Podcasts about VJ

Jess is joined by iconic MTV VJ DAVE HOLMES! Dave was the “runner-up” in the infamous Wanna Be a VJ contest who turned his “loss” to Jesse Camp into a 5-year career at MTV. Dave chats about being gay in the TRL days, BRITNEY, N'SYNC, EMINEM, MANDY MOORE, CARSON DALY's rise, JOHN NORRIS, the MTV Beach House, his favorite seasons of The Real World, transforming his body and more!

After 25 years of suffering from multiple autoimmune conditions that affected your guest's energy, skin, hair, and joints, VJ Hamilton's finally found her answer(s) and her calling. First diagnosed with alopecia areata in childhood, VJ endured many years of very visible autoimmune conditions, including alopecia, psoriasis, and eczema. After decades of enduring various symptoms and ill health, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue—another 'problem' to add to the growing list. Determined not to let the ongoing multiple health problems become her 'fate' in life, VJ did an intense study into immunology and trained as a Nutritionist.She finally uncovered the root cause of her issues and transformed her health — now living free of symptoms. She shares with us more of her own survivor-to-thriver story, plus she explains: • How we have to think beyond food groups and look at the nutrients we need,• Why and how food can trigger symptoms, including multiple skin issues,• Why (in most cases) we don't need to throw out whole food groups such as 'no diary,' 'no nightshades,' etc.,• The importance of individualized analysis and care and so much more...More About Our Guest: VJ Hamilton VJ has a BSc in Biochemistry & Immunology, is a Registered Nutritional Therapist, and is a member of the Institute of Functional Medicine. VJ now uses these same principles in her nutritional therapy clinic, The Autoimmunity Nutritionist, to help strong-willed women with autoimmune disease regain their strength and live a whole, symptom-free life. VJ is a perceptive health writer featured in Cosmopolitan, The Telegraph, Glamour magazine, and many health magazines. VJ has also co-authored a book with other well-being therapists called 'Empowerment in Health & Wellness,' which provides practical wellness tips to thrive after a life challenge. In her free time, VJ seeks culinary experiences at home and away and loves to recreate dishes at home with her friends and family. VJ is dedicated to her two twin pups and enjoys long walks in the country, Pilates practice, and attending music and theatre shows. d enjoys long walks in the country, Pilates practice, and attending music and theatre shows. Learn more at: https://theautoimmunitynutritionist.com/Please share this link to our chat with family and friends: https://UnderstandingAutoimmune.com/VJ-2023.
Your host is neither a doctor nor a medical professional. She is someone who is living well with an autoimmune diagnosis. This show is for educational purposes only. The information presented in this interview cannot substitute for the advice of your physician or other trained medical, healthcare, or other professionals. Host(s) and guest(s) are not diagnosing any specific conditions during the show. This show is not intended to diagnose, prevent, or treat autoimmune diseases or other conditions or illnesses. The information provided on UnderstandingAutoimmune.com, Life Interrupted Radio.com, and The Autoimmune Hour is for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for your own medical, legal, or other professional advice and care.

Get your VJ here. A brain storming session for Chlemma. Finding balance The opportunity cost of how you spend your time What the EC method is all about Leaning into hard things 56 days moderate TheECmethod.co.uk

My guest today is stand-up comedian and author, Bill Bellamy. Bill is the executive producer and host of Bill Bellamy's Who's Got Jokes? on TV One and was a longtime VJ and the host of several MTV programs, including MTV Jamz and House. We talk about his memoir “Top Billin'” during this episode. This episode […]

Radio and VJ legend Matt Pinfield returns to drill down into the deep cuts of the obscure but essential alt rock of The Jesus and Mary Chain's 1985 album Psychocandy. Follow Matt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matthewpinfield/ Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattpinfield Check out Matt's website: https://mattpinfieldmusic.com/ Follow Josh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshadammeyers/ Follow Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshAdamMeyers Follow Josh on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joshameyers Follow The 500 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the500podcast/ Follow The 500 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/the500podcast Follow The 500 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The500PodcastWithJAM/ Email the show: 500podcast@gmail.com Check the show website: http://the500podcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This show starts out with discussion on the "Stowe" tape, and what such an exciting discovery means to the world of Beatles fandom and scholarship.      This is followed by our main topic - the US Singles.   VJ, Swan, Tollie, MGM, Capitol and ATCO (oh my).      What did the abundance of 45's mean to the average fan, and what has "collectibility" meant to the world of Beatles singles.

Aanchal Sharma Dawadi is an actress, model and VJ who made her acting debut from Nai Nabhannu La 4, following with Johnny Gentleman, Shatru Gate, Daal, Bhaat Tarkari, Jhinge Dau and others.

Today on Too Opinionated, our good friend actress Nadia Hatta drops by to talk about her new Hallmark movie, A Winning Team!  In addition to her role as Emily on A Winning Team, Nadia is an award-winning actress best known for her feature role Mei Chen in Netflix Original Series, Away, and Queen Babylon in "Babylon Fog" (Ba Bi Lun Mi Wu) by acclaimed Chinese director Chuan Lu, among others. After graduating with a BFA at NYU Tisch School of Arts, she starred in Discovery Channel's Golden Bell Award-winning travel show, Fun Taiwan reaching over 2 billion views. As a VJ at MTV Asia in China, she also wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a seven-part miniseries about New York Fashion Week title, "Nadia in New York". Nadia is now based in North America starting the next chapter in her career. While English is her native language, she speaks Mandarin with a native tongue and fluent in French and Italian.  Want to watch: YouTube Meisterkhan Pod (Please Subscribe)  

Adam Curry is an podcaster, announcer, Internet entrepreneur and media personality, known for his stint as a VJ on MTV and being one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer Web sites. Also known for co-hosting the No Agenda show, in the 2000s, he first became involved in podcasting, and has been called the 'Podfather' because of his efforts.Check him out here: https://www.noagendashow.net/

Subeksha Khadka is Miss Nepal International 2012, World Miss University Nepal 2017, VJ and an actor, whose debut movie is Ranveer. Arun Chhetri is an actor and dancer who is known for the 2022 movie, Mahapurush. Bibek Ghimire is a Nepali-American film director and producer known for Chini Kam Rang Kada. Their movie ‘Prema' is releasing on March 31. Don't forget to watch it! Cheers!

Figure skating prodigy/USFL cheerleader/model/Playboy Cover Girl/Centerfold/actress/VJ turned successful business woman/life coach and now author Deborah Driggs talked with Mark and Nicole about her extraordinary life. This life has taken her from Orange County to Hollywood to Japan to acting with people as diverse as Mickey Rourke, Bob Hope and DEVO (!), to being part of a power couple with an Olympic champion, hit rock bottom due to her struggles with alcohol, only to rise again and thrive as one of the top insurance agents in the country and now is a life coach (she gives Mark some valuable advice on closing) helping to transform lives with her 90 day journey into healing. If that wasn't enough, Deborah has turned a yellowing, 40-year-old manuscript found in her grandmother's basement into a historical novel "Son of a Basque" which is based on the autobiographical writings of her grandfather Mark B. Arrieta and his amazing true story of an immigrant turned WWII hero as well as an inspiring love story. Go to deborahdriggs.com. If you sign up to Debbie's Den and say you heard about it from The Dark Mark Show you will get a free signed copy of Son of a Basque AND a free copy of Here Comes the Sun, compilation of amazing stories about and written by women, which Deborah contributed to Get some Dark Mark Show gear Go to www.teepublic.com/user/dms1 for shirts, mugs, phone/laptop covers, masks and more! Go to lulu.com and get Nicole's poetry book “Slow Burn” This show is sponsored by: Eddie by Giddy FDA Class II medical device built to treat erectile dysfunction and performance unpredictability. Eddie is specifically engineered to promote firmer and longer-lasting erections by working with the body's physiology. Get rock hard erections the natural way again. Using promo code DARKMARK20, you can save 20% on your Eddie purchase, and you and your partner will be chanting incantations of ecstasy together faster than you can say “REDRUM.” Go to buyeddie.com/DarkMark for 20% off your purchase using code DARKMARK20 today. Raze Energy Drinks Go to https://bit.ly/2VMoqkk and put in the coupon code DMS for 15% off the best energy drinks. Zero calories. Zero carbs. Zero crash Renagade CBD Go to renagadecbd.com for all of your CBD needs Tactical Soap Smell Great with Pheromone infused products and drive women wild with desire! Go to https://grondyke-soap-company.myshopify.com/?rfsn=7187911.8cecdba

All through her youth and her studies, Victoria (VJ) suffered from chronic fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, unexplained lightheadedness, swollen and painful joints, and cravings.She also had the symptoms of multiple autoimmune disorders that she'd been diagnosed with from the age of 7. As a result, VJ went on to study immunology at university and focused on autoimmune disease. But learning about the underlying biology of autoimmune disease gave her no solutions for easing her symptoms.So she went into nutritional therapy training, and started to understand that uncovering the root causes of her conditions was a better approach than just trying to appease her symptoms. And she transformed her health within 12 months – no napping, no aching muscles and restless legs, no irritated and inflamed skin, and best of all, her brain was back.  Stabilizing her blood sugar and insulin was key to improving VJ's health and her autoimmune disorders. In this episode, VJ shares the diet and lifestyle changes she made, especially vastly reducing sugar and processed foods. Find VJ here: https://theautoimmunitynutritionist.com/To get personal guidance, support, and accountability to live your healthier lifestyle and let go of sugar: Join the the After Sugar Club today!To get rid of cravings, especially if you're an intermittent faster, download your 5 tips here.Also check out the Life After Sugar Facebook page, and subscribe to my Instagram account and to the Life After Sugar YouTube channel.To rate and review this podcast: scroll down in your podcast player on your phone and click on the stars. To leave a review, scroll down a little more and click on "Write a Review". Once you've finished, select “Send” or “Save” in the top-right corner. If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed on your review. After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible, but it should be posted soon. Thank you! - Netta

Former model, actress, cheerleader, figure skater Deborah Driggs talks about her latest release “Son of a Basque” (the story of her grandfather Mark Arrietta) as an immigrant's story of survival, bonding, and gifts of the family that resonates with many people and how discovering her grandfather's story her own journey of self-awareness, self-acceptance and peace! Deborah has appeared in Playboy, Covergirl, VJ for Playboy Channel's Hot Rock, and USFL's L.A. Express later transitioning through a series of events to global print sales and becoming VP of Business Development, later working in the insurance and financial industry now working as a healing coach helping others work through emotional trauma and getting out of the victim mentality! Check out the amazing Deborah Driggs and her latest “Son of a Basque” on all platforms plus how Deborah can help you at www.deborahdriggs.com today! #deborahdriggs #author #sonofabasque #markarrieta #playboymodel #actress #figureskter #USFL #LAExpress #covergirl #healingcoach #iheartradio #spreaker #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner#themikewagnershow #mikewagnerdeborahdriggs #themikewagnershowdeborahdriggs   --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/support

A short and sweet solo update: What happens when experimenting asks us to give up what feels comfortable? A trust fall and greater connection to our design. Links:Renunciation, by Jennifer WelwoodHD resources + offerings: Compass - Live program open until 4/26th Line Guidebook 1:1 MentorshipStay in touch: Subscribe to the VJ email newsletter or follow on Instagram @victoriajane.hd

Former model, actress, cheerleader, figure skater Deborah Driggs talks about her latest release “Son of a Basque” (the story of her grandfather Mark Arrietta) as an immigrant's story of survival, bonding, and gifts of the family that resonates with many people and how discovering her grandfather's story her ownjourney of self-awareness, self-acceptance and peace! Deborah has appeared in Playboy, Covergirl, VJ for Playboy Channel's Hot Rock, and USFL's L.A. Express later transitioning through a series of events to global print sales and becoming VP of Business Development, later working in the insurance and financial industry now working as a healing coach helping others work through emotional trauma and getting out of the victim mentality! Check out the amazing Deborah Driggs and her latest “Son of a Basque” on all platforms plus how Deborah can help you at www.deborahdriggs.com today! #deborahdriggs #author #sonofabasque #markarrieta #playboymodel #actress#figureskter #USFL #LAExpress #covergirl #healingcoach #iheartradio #spreaker #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerdeborahdriggs #themikewagnershowdeborahdriggs   --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/support

Happy Birthday VJ!!! We got to celebrate this week with a good old birthday recap from not only VJ's birthday over the weekend, from masssages to the one of the best parties ever, a good time of celebration was had! We also got to do VJ's favorite emotional and mental checkin LOL. With any birthday recap, we have to talk about some of most memorable birthday experiences...some include car alarms, foot prints on ceilings, and boats&hoes. Let us know your favorite birthday ever! Cheers!Also, Happy St. Patrick's Day! Be on the lookout for ASAAS St. Patty's Day Fun!The Sip: Birthday Cake Martini & The Shot: Irish Flag Shot

In the world of basketball, defense is just as important as offense. And when it comes to locking down the opposing team's top scorers, few players in NBA history can match the skills of 5x champion as a key member of the Showtime Lakers and 1987 NBA Defensive Player of the Year, Michael Cooper. In this video, Coop takes us on a deep dive into his top five defensive assignments. From guarding the likes of Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas, to shutting down George Gervin and Alex English, Cooper proved time and time again that he was one of the best defenders to ever step onto the court. But what made Cooper so special? It wasn't just his quick hands or his ability to read the offense. It was his commitment to studying his opponents and understanding their tendencies. Cooper knew that defense was about more than just stopping a player from scoring - it was about disrupting their rhythm, throwing them off their game, and forcing them to make mistakes. Throughout this video, he breaks down each of defensive assignment and provides insights into his techniques, strategies, and mindset. We'll see how he used his length and agility to frustrate top scorers in the 1980's NBA. So if you're ready to go inside the mind of an NBA defensive legend, join in and explore Michael Cooper's top five defensive assignments in NBA history. You won't be disappointed! 00:00 - Intro 00:10 - Why no Larry Bird? ABOUT EACH: Andrew Toney - 00:28 Andrew Toney played for the Philadelphia 76ers from 1980 to 1988. He was born on November 23, 1957, in Birmingham, Alabama, and attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Toney was known for his shooting skills and was nicknamed "The Boston Strangler" for his dominant performances against the Boston Celtics. He was a 2x All-Star and helped the Sixers win the title in 1983. Vinny Johnson - 08:12 Vinny Johnson, also known as "The Microwave," played in the NBA from 1981 1992. VJ was born on September 1, 1956, in Brooklyn, New York, and went to Baylor. Johnson was a key player off the bench for the Pistons and earned his nickname "The Microwave" for his ability to come into the game and quickly heat up, scoring points in bunches. George Gervin - 03:12 George Gervin, also known as "The Iceman," is a retired pro basketball player who played in the NBA and ABA from 1972 to 1986. He was born on April 27, 1952, in Detroit, Michigan. Gervin played college basketball at Eastern Michigan University and then transferred to a small school, Long Beach State, before being drafted in the third round of the 1974 ABA draft by the Virginia Squires. He later signed with the San Antonio Spurs in 1974 and spent most of his career with the team. Doctor Julius Erving - 05:48 Julius Erving, also known as "Dr. J," was an ABA and NBA champion. He was born on February 22, 1950, in Hempstead, New York. Erving played college hoops at the University of Massachusetts before joining the ABA in 1971. He played for the Virginia Squires and the New York Nets, where he gained fame for his acrobatic moves and flashy style of play. Doc was NBA MVP award in 1981, and led the 76ers to an championship in 1983. Erving retired in 1987 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993. Alex English - 10:26 Alex English is a retired professional basketball player who is best known for his time with the Denver Nuggets of the NBA. He was born on January 5, 1954, in Columbia, South Carolina. English played college basketball at the University of South Carolina before being drafted in the second round of the 1976 NBA Draft by the Milwaukee Bucks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Mar and I have become pretty good friends in his time doing stand up, Mike is an incredibly talented comic with experience in bands and sales, going from writing jokes 10 years ago to finally being able to do them. **also a cameo from VJ again like the Jordan Episode due to my poor planning

In this episode of From the Blockchain, Ashley (Bored Becky) is joined by guests VJ and Safa – a couple of NFT and Web3 thought leaders who have been friends since the third grade. After college, VJ and Safa took different directions in their careers. VJ went into project management and was working at different software companies, while Safa went into marketing and started his own agency. They would text each other different ideas and early on realized how special the Web3 space could be. After VJ bought his first Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, the friends got creative. What began as a gut instinct and playful experiment with IP, the journey of Jenkins The Valet and Tally Labs highlights how having your finger on the pulse in a new arena with the right entrepreneurial vision and work ethic can lead to a full-time, innovative, and scaled business.   00:41 – Episode introduction, overview, and brief guest bio. 05:32 – Meet VJ and Safa from Tally Labs and Jenkins The Valet07:32 – Where and how did Tally Labs begin? 16:53 – Diving into what the Tally Labs ecosystem is and what it does. What they learned about creating a character from the internet. Learn about their new franchise and book. 20:58 – Learn more about NFT licensing and IP use and the importance of utilizing those tools. 25:04– What has their biggest learnings been, what are the different tiers of Tally Labs, and creating content with their community.33:36 – How have they been able to scale, the importance of funding and fundraising and how they were able to navigate.37:10 – What Web3.0 means to them and where they draw the line. 41:53 – What are they working on now and what they are focusing on. 43:39 – Diving into the Tally Labs podcast and what they are working on with the podcast. 47:34 – ChatGPT question: What examples of innovation do they expect the public to see in the intersection of media, intellectual property, and Web3.0 over the next five years and which of these innovations do they think will be the most surprising or unexpected? 50:25 - Where to find them. Today's show is brought to you by Daz3D  LINKS:To learn more about Fame Lady Squad and our NFT project, visit our website. Have a question, comment, or guest suggestion? Fill out this form Subscribe to our newsletter here Follow Ashley “Bored Becky” on Twitter Follow Danielle “NFTIgnition” on Twitter Follow Cara on TwitterLearn more about Tally Labs  Follow Tally Labs on Twitter @tallylabsnft, Follow Safa on Twitter @seeapefollowape, Follow Jenkins the Valet on @jenkinsthevalet, Follow Jenkins the Mutant on Twitter @jenkinsmutated, Follow Azurian Art Council on Twitter@azurbala   

Le 20 mai 2010 au musée d'art moderne de Paris, sans déclencher aucune alarme, cinq toiles de Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Braque et Léger, sont dérobées. Des toiles évaluées par son propriétaire, la mairie de Paris, à 109 millions d'euros. Vjéran Tomic, surnommé l'homme araignée, est l'auteur de ces vols. invité : Maitre David-Olivier Kaminski, avocat de Vréjan Tomic.

Ben Cantil (a.k.a. Encanti) is a music producer, synthesist, sound designer, performer, DJ, VJ, and electronic music teacher. Encanti Links: https://linktr.ee/encantimusic Rob Clouth is an electronic musician, sound designer and new media artist based in Barcelona. Rob Clouth Links: https://www.facebook.com/robclouth https://www.soundcloud.com/robclouth https://www.instagram.com/robclouth AI death metal band. Emulating musicians dead or alive with neural networks. We're a couple of weirdo metalhead noise musicians who met at Berklee College doing machine learning research, building raw audio neural networks to generate music in genres like death metal, mathcore, breakcore.  Dadabots Links: https://dadabots.com/ Mr. Bill's Links: https://live.mrbillstunes.com/ https://discord.gg/ySjhgWQ https://mrbill.bandcamp.com/ https://www.youtube.com/user/MrBillsTunes Podcast Produced & Edited by: https://twitter.com/303FuMo    

With unprecedented access to the MuchMusic archives, 299 Queen Street West tells the story of a scrappy Canadian television upstart from the perspective of the VJ's who at the time had no prior TV hosting experience, received no direction, no scripts and broadcasted live across the country. Director Sean Menard and legendary VJ Rick "the Temp" Campanelli joined Becky and Shai for the most anticipated interview of SXSW, and it did not disappoint. Join the FNM Fam for an emotional journey through the most influential music television of our childhood.  Follow all of the Friday Night Movie SXSW 2023 coverage and join Becky and Shai at the Wonder House March 11-14, noon-5pm, at Café Blue Downtown Austin, courtesy of the University of Arizona.  Sign up for the Friday Night Movie Newsletter for giveaways, curated episode playlists from the hosts and guests (including our mom), and at MOST one email per month (and probably fewer).  Closed captions for this episode are available via the player on the official Friday Night Movie homepage, the Podbean app and website, and YouTube.  The Friday Night Movie Family supports the following organizations: the DC Abortion Fund, HIAS, NAACP Legal Defense Fund | Equal Justice Initiative | Asian American Journalists Association. Subscribe, rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, including iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | Podbean | Overcast. Catch up on all the Friday Night Movie SXSW special coverage in this playlist, including featured interviews from SXSW Wonder House hosted by the University of Arizona.  Play along with Friday Night Movie at home! Read the FNM Glossary to learn the about our signature bits (e.g., Buy/Rent/Meh, I Told You Shows, Tradesies, etc). Email us at info@p4tmedia.com or tweet @FriNightMovie, @pancake4table, @chichiKgomez, and/or  @paperBKprincess.  Follow our creations and zany Instagram stories @frinightmovie, @FNMsisters, and @pancake4table. Follow us on Letterboxd (@pancake4table) where we're rating every movie we've EVER watched.  Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter for exclusive giveaways and news! Theme music by What Does It Eat.  Subscribe and leave a review on IOS or Android at frinightmovie.com.

Two sisters who are both famous in their own right go into business together to teach others the skills that have supercharged their own careers. That's the upshot of this episode but it's so much more than that.  Erica Ehm has been a public figure since I was a teenager and although we didn't meet until today, her work has been a reality in my life for decades.  She launched her digital media business catering, a digital agency catering to mom's on social when my daughter was 1.  I didn't understand the full scope of her work until I connected with her on LinkedIn several years ago.  She's so much more than a VJ.  She has a personal commitment to adding her voice to do good in the world and boy has she succeeded.   I was thrilled to connect with Erica on LinkedIn but little did I know she has a sister, Leslie Ehm.  I met Leslie just as she was launching her book Swagger.  She also has a media background but she's a world renowned trainer (Disney hires her to teach their staff creativity and confidence!) and international speaker. I get constructive feedback about my interview technique during the podcast.  It's a sneak peak of how the live cohort coaching might go. This is the only podcast they have done together and it was an honour to host Ehm2 on PI Day (yes, I'm a math geek). We talk about legacy, mothers, children, social media, worldviews and how reality often forces us to choose differently that we might dream. And yes, I finally asked Erica music question.  I've held off for years but her answers are worth a listen. My favourite part is the end when we get to see the full power of sisterhood when Leslie describes her protective instincts towards her Erica. It's an episode that radiates love. https://ehm2.com/ Erica Ehm - LinkedIn Leslie Ehm - LinkedIn    

 This is Superlative: A Podcast about watches, the people behind them, and the worlds that inspire them. This week our host and aBlogtoWatch Founder Ariel Adams is joined by VJ Geronimo, the CEO of The Americas at Oris. To start the conversation, Ariel has VJ dive right into what he does in his current role for Oris, and they begin to talk about some of the differences between markets like the South American market compared to The United States market. The two discuss some of the goals behind the brand, and how his current position influences VJ's life while living in a place like Connecticut while working for a Swiss Watch Brand. Since a big focus for Oris is conservation and being environmentally conscious, Ariel and VJ really look into what Oris has been doing when it comes to conservation with their own products, and why it is something that is important to the brand as well as VJ. Our guest and host go deeper into industry talk, VJ talks about the R&D that goes into some of the product design, and Ariel asks what watch VJ likes to put on people's wrist when asked for guidance. To stay updated with VJ and Oris:Website - https://www.oris.ch Instagram @Oris - https://www.instagram.com/oris/ Twitter @Oriswatches - https://twitter.com/oriswatches To check out the ABTW Shop where you can see our products inspired by our love of Horology:- Shop ABTW - https://store.ablogtowatch.com/To keep updated with everything Superlative and aBlogtoWatch, check us out on:- Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ablogtowatch/- Twitter - https://twitter.com/ABLOGTOWATCH- Website - https://www.ablogtowatch.com/If you enjoy the show please Subscribe, Rate, and Review!

On this week's episode of VJ, Chuck deep dives into MJF and AEW's futures after the company's last Pay-Per-View Revolution. How the art of storytelling will help the new company move forward. Lastly, Chuck takes apart the media's love affair with former Dallas Cowboys Offensive Coordinator Kellen Moore. SUPPORT VJ WITH FREE APPLE MUSIC TRIAL: https://apple.co/3SK77uU SUPPORT VJ WITH FREE APPLE TV+ TRIAL: https://apple.co/3RLZpRj

This week Dave Holmes (legend) comes by for a special episode unpacking midwest trauma, VJ'ing on MTV, and Cher. We also discuss:-the drama of Catholic Mass-Coming Out in Missouri™️ -interviewing Britneyplus we ask, "is Zillow the problem?"*******************************************************Buy your Character Actress sweatshirt, onesie, and more at gayasspodcast.com!Follow Dave on Instagram (@daveholmes), Twitter (@daveholmes), and listen to Homophilia Podcast (Eric's ep was released Nov. 25th

BB x CC x VJ by PUMPDABEAT

Welcome to the FuturePerfect Podcast where we talk with compelling people breaking new ground in art, media, and entertainment. This podcast is produced by FuturePerfect Studio, an extended reality studio creating immersive experiences for global audiences. Visit our website futureperfect.studio for more details.The text version of this interview has been edited for length and clarity. Find the full audio version above or in your favorite podcast app.For episode 006, Wayne Ashley interviews Andrew Keller, founder of We Few Group, a post-media company that manages singers and songwriters, and develops brand partnerships and ventures with internationally known visual and musical artists. Making innovative use of blockchain technologies and NFTs, Andrew has been building compelling projects with such noted organizations as the David Bowie Estate and singer-songwriter Stefan Storm.Early career at Columbia RecordsLet me start right off by saying how excited I am to be speaking to someone who's been part of the music industry for over 20 years. As much as I love music, I've had very little access to the inside workings of the business. You've had these long relationships with labels like Columbia and Capitol Records. What are some of the most important insights you've gained over the last two decades?Andrew Keller: One of the biggest insights I've gained is that change is necessary and hard. When you're dealing with global major labels it's really hard to make noticeable changes. There's a lot of people working at major labels who are innovative and want to do good. It's just really hard to turn a gigantic ship around. You're dealing with all sorts of policies and god knows how many different types of contracts that were written over the years.How did you get started at Columbia Records and what were your major focuses were when you were there?AK: I started at Columbia as a 17 year old and was a total music-head. I grew up in New York City so I had access to absolutely everything, and thankfully, I had parents who were simultaneously really supportive and also slightly oblivious. From the time I was 13 or 14 I was going out to places I probably shouldn't have been and exploring all sorts of different scenes from nightclubs to hardcore and punk shows to mainstream pop shows. I was really giving myself a crazy education in different subcultures and figuring out little scenes and pockets that had their own worlds, archetypes, and systems in place. And they're probably all relatively similar, it's just people wearing different clothes and different hair. But the whole concept of having these scenes and worlds always excited me. It kind of all played into ideas of identity—sonic identity and visual identity.I was going to lots of shows around 2002 when there was this giant emergence of bands in the tri-state area who were coming out of the punk scene. And it became kind of this pop-punk, emo, screamo post-hardcore thing. I refer to it lovingly as the Warped Tour-scene, which was this festival that traveled around the US for years. There was a ton of attention on bands that I was friends with and bands that I had built relationships with as a fan.One thing kind of led to another and I ended up getting hired as a junior A&R scout / assistant at Columbia and got to work for some amazing people. One of whom is kind of this incredibly legendary small bald man named Matt Pinfield, who was a DJ and then VJ on MTV. A lot of the time we kind of ended up having a deal where he would get booked to DJ and then I would basically cover his set and he'd split the money with me if he had to leave.So I started DJing and it was just this awesome moment in time where I was really young and exposed to so many people. It became clear to me at that point that I just loved being around creative people. I was never in a band. I don't sing. I don't consider myself an artist in any way, shape or form. I do consider myself a creative person and a professional fan. I realized early on that for me it was gonna be about being the conduit and the kind of middle man between the artist and the rest of the world.That period of time was really incredible. I got to work on MGMT's first two albums as a coordinator then started to sign bands on my own like Cults and St. Lucia and doing stuff in the dance space with Krewella and Dillon Francis. And then one of the last things I got to do at Columbia was Bring Me the Horizon, which as a metal kid was unreal. And that was all under a guy named Ashley Newton, who is still one of my closest friends and mentors. He was responsible for signing Spice Girls, Massive Attack, Daft Punk, and Pharrell. Ultimately I went with him and Steve Barnett, who had been the chairman of Columbia, over to Capitol Records when Steve was relaunching Capitol.Streaming music, shifts in the industry, and joining Capitol RecordsI'm very interested in the sort of crises that upend one's assumptions about the world and motivate people to do something radically different than what they've been doing. You mentioned inertia in the music industry when we talked earlier. What happened that caused you to leave Columbia, join Capitol and eventually start your own company?AK: There were a few things. I was 30 and had started at Columbia when I was 17 and I really wanted a change. I loved my artists and everyone I worked with. It really was a family, but I was too comfortable. If you do A&R at a label your real challenge at the end of the day is to sell records. Your goal is to find artists, help them make the best record possible and have as much success as you can. There's a million ways to do it, and I'm not even saying I was great at it, but it's a very linear goal. You go from point A to point B, and that's fine, but it had just done so much and I needed a change.So Steve Barnett called me and said what would you want to do if you were going to stay at a label? And my answer was that streaming was starting to become really dominant. And the thing that streaming changed was access to global music. Before streaming if you were a British band you would sign to a label in the UK for the world. But unless something really took off, you might not even get a US release. When Spotify started putting out music, for the most part, nothing was geo-locked. Everything was coming out day and date, but labels were still working territorially.So I said to Steve, I think there's gonna be a really big shift in the way music is consumed from an international standpoint and I wanted to create “international A&R 2.0” for streaming. So off I went to Capitol Records where I started figuring out this whole system. And also taking systems that were already in place and trying to break them because there were things that didn't make sense to me and that I thought needed to be changed. Part of that was really just being the ambassador and being the person who could go and have some difficult conversations. But also go and represent Capitol around the world. It was a lot of time on airplanes.I had a ton of fun at Capitol. I got to partner with Lewis Capaldi who is on his arena tour right now and is a fantastic artist. I introduced Capitol to SM Entertainment, one of the biggest K-pop labels in the world, and they have an amazing and fruitful partnership. When I reached the end of my deal at Capitol I was in my thirties and my brand had always been owned by a major corporation. There were things I wanted to do that I'd never be able to do in those situations. For example I wouldn't be able to music supervise a movie, I wouldn't be able to launch my own projects or do certain things.An open-ended post-media companyFrom here you started your own company We Few Group. I like to call it an “open-ended post-media company”. You take on so many roles—an artist manager, a mixing engineer, an NFT project producer, an entertainment strategy consultant, you're also working closely with visual artists to produce a graphic novel and even knitwear. This kind of post-media practice that you engage in is so exciting to me and it's exactly what FuturePerfect is doing. How are these different worlds and practices connected for you?AK: When I went off to start We Few Group everyone was like what is it, what are you going to do? And I just said I'm going to do things that excite me with people I like. And that was it, that's the entire thing.For example, you mentioned the knitwear. A couple of years ago, there was a painter that I was obsessed with and I wanted to buy his paintings. I ended up getting on a Zoom call with him for over two hours talking about what he was doing. At the end of the call he asked—if I manage artists could I also manage a painter? He's in the kind of traditional art world, but makes these 30-second horror films around each of his pieces on TikTok. It's all kind of neo-gothic stuff.He has all of these kids as fans, everyone from artists and influencers and just regular teenagers and 20-somethings, the typical TikTok audience. And they all wanted merch. They weren't necessarily buying fine art, but they wanted merch. And he and I started having conversations about it. He wasn't really interested in making merch because he is an artist, but he was like, I'll start a clothing company. Next thing you know, I'm learning about knitwear.This connects back to your earlier question of why I was leaving. The answer is I wasn't learning stuff. There was no time in my life at a label that I would ever be learning about making knitwear, or consulting for Arizona Iced Tea and helping them with their entertainment strategy for two years. I now know more about consumer packaged goods and beverage production and can wrapping. Is that the world's most useful thing to know [laughs]? No but I love learning that kind of stuff and being around it.Crypto and transforming artistic engagementThis brings me now to your fascination with the crypto space. That's another expansive world. What about crypto most excites you and your efforts to transform both artistic and business practices? How did you get into it?AK: I got into crypto early. I'll preface this with saying it's not because I bought millions of Bitcoin at $2 and am now sitting here just pounding money. I wish that were the case, but it's not. I started buying little fragments of Bitcoin in like 2010. Growing up things like business and banking and the stock market were like the devil to me. For better or worse, I kind of vilified it in my mind. But with crypto it felt almost like punk rock banking. I was completely intrigued by it as a kind of rebellion. For years friends heard me talking about crypto, and when the pandemic started and touring was shut down there was suddenly a bull market mentality in the crypto space. And NFTs, which had been around for a few years prior, started to be something that artists, managers and agents were paying attention to. People started calling me saying you probably know about this stuff, right?I gave pretty much everyone the exact same conversation. I said please don't do this, it is really early. This is a real world and kind of culture. You do not care about them. They do not really care about you. Your fans do not care. You know, this is bad for everyone. I guess not a lot of people were voicing that at the time. A lot of people were saying we should do this and people made a bunch of money, but I think a lot of them also looked a little dumb. A lot of the projects were pretty empty. Most of them don't get talked about anymore.But as this world kept growing I started getting calls again. I realized that I could help be a middle man and tour guide. I could help bring the right people with the right intentions in and help shape what adoption to Web3 looked like and help introduce people to the real crypto-native world and to the people who really care about this. A lot of what I do now with Web3 is try to find interesting projects and people who I think will love and enjoy this space and help them either dip their toe in the water or jump in the right way surrounded by the right people.Working with the David Bowie EstateTalk about the David Bowie project, because clearly this is something that you have a lot of passion for, and through it we can better understand what you mean by NFT, crypto space or blockchain.AK: It was without a doubt, one of the most incredible and surreal things I have and probably will ever get to be a part of. Let's put it this way, when my son came home from the hospital in his nursery at home over the changing table is a caricature of David Bowie. My dog's name is Bowie. I'm not a casual Bowie Fan. I revere Daivd Bowie.I couldn't write it better. I'm sitting on the computer one night buying something on the NFT marketplace OpenSea with my dog Bowie sitting next to me and I get a text that says “I can't really say much, but can I introduce you to the Bowie estate, they want to talk about NFTs.” We end up starting this dialogue with the executor of the Bowie estate, who is just an incredible man. He had heard a lot about crypto and what was going on in this space and was very cautious, but had a kind of bullishness. As someone who knew Bowie well, he knew Bowie would've been really excited by this. For me, there had to be a very specific why. That question of why are we doing this? What is our north star for this?What was the vision that emerged for the project?AK: I basically spent the weekend thinking about Bowie and everything I knew about him and digging into his art collection because he was a huge art collector. I happened to have the catalog of the Sotheby's auction when they auctioned off his collection. So I started going into it and asking what did his collection look like? What kind of art did he collect? Then you start thinking about him as a technologist and a lover of new technology. And you're like okay you had BowieWorld before Metaverse was even a thing we talked about. You had BowieNet, which was his own ISP and kind of fan club site. You had BowieArt, which ultimately became a showcase of art that he liked and art made by his community. And then you start thinking about Bowie Bonds and the idea of him having commodified his work and well, that sounds a lot like a bunch of NFT projects. And I just went, okay, this is a guy who kind of had the ethos of the crypto artist before that was a thing. If the blockchain is the permanent immutable ledger, then let's go put this on the blockchain. Let's go put his legacy there.So what does that mean to put his collections on the blockchain?AK: Well, it wasn't his collections, it was, let's do a project that puts on-chain—something that is on the ledger and can never be deleted—that he was here. And let's create something to honor his legacy. I kept going back to the fact that he was a huge supporter of new artists. He was a digital artist himself. I got access to the Bowie archives through my partner Joaquin and I would literally get screenshots on my phone of anything from the archive whether it was an outfit he wore or a ticket to one of his shows or art he had done or a photograph. Everything is meticulously databased. And so Joaquin and I basically started narrowing down this idea.The project became, let's get a handful of the best artists in the crypto art space, from super established to new and up-and-coming and give them free rein to create anything they want to contribute to Bowie. They also had the added bonus of incorporating anything from the archives, which no one has ever been able to do. From there I started to ask who do we want, who makes sense here?I did things like going through Bowie's personal art collection and basically tagging a bunch of stuff like “landscape”, “British artist”, “contemporary African artist”, “sculptor”. And then I did the same with crypto-native artists and tried to find what the connections were. It wasn't about finding a one to one match with everyone, but there were certainly people where I could say okay, this guy's work kind of reminds me of this guy's work. Or I think what this guy does with his art is kind of interesting in relation to this part of Bowie's archive. And also people who were fans of Bowie and people whose art represents certain things that I thought were key to Bowie's legacy. So we came up with a dream list and started approaching them. Almost everyone said yes.What makes this specifically crypto art? How do you differentiate the art that emerges within the blockchain? What is unique about it?AK: What makes this special? Well it is a new medium for art, a new way to distribute art. Artists are able to do things they couldn't do with prior art forms. For example, there are some works that are coded to literally change the time of day; there are pieces that morph over time; some of the artists built mechanisms into the work that would change the work automatically at a future time…at the end of the day it's just art. There's a community aspect to this art. All of the artists in the project interact directly with their community, their fans, and collectors. There is no middleman. There are no traditional rules. There needs to be collaboration, direct connection, dynamic movement, and that's what makes it special to me. Being on the blockchain is a means for it to exist. And then there is the “smart contract.” That's a huge part of what an NFT is, the actual code you are gaining access to in this token. This contract protects not only Bowie, but artists and the NFT community from being exploited. Everything was a 50/50 partnership between the artists and the estate, and 100% of the profits went to charity. Launching a new transmedia art projectTell me about Kids of the Apocalypse, another far reaching transmedia project that spans across music, NFTs, music videos, a comic book, and film. Here is a quote from the Kids of the Apocalypse Discord channel that sums up the project really well: In the aftermath of a cataclysmic bio-explosion, a social movement of revolutionaries is born to break the chains of the tyrannical rule of Horizon Corp in the wake of the apocalypse. A multimedia art project born from the music, Kids of the Apocalypse (KOTA) aspires to highlight the themes represented on the journey of our - awakening, unity, and deposition of unjust power. Positioned as a multimedia IP with strong experience and connections in the music industry alongside a world-class design team, KOTA is a love letter to those who dare to speak out and be themselves - delivered in the form of a suspenseful, emotional, and immersive sci-fi adventure.AK: Kids of the Apocalypse was a concept and story that was conceived about 10 years ago. There was a Swedish production group called The Sound of Arrows, and Stefan Storm from the group had started this kind of side project idea Kids of the Apocalypse. Imagine a dark comedy version of—I'm gonna say X-Men because it involves mutants—that is alt and internet leaning and kind of self-referential which also has a music component. There's this whole story and a really immaculately created lore and universe. And now imagine 10 years ago saying let's make this happen. Where the do you begin? So this idea sat there for a long time.So cut to 10 years later and I'm reconnecting with my friend Derek Davies, who was the founder of Neon Gold, which was a label that I had actually done a label deal with when I was at Columbia and who had signed Sound of Arrows and put out their first EP. He was still in touch with Stefan, and Derek is also doing a lot of stuff in the Web3 space. He has an incredible company called Medallion. I think we have put together a pretty incredible team—we've got Derek and the Medallion crew, we have Stefan and his crew, we've got an incredible creative agency who have been working on all of this alongside Stefan. And we've got the guys at Bench Mob who are some of the best digital architects out there from a social media strategy perspective. We've got an incredible community manager, we've got a advisory board of people who really are some of the best and brightest in the space from Cooper Turley on the music NFT side to John Roger, who's one of the advisors and was marketing for Star Wars for Lucasfilm and then became the first head of franchise development at Disney.We have released a few songs and one video, which I think might be the number one (I hate data points because they get outdated quickly so I might be wrong here) most traded piece on Glass which is a music video NFT protocol. We've also created something that I think has never been done before, which was creating a mechanism that integrates traditional streaming with NFT minting. Where in order to gain access to the allow list you actually had to interact with and log yourself into your Spotify or Apple account. This is a very blockchain-native project, but I also want everyone to be able to hear the music, even if you don't know what an NFT is, because the music is fantastic. The first drop is a PFP (profile picture) project. It's season one and includes the eight main characters, which you're randomly assigned to and each of them has its own unique theme music and properties, and it's all happening on the Blockchain. We're doing all this on Solana, which is a chain that I think allows for very quick movement. And part of what we want to do is really involve our community in the storytelling and really let them into all of the bits and pieces of the lore. And to me, a lot of that will come from surprise and delight and from airdrops and from opening up your wallet one day and seeing things you didn't know were going to be in there.For those of us who are still new to this space, what is a wallet? AK: The wallet is the digital space through which everything is integrated and enters into your possession. Your wallet is where you hold your cryptocurrency, where you hold your NFTs. So you may log into your wallet one day and if you're a holder of Kids of the Apocalypse NFT, you may find something new that has been added to your wallet. We've also created an amazing community in Discord, and the fan art alone is pretty incredible. I encourage people to check it out because we really are trying to build something unique. I think the website is one of the coolest websites I have seen, it is fully immersive, and we're going to play with it.So how will the comic book and full film emerge? How is that all going to be integrated?AK: The full-length film is a dream. It could be a short film too, we don't know. The plan is for this to be a story told in a moving visual media. We're still having discussions about how and what that will look like.Before we stop, were there any other current projects that we should be aware of?AK: Yeah there are two things. After the Bowie project I felt that it was important for me to put myself out there more. I felt that there was an opportunity to experience what artists and creators in this space go through, their step-by-step process. My father was a photo journalist, and I've always loved photography. I had this idea going back to the idea of the blockchain as a permanent immutable ledger; and thinking of photographs, particularly snapshots, as as memory objects; and what if you minted those memories to the blockchain, and then they're there forever. Now what happens if you then renounce your ownership of them? If you're using the snapshot as a representation of a memory, what if I minted it, and sent it to you and now it's yours? What does it mean for someone else to have my memory? It was an idea that I kept coming back to and I finally felt the need to bite the bullet and just put this out there. It's called Memory Loss. I spoke to a few artists in the crypto space to see if the idea offended anyone. I got their support and encouragement. I minted some of the snapshots and made them available on the Tezos blockchain, which is a space that is more experimental, low key, less pressure. It's on the marketplace Objkt. I do have ideas for future ways for this to evolve.The other project, equally experimental, gives support to visual artists who want to start playing in the music NFT space. There are some artists making really amazing music and building a fan base and building patrons and building their own worlds with their own rules in this space. I wanted to create a way for visual artists, who are curious, to safely and with integrity and respect, integrate themselves into that world. The short of it is I am launching an NFT-based singles label. The name is, W3 F3W like my company, except that the ees are 3s. It's going to be a place for great new music and great visual art to collide and hopefully again, just bring people into a world that I'm pretty excited about. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit futureperfect.substack.com

Hour 3 sets up with the question of should the Broncos go after Carson Wentz during free agency? Also, DMac discusses what happened last week with Russell Wilson and the Broncos. Derek isn't impressed with Russell's new changes. | Deion Sanders takes everyone behind the scenes of how he recruits. Derek discusses why you need certain guys in certain positions to take that next step as a football program. | Sean Payton has given VJ free reign and the guys breakdown why that'll be important the second time around. | Our Denversports.com Nuggets Analyst Jake Shapiro joins The Drive. Jake talks about the one unique thing from the Nuggets game last night. Is Nikola Jokic an athlete? Why does Jokic get so much hate? Derek also talks about why the Broncos NEED to capitalize on OL in the draft. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 3 has a visit from The Morning Show as Mark and Mike come on to defend themselves! Did the Broncos get the VJ hire correct? Also, why do they support Sean Payton so much? Is DMac being a negative nancy? Will DMac save Mike a snack? | Was VJ truly the best hire for the job? Big O lays out why the Broncos didn't have a choice. | Big O had a scary personal moment last night and he explains what happened. | Stephen A. has good words for Nikola Jokic and his chances for a 3-peat. The guys react! Our Denversports.com Nuggets Analyst Jake Shapiro joins The Drive. Jake recaps the Nuggets come from behind win vs the Cleveland Cavaliers. Jake details the debut of Reggie Jackson and the new bench unit. Also, how close is Jokic to locking in the MV3? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 4 of The Drive starts with a game of do who we like better as a DC? Our Denversports.com Senior Broncos Writer Andrew Mason joins The Drive. Mase wonders why people don't trust Sean Payton to get the most out of Vance Joseph. Mase also goes deep into the stats on how Vance Joseph actually did as the DC in Arizona. | The Denver Nuggets are off to a HOT start! What will the Nuggets rotation be moving forward? Will the Nuggets pull out the win tonight? | James Merilatt stops by again to set the record straight on Coach Malone and his current woes. James also gives an update on the pulse of the city about VJ!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 3 of The Drive is all about Vance Joseph coming home to the Denver Broncos as the new DC! How will VJ translate to the current Broncos? The guys answer that question by looking at what he did in Arizona! | Aaron Rodgers is out of his darkness retreat. What's one thing everyone on the show would be able to go into a darkness retreat about? | DMac kills everyone with truth about the “Nothing to see here crowd” | Former All-Pro ILB Bobby Wagner is back on the market. What would it take for the Broncos to reel him in? Without Cale Makar, where could that leave the Avs in the near future?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 4 of The Drive is all about the initial reactions to the Broncos Breaking News that just came out about a new mystery candidate for the DC position. How would this guy fit into the fabric of the Denver Broncos? Also, what tree did he come from and how would that affect what type of defense he'd run with the Denver Broncos? Our Denversports.com Senior Broncos Writer Andrew Mason joins The Drive. Mase talks about the Breaking News that just came out. Does this guy have a real chance with the Broncos? Who's in the lead right now: Rex Ryan, Vance Joseph, or mystery candidate? Did the Broncos overplay their hand? If Rex Ryan really was the guy, would they have let him out of town? | Chad Brown from The Players Club joins The Drive. Chad gives his initial reaction to the mystery candidate news. Chad gives more info on the mystery candidate. How did the Broncos get here? Did Sean Payton lie to the Broncos? Chad talks about being a player under this mystery candidate. Who would Chad want as his DC? | Mark Schlereth from Schlereth and Evans joins The Drive. Mark details what's going on with why the mystery candidate is getting a look. Is the mystery candidate better than Rex or VJ? Has Mark been in contact with the mystery candidate? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 4 of The Drive comes in with the Big Story of the Day being Vance Joseph potentially lining up to become the Broncos next DC. James Merilatt comes in with heat as he breaks down why the Broncos are in this unique position right now. What was the plan and did Sean Payton ever have one? Could the Broncos be hiring an old ST coach to turn things around as well? Who's the better choice for VJ: the Eagles or the Broncos? | Are the Broncos in win now or win later mode? Also, why did the Broncos hire Sean Payton if they aren't in win now mode? | The guys go through their favorite moments with Vance Joseph. Was Sean Payton an emergency hire for the Broncos? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 3 of The Drive sets up with Breaking News out of Arizona. How will this affect the Broncos moving forward? | More breaking news comes out of Dove Valley as another coach is leaving Denver. Who would you rather have: VJ or Rex Ryan? Also, how did the Broncos get here? | DMac kills everyone with truth about VJ being a legit candidate for the Denver Broncos DC job. | Our 9 News Broncos Insider Mike Klis joins The Drive. Mike details the breaking news and explains the decision that VJ would have to make between the Eagles and the Broncos. Was this Sean Payton's original plan? What would be the tone and tenure of a VJ return? | Kyler Speller, the PA Announcer for the Denver Nuggets, joins The Drive. Kyle discusses his relationship with the players. He also talks about his journey to this moment as he represents the NBA as the official PA Announcer for the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend. Kyle and the guys have fun about Utah and what's in store for him this weekend. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Noel catches up with Angela Dohrmann. The actress is best known for playing Donna Chang on Seinfeld. Angela discusses the experience, whether Donna Chang enjoyed people thinking she was Chinese and if there was a real-life Donna Chang. Angela started her career as a VJ in Canada for Much Music. She has had roles on Star Trek: Voyager, Nash Bridges and The Drew Carey show.

To me, Laurie Brown is an icon. Since I was kid I've felt like I've known her. She has been a VJ on MuchMusic,  was the host of The Signal on CBC Radio 2 for over a decade and now has one of the most interesting podcasts out there called “Pondercast”. I'm a huge fan of Laurie Brown and, in many ways, she has been there as a guide for me towards great music throughout most of my life. Plus I love her voice and her style as a broadcaster. So needless to say, I was super pumped to have this chat and it lived up to my expectations in every way. We talked about imagination, creativity, meditation and the importance of space, in life, music and in broadcasting.  I was honoured to get to have this chat with Laurie and I'm thrilled to be sharing it with you. For more info on her podcast go to www.pondercast.ca.  

VJ and the Diva is the solo and collaborative work of Vince I Jones a musician and producer from the UK south coast. Having played in a number of bands over the years and having been half the duo You and Me Both, I now am concentrating on building a portfolio of top quality tracks under my new moniker. Self taught in both music and production I began attempting to recreate the music of my idols, Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure), Duran Duran, Ultravox, Goldfrapp and more.******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************* Eli Bordonaro   Local singer/songwriter out of Bethlehem Pennsylvania with a love for live music just getting into the release world! Major influences include John Mayer, Jack Johnson, BB King, Eric Clapton and others

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. 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 No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork.  The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love  song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q.  But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t

Upendra Subba is a poet, lyricist, and writer, known for poetry collections such as Manche Ra Gham, and Desh Khojdai Jaada. Viplob Pratik is a poet, lyricist, translator, and scriptwriter, known for A Person Kissed by the Moon and Nahareko Manchhe. Anup Baral is an actor, writer, director, and artistic director of Actors Studio Nepal, known for Dasdhunga, Badshala, and Pani Photo. Surakshya Panta is an actor, model, VJ and engineer, known for movies like Dhanapati and Aama.

On this episode we have the pleasure of Speaking with VJ and Yolonda Joiner, the owners of the Legendary Institute. They explain the process of opening a barber college. VJ explains the process of becoming accredited to be eligible for financial aid. They also share the trials and tribulations they endured during the beginning of their journey.

Luiz Thunderbird, dentista, apresentador, ator, músico, ex-VJ, e p*t4 cara legal! Retorna ao Ben-Yur, trazendo novidades e dicas para quem gosta de pedalar por São Paulo.

Rise of India Under Modi - America has Become 3rd World Country Aditya Sathsanghi, Sanjay D, VJ

On this special edition video episode of Kennedy Saves the World, Kennedy discusses where one of her signature styles originated. She explains why she wears so many hats, how she solidifies her "brand," and reflects on her time as a VJ on MTV. Follow Kennedy on Twitter: @KennedyNation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of You're Wrong... And Here's Why, Chris Horwedel and Greg Crone talk about Ben Simmons return to Philadelphia, the 2022 World Cup (and other soccer talk), Chris talks more about YouTube TV, and the guys wrap things up by making their game-by-game Week 12 NFL picks against the line. For more great baseketball talk, be sure to check out Deon, VJ, and Taylor on "The Dagger" which can be found on the Underdog website (underdogpodcasts.com) and through Spotify, Apple and other providers.

On this week's episode of The Underdog Chris Horwedel and Matt Crone give their picks against the line for Week 11 NFL games. Other topics of conversation this episode include: Ole Miss vs. Arkansas, Matt's Jordan 11's, City Edition Jerseys, Jack Johnson/Dave Matthews wine, Haylie McCleney, and the guys hatch a plan to buy a professional sports team. For more great basketball talk, be sure to check out Deon, VJ, and Taylor on "The Dagger" which can be found on the Underdog website (underdogpodcasts.com) and through Spotify, Apple and other providers.

On this week's episode of You're Wrong... And Here's Why, Chris Horwedel and Greg Crone talk about Joel Embiid's big game, Chris continues to rave about YouTube TV, and the guys wrap things up by making their game-by-game Week 11 NFL picks against the line.--- For more great baseketball talk, be sure to check out Deon, VJ, and Taylor on "The Dagger" which can be found on the Underdog website (underdogpodcasts.com) and through Spotify, Apple and other providers.

On this week's episode of The Underdog Chris Horwedel and Matt Crone give their picks against the line for Week 10 NFL games.  If you're a fan of the digressions you get a lot in this episode, including a bunch of movies, the Pitch Perfect franchise and they create a new TV show and name themselves hosts.  The ball's in your court Hulu. For more great basketball talk, be sure to check out Deon, VJ, and Taylor on "The Dagger" which can be found on the Underdog website (underdogpodcasts.com) and through Spotify, Apple and other providers.

On this week's episode of The Underdog Chris Horwedel and Matt Crone spend some time at the start of the show by talking about Matt's (seemingly) non-stop appearances on national TV during Game 3 of the 2022 World Series.  They then talk about the series itself, what could be coming next and they end the show by giving their picks against the line for Week 9 NFL games.  If you're a fan of the digressions, you'll enjoy a conversation this week that implies Matt is either a time traveler or well over 150 years old.  For more great basketball talk, be sure to check out Deon, VJ, and Taylor on "The Dagger" which can be found on the Underdog website (underdogpodcasts.com) and through Spotify, Apple and other providers.

On this week's episode of The Underdog Chris Horwedel and Matt Crone kick things off by talking a bit about the upcoming World Series featuring the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros.  Following that they make Week 8 NFL picks against the spread and wrap things up by talking about the finale of HBO's House of the Dragon.  Digressions are limited again this week but include: MillerCoors, Buger King, Pickle Chips, Ugly Jordans, Mayans, and a few others. For more great basketball talk, be sure to check out Deon, VJ, and Taylor on "The Dagger" which can be found on the Underdog website (underdogpodcasts.com) and through Spotify, Apple and other providers.