states that he *is* a cock -- I'm sorry, a rooster -- rather than that he merely has one. And this would normally be something that would please Brian Jones immensely -- that the group he had formed to promote Delta and Chicago blues had managed to get a song like that to number one in the UK charts, especially as it was dominated by his slide playing. But in fact the record just symbolised the growing estrangement between Jones and the rest of his band. When he turned up at the session to record "Little Red Rooster", he was dismayed to find out that the rest of the group had deliberately told him the wrong date. They'd recorded the track the day before, without him, and just left a note from Jagger to tell him where to put his slide fills. They spent the next few months ping-ponging between the UK and the US. In late 1964 they made another US tour, during which at one point Brian Jones collapsed with what has been variously reported as stress and alcohol poisoning, and had to miss several shows, leaving the group to carry on without him. There was much discussion at this point of just kicking him out of the band, but they decided against it -- he was still perceived as the group's leader and most popular member. They also appeared on the TAMI show, which we've mentioned before, and which we'll look at in more detail when we next look at James Brown, but which is notable here for two things. The first is that they once again saw how good James Brown was, and at this point Jagger decided that he was going to do his best to emulate Brown's performance -- to the extent that he asked a choreographer to figure out what Brown was doing and teach it to him, but the choreographer told Jagger that Brown moved too fast to figure out all his steps. The other is that the musical director for the TAMI Show was Jack Nitzsche, and this would be the start of a professional relationship that would last for many years. We've seen Nitzsche before in various roles -- he was the co-writer of "Needles and Pins", and he was also the arranger on almost all of Phil Spector's hits. He was so important to Spector's sound that Keith Richards has said “Jack was the Genius, not Phil. Rather, Phil took on Jack's eccentric persona and sucked his insides out.” Nitzsche guested on piano when the Stones went into the studio in LA to record a chunk of their next album, including the ballad "Heart of Stone", which would become a single in the US. From that point on, whenever the Stones recorded in LA, Nitzsche would be there, adding keyboards and percussion and acting as an uncredited co-producer and arranger. He was apparently unpaid for this work, which he did just because he enjoyed being around the band. Nitzsche would also play on the group's next UK single, recorded a couple of months later. This would be their third UK number one, and the first one credited to Jagger and Richards as songwriters, though the credit is a rather misleading one in this case, as the chorus is taken directly from a gospel song by Pops Staples, recorded by the Staple Singers: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "This May Be The Last Time"] Jagger and Richards took that chorus and reworked it into a snarling song whose lyrics were based around Jagger's then favourite theme -- how annoying it is when women want to do things other than whatever their man wants them to do: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "The Last Time"] There is a deep, deep misogyny in the Stones' lyrics in the mid sixties, partly inspired by the personas taken on by some blues men (though there are very few blues singers who stuck so unrelentingly to a single theme), and partly inspired by Jagger's own relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton, who he regarded as his inferior, even though she was his superior in terms of the British class system. That's even more noticeable on "Play With Fire", the B-side to "The Last Time". "The Last Time" had been recorded in such a long session that Jones, Watts, and Wyman went off to bed, exhausted. But Jagger and Richards wanted to record a demo of another song, which definitely seems to have been inspired by Shrimpton, so they got Jack Nitzsche to play harpsichord and Phil Spector to play (depending on which source you believe) either a bass or a detuned electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Play With Fire"] The demo was considered good enough to release, and put out as the B-side without any contribution from the other three Stones. Other songs Chrissie Shrimpton would inspire over the next couple of years would include "Under My Thumb", "19th Nervous Breakdown", and "Stupid Girl". It's safe to say that Mick Jagger wasn't going to win any boyfriend of the year awards. "The Last Time" was a big hit, but the follow-up was the song that turned the Stones from being one of several British bands who were very successful to being the only real challengers to the Beatles for commercial success. And it was a song whose main riff came to Keith Richards in a dream: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)"] Richards apparently had a tape recorder by the side of his bed, and when the riff came to him he woke up enough to quickly record it before falling back to sleep with the tape running. When he woke up, he'd forgotten the riff, but found it at the beginning of a recording that was otherwise just snoring. For a while Richards was worried he'd ripped the riff off from something else, and he's later said that he thinks that it was inspired by "Dancing in the Street". In fact, it's much closer to the horn line from another Vandellas record, "Nowhere to Run", which also has a similar stomping rhythm: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] You can see how similar the two songs are by overlaying the riff from “Satisfaction” on the chorus to “Nowhere to Run”: [Excerpt “Nowhere to Run”/”Satisfaction”] "Nowhere to Run" also has a similar breakdown. Compare the Vandellas: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] to the Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So it's fairly clear where the song's inspiration came from, but it's also clear that unlike a song like "The Last Time" this *was* just inspiration, rather than plagiarism. The recorded version of "Satisfaction" was never one that its main composer was happy with. The group, apart from Brian Jones, who may have added a harmonica part that was later wiped, depending on what sources you read, but is otherwise absent from the track, recorded the basic track at Chess studios, and at this point it was mostly acoustic. Richards thought it had come out sounding too folk-rock, and didn't work at all. At this point Richards was still thinking of the track as a demo -- though by this point he was already aware of Andrew Oldham's tendency to take things that Richards thought were demos and release them. When Richards had come up with the riff, he had imagined it as a horn line, something like the version that Otis Redding eventually recorded: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] So when they went into the studio in LA with Jack Nitzsche to work on some tracks there including some more work on the demo for “Satisfaction”, as well as Nitzsche adding some piano, Richards also wanted to do something to sketch out what the horn part would be. He tried playing it on his guitar, and it didn't sound right, and so Ian Stewart had an idea, went to a music shop, and got one of the first ever fuzz pedals, to see if Richards' guitar could sound like a horn. Now, people have, over the years, said that "Satisfaction" was the first record ever to use a fuzz tone. This is nonsense. We saw *way* back in the episode on “Rocket '88” a use of a damaged amp as an inspired accident, getting a fuzzy tone, though nobody picked up on that and it was just a one-off thing. Paul Burlison, the guitarist with the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, had a similar accident a few years later, as we also saw, and went with it, deliberately loosening tubes in his amp to get the sound audible on their version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'": [Excerpt: Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, "Train Kept A-Rollin'"] A few years later, Grady Martin, the Nashville session player who was the other guitarist on that track, got a similar effect on his six-string bass solo on Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry", possibly partly inspired by Burlison's sound: [Excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Don't Worry"] That tends to be considered the real birth of fuzz, because that time it was picked up by the whole industry. Martin recorded an instrumental showing off the technique: [Excerpt: Grady Martin, "The Fuzz"] And more or less simultaneously, Wrecking Crew guitarist Al Casey used an early fuzz tone on a country record by Sanford Clark: [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "Go On Home"] And the pedal steel player Red Rhodes had invented his own fuzz box, which he gave to another Wrecking Crew player, Billy Strange, who used it on records like Ann-Margret's "I Just Don't Understand": [Excerpt: Ann-Margret, "I Just Don't Understand"] All those last four tracks, and many more, were from 1960 or 1961. So far from being something unprecedented in recording history, as all too many rock histories will tell you, fuzz guitar was somewhat passe by 1965 -- it had been the big thing on records made by the Nashville A-Team and the Wrecking Crew four or five years earlier, and everyone had moved on to the next gimmick long ago. But it was good enough to use to impersonate a horn to sketch out a line for a demo. Except, of course, that while Jagger and Richards disliked the track as recorded, the other members of the band, and Ian Stewart (who still had a vote even though he was no longer a full member) and Andrew Oldham all thought it was a hit single as it was. They overruled Jagger and Richards and released it complete with fuzz guitar riff, which became one of the most well-known examples of the sound in rock history. To this day, though, when Richards plays the song live, he plays it without the fuzztone effect. Lyrically, the song sees Mick Jagger reaching for the influence of Bob Dylan and trying to write a piece of social commentary. The title line seems, appropriately for a song partly recorded at Chess studios, to have come from a line in a Chuck Berry record, "Thirty Days": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Thirty Days"] But the sentiment also owes more than a little to another record by a Chess star, one recorded so early that it was originally released when Chess was still called Aristocrat Records -- Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] “Satisfaction” is the ultimate exercise in adolescent male frustration. I once read something, and I can't for the life of me remember where or who the author was, that struck me as the most insightful critique of the sixties British blues bands I've ever heard. That person said that by taking the blues out of the context in which the music had been created, they fundamentally changed the meaning of it -- that when Bo Diddley sang "I'm a Man", the subtext was "so don't call me 'boy', cracker". Meanwhile, when some British white teenagers from Essex sang the same words, in complete ignorance of the world in which Diddley lived, what they were singing was "I'm a man now, mummy, so you can't make me tidy my room if I don't want to". But the thing is, there are a lot of teenagers out there who don't want to tidy their rooms, and that kind of message does resonate. And here, Jagger is expressing the kind of aggressive sulk that pretty much every teenager, especially every frustrated male teenager will relate to. The protagonist is dissatisfied with everything in his life, so criticism of the vapidity of advertising is mixed in with sexual frustration because women won't sleep with the protagonist when they're menstruating: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] It is the most adolescent lyric imaginable, but pop music is an adolescent medium. The song went to number one in the UK, and also became the group's first American number one. But Brian Jones resented it, so much so that when they performed the song live, he'd often start playing “I'm Popeye the Sailor Man”. This was partly because it wasn't the blues he loved, but also because it was the first Stones single he wasn't on (again, at least according to most sources. Some say he played acoustic rhythm guitar, but most say he's not on it and that Richards plays all the guitar parts). And to explain why, I have to get into the unpleasant details I talked about at the start. If you're likely to be upset by discussion of rape or domestic violence, stop the episode now. Now, there are a number of different versions of this story. This is the one that seems most plausible to me, based on what else I know about the Stones, and the different accounts, but some of the details might be wrong, so I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that this is absolutely exactly what happened. But if it isn't, it's the *kind* of thing that happened many times, and something very like it definitely happened. You see, Brian Jones was a sadist, and not in a good way. There are people who engage in consensual BDSM, in which everyone involved is having a good time, and those people include some of my closest friends. This will never be a podcast that engages in kink-shaming of consensual kinks, and I want to make clear that what I have to say about Jones has nothing to do with that. Because Jones was not into consent. He was into physically injuring non-consenting young women, and he got his sexual kicks from things like beating them with chains. Again, if everyone is involved is consenting, this is perfectly fine, but Jones didn't care about anyone other than himself. At a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, on the sixth of May 1965, the same day that Jagger and Richards finished writing "Satisfaction", a girl that Bill Wyman had slept with the night before came to him in tears. She'd been with a friend the day before, and the friend had gone off with Jones while she'd gone off with Wyman. Jones had raped her friend, and had beaten her up -- he'd blackened both her eyes and done other damage. Jones had hurt this girl so badly that even the other Stones, who as we have seen were very far from winning any awards for being feminists of the year, were horrified. There was some discussion of calling the police on him, but eventually they decided to take matters into their own hands, or at least into one of their employees' hands. They got their roadie Mike Dorsey to teach him a lesson, though Oldham was insistent that Dorsey not mess up Jones' face. Dorsey dangled Jones by his collar and belt out of an upstairs window and told Jones that if he ever did anything like that again, he'd drop him. He also beat him up, cracking two of Jones' ribs. And so Jones was not in any state to play on the group's first US number one, or to play much at all at the session, because of the painkillers he was on for the cracked ribs. Jones would remain in the band for the next few years, but he had gone from being the group's leader to someone they disliked and were disgusted by. And as we'll see the next couple of times we look at the Stones, he would only get worse.
Buffalo Bills Trivia II w/ Vince Taylor The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is back! In this Wandering Buffalo Podcast, Vince Taylor from Buffalo on the Brain with the Built in Buffalo Network challenges Justin for the Buffalo Bills Trivia Belt. Our Buffalo Bills Trivia is made up of about 15 Buffalo Bills Trivia questions. Whoever buzzes in first, gets the first crack at the Buffalo Bills trivia fact. Can Vince Taylor take the belt from Justin? Will Justin defeat Vince Taylor and keep the Buffalo Bills Trivia belt? Find out on Episode 23 of The Wandering Buffalo Podcast -- The Wandering Buffalo Podcast for 07/22/21 Buffalo on the Brain w/ Vince Taylor: Twitter -- https://twitter.com/PodcastVince Spotify -- https://open.spotify.com/show/2TgFmaLIPDoe07AqWWHvt2 --------------------------------------------------- Connect with The Wandering Buffalo Podcast: Support the show! -- https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support Follow us on Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/TheWanderingBuf Follow us on Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/wanderingbuffalopodcast Subscribe to our Apple Podcast -- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wandering-buffalo-podcast/id1553575732 Subscribe to our Spotify Podcast -- https://open.spotify.com/show/7HCluqByJZqhUQD9DJE0Iq The rest of our socials: https://linktr.ee/thewanderingbuffalopodcast --------------------------------------------------- Justin: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/jgods22 Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/jgods22 Andrew: Twitter -- https://www.twitter.com/2chiangs_ Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/2chiangs_ --------------------------------------------------- The Wandering Buffalo Podcast is a part of the Built in Buffalo Network. Built in Buffalo is your #1 source for all of your Buffalo Bills news, Buffalo Bills updates, and everything else to do with the Buffalo Bills. Built in Buffalo: https://linktr.ee/BuiltinBuffalo #BuffaloBills #GoBills #BillsMafia #TheWanderingBuffaloPodcast --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wandering-buffalo-podcast/support
That's the Black Falcon there, I tell ya!" "Naaah ... that's Captain America" Host and comedian Vince Taylor and co-hosts Tyleem Robinson and Yasmeen St. Clair review the latest episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The gang welcomes special guest Orlando comedian Ken Miller, host of Real Laughs on Real Radio 104.1, and winner of Steve Harvey's 2020 Stand-Up Spotlight. More topics: Mortal Kombat and the recasting of Black Panther.
Dave Palumbo and Chris Aceto are back for another episode of Heavy Muscle Radio, the show where the two discuss everything going on in the bodybuilding world. On today's episode, Dave and Chris talk about the recent health struggles of 1982 Mr. Olympia Chris Dickerson, and how he has overcome them all - at the age of 80! Also, August 25th will forever be remembered as the day that the bodybuilding world lost Rich Piana. Dave and Chris reflect on the life of Piana, 3 years after his passing. Plus...happy birthday Vince Taylor! It's Heavy Muscle Radio, on RXMuscle.com.