Podcasts about What About Us

“Everything comes full circle” Total (Kima, Keisha, and Pam) is an R&B group known for hit records such as “Kissin' You”, “Can't You See”, “What About Us”, and “Trippin'”. They rose to fame in the 90s and were a major contribution to the Hip Hop culture. Kima recently moved to Georgia and stopped by Coalition DJs New Music Mondays at Stankonia Studios to speak to Lalaa Shepard from The Progress Report Podcast about how Total began, gaining confidence in herself overtime, offers advice to upcoming artists about remaining independent, Bad Boy, rediscovering her purpose, reality TV, and life after Total. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theprogressreportpodcast/support

For people who consider themselves to be artists, making time for creativity can feel as important as breathing. However, for the rest of us, we might dismiss the concept of cultivating creativity as something “cute” that only other people have time for. We might feel like creativity is simply an unnecessary luxury that doesn't mesh with the practical responsibilities of life. However, creativity is a key component to wholehearted living for ALL of us. In this episode, we discuss ways for everyone, regardless of interests, personality, and responsibilities, can benefit from engaging with the creative spark in all of us. Creation feeds our souls. RELATED EPISODES Growth Mindset is Crucial for Our Kids, but What About Us? How to WAKE UP to Your Life BOOKS AND LINKS WE MENTIONED Art of War // Steven Pressfield The Artist's Way // Julia Cameron Tim Ferris Article // https://tim.blog/2021/05/26/how-to-become-a-better-writer-by-becoming-a-better-noticer/ Creative Visualization // Shakti Gawain Bird by Bird // Ann Lamont EPISODE SPONSOR Utah House Doctors: Everyone knows that the market is hot right now and it is the perfect time to sell your home, but what you may not know is using a professional in this type of market will actually make you more money then if you try and sell your home yourself, or sell with a discount brokerage. We have experienced the service of Utah House Doctors, and they make buying and selling homes so easy and painless. You can find them at Instagram at @utahhousedoctors or on their website, http://www.utahhousedoctors.com. Thank you for the kind reviews! We appreciate them so much. Here is how to leave a review for us on iTunes: Open Find the Magic in the podcast app Scroll to the bottom of the page Click on write a review Tap the stars to rate us and then write us some feedback:) Hit SEND REVIEW OF THE WEEK! TaraMS10 5.20.21 -- BEST PODCAST! My favorite parenting podcast (and I listen to a LOT of them). These women are real, with great advice, and examples for navigating the parenting journey. They read all the books we don't find the time to read, make our struggles seem normal, and provide tips along the way. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/findthemagic/support

Sandy summarizes her trip to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and “lynching memorial” and searches for signs of its mission in our state. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

As the pandemic numbers seem to be moving in the right direction, John shares some statistics from a survey that shows many people are moving forward in a positive way, and that the chaos of the pandemic is the catalyst for better choices. Liu Yan shares some of his thoughts about how people can take difficult situations, which leads to an impromptu musical interlude that includes "What About Us" from Pink and "Bohemian Rhapsody" from Queen. John talks about his late friend, Dr. John Ortiz and his book "The Tao of Music" and the important role music can play in keeping our head above water, when the flood of chaos seems to be overwhelming.

Adrienne Pakis-Gillon knows about women in politics, from the passage of the 19th amendment to her disappointment with the representation of women in our GOP majority legislature. Ladies, can’t we do better for women and children in Tennessee? EPISODE CORRECTION: The correct dollar amount allocated to Tennessee under the American Rescue Plan is $900 million. $346 million is for Child Care Development Fund Flexible Funding and $554 million for Child Care Stabilization Funding. Source — The The White House Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces American Rescue Plan Funding to Rescue the Child Care Industry so the Economy Can Recover. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Elizabeth Madeira, an organizer for the Southern Christian Coalition, discusses recent Tennessee legislation and her views on the intersections between Christian morality and public policy. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

We need more diversity and inclusion in our national and state discussions. Tullahoma City Alderman Rupa Blackwell joins the show to discuss how she is helping to elevate these issues in her rural community. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Hoy centramos nuestra actividad y energía en enfatizar la importancia de la mujer en el Rock/Metal. Primer episodio de nuestro personal documental sonoro titulado Women Riot; un tributo y un análisis, desde nuestra perspectiva, con toda nuestra pasión y sin etiquetas, sobre la relevancia de la figura femenina en nuestra pasión musical. 1.- WENDY O. WILLIAMS – It´s My Life – WOW (1984 Passport Records) 2.- CHER – Emotional Fire – Heart of Stone (1989 Geffen Records) 3.- ROBIN BECK – A Heart For You – Trouble Or Nothin´ (1989 Mercury Records) 4.- SARAYA – When You See Me Again – When The Blackbird Sings (1991 Polygram Records) 5.- LAOS – Badlands – We Want It (1990 Teldec Records) 6.- IF ONLY – Ghost Of You – No Bed Of Roses (1992 Long Island Records Germany) 7.- PHANTOM BLUE – Loved You To Pieces – Built To Perform (1993 Geffen Records) 8.- CHEZ KANE – Too Late For Love – St (2021 Frontiers Music s.r.l.) 9.- ISSA – Angels Calling – Queen Of Broken Hearts (2021 Frontiers Music s.r.l.) 10.- FIRE TIGER – Love The Way – Suddenly Heaven (2018 Self Released) 11.- SPACE ELEVATOR – We Can Fly – St (2014 Space Elevator Productions) 12.- SILVERNITE – Danger Zone – So It Began (2021 Valve Studio Records) 13.- SUPERNOVA PLASMAJETS – Nothing´s Gonna Stop Me Now – St (2017 Aor Heaven) 14.- NEMESEA – Get Out – Uprise (2017 Napalm Records) 15.- THE STORM – Lost In The Fire – Rebel Against Yourself (2011 Universal Music Group) 16.- THEATRE OF TRAGEDY – Image – Musique (2000 Nuclear Blast) 17.- THE GATHERING – The May Song – Nighttime Birds (1997 Century Media Records) 18.- LEAVE´S EYES – Norwegian Lovesong – Lovelorn (2004 Napalm Records) 19.- DELAIN – Lost -April Rain (2009 Roadrunner Records) 20.- WITHIN TEMPTATION – What About Us (feat TARJA) – Hydra (2014 BMG Entertainment) 21.- TEMPERANCE – Oblivion – Limitless (2015 Scarlet Records) 22.- THE AGONIST – Swan Lake (A Capella) – Lullabies For The Dormant Mind (2009 Century Media Records) Dirigido por Jesús Alijo LUX ¡QUE NADIE SE TE ADELANTE! NO DUDES EN REGISTRARTE, DISFRUTAR, COMENTAR, SEGUIRNOS Y COMPARTIR, GRACIAS.

For Black History Month and in honor of Rosa Parks' birthday (February 4th!), we take a look at her life, including the importance the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee had on her life and activism. Another connection Parks had to Tennessee were the words spoken by then-Senator Frist as she was lying in state in the US Capitol Rotunda. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

This week's episode looks at "Needles and Pins", and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Farmer John" by Don and Dewey. 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/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many recordings by the Searchers.  My two main resources for this episode have been the autobiographies of members of the group -- Frank Allen's The Searchers and Me and Mike Pender's The Search For Myself.  All the Searchers tracks and Tony Jackson or Chris Curtis solo recordings excerpted here, except the live excerpt of "What'd I Say", can be found on this box set, which is out of print as a physical box, but still available digitally. For those who want a good budget alternative, though, this double-CD set contains fifty Searchers tracks, including all their hits, for under three pounds.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Last week we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren't the only influential band on the Merseybeat scene, and while we won't have much chance to look at Merseybeat in general, we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today we're going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they're rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We're going to look at The Searchers, and "Needles and Pins": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] The story of the early origins of the Searchers is, like everything about the Searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven't spoken to each other in thirty-six years, and didn't get on for many years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group's history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group's bass player from 1964 on and someone who took McNally's side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a skiffle group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer then known as Chris Crummey, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis.  According to Pender, he never liked skiffle, never played skiffle, and "if McNally had a skiffle group, it must have been before I met him". He is very insistent on this point -- he liked country music, and later rock and roll, but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn't led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up, and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson -- and he's very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during  a period when he didn't know McNally -- and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group's name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film The Searchers -- the same film which had inspired the group's hero Buddy Holly to write "That'll Be The Day" -- but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named "Big Ron", who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron's replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who at the time he was with the Searchers used the stage name Johnny Sandon (though he later reverted to his birth name). The group performed as Johnny Sandon and The Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo Four, a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sandon made some records with the Remo Four in 1963, but they went nowhere, but they'll give some idea of how Sandon sounded: [Excerpt: Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four, "Lies"] The Remo Four later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song the Beatles wrote for him. With Sandon out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman, and were in trouble -- they were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon's backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking most of them. And, in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group's front-man and second lead singer. Even at this point, though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The Searchers were the most clean-living of the Liverpool bands -- they were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seem to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally -- Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways -- he seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no-one's ever spoken about a diagnosis -- the Beatles apparently referred to him as "Mad Henry". Curtis and Jackson didn't get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Pender's, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band's musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much of their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music -- country and rockabilly, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly -- while Jackson preferred harder, stomping, music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group's repertoire, and who was the group's unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists like The Clovers and Richie Barrett -- while many Liverpool groups played Barrett's "Some Other Guy", the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, "Tricky Dicky", a song written by Leiber and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music, and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the Searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B, and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Everlys than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around Liverpool. Other than the Beatles, the Searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool, and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the Searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there, and their live version of Brenda Lee's "Sweet Nothin's" later got released as a single after they became successful: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweet Nothin's"] Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool, and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles' success, the Searchers were having no luck getting any attention from the London music industry. In part that was because of one bit of bad luck -- the day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage, and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and send that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest-driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the Searchers were no exception, and it's interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Let's Stomp"] The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter -- EMI and Decca between them had something like eighty-five percent of the market, and basically *were* the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible, chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some big acts, most notably Petula Clark -- indeed the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark's records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she'd had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit "Sailor": [Excerpt: Petula Clark, "Sailor"] The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark's hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits -- we've heard several songs he was involved in over the course of the series. Most recently, we heard last week how "She Loves You" was inspired by "Forget Him", which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell: [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, "Forget Him"] Hatch heard the group's demo, and was impressed, and offered to sign them. The Searchers' manager at the time agreed, on one condition -- that Hatch also sign another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertakers also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune: [Excerpt: The Undertakers, "What About Us?"] The biggest mark that the Undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, "Sour Milk Sea", which George Harrison wrote for him. The Searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group's first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, which had been a top twenty hit in the US for the Drifters a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Sweets For My Sweet"] That had become a regular fixture in the Searchers' live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with "Twist and Shout", they'd flattened out the original record's Latin cha-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances, as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door sessions: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweets For My Sweet (live at the Iron Door)"] As you can hear, they'd also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of "your tasty kiss", Jackson sang "Your first sweet kiss". In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweets For My Sweet"] That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool, and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups, their only real competition being the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers -- and though nobody could have known it at the time, the Pacemakers' career had already peaked at this point.  Their first album, Meet The Searchers, featured "Sweets For My Sweet", along with a selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Merseybeat band -- "Money", "Da Doo Ron Ron", "Twist and Shout", "Stand By Me", and the Everly Brothers' "Since You Broke My Heart", with more obscure songs like "Ain't Gonna Kiss Ya", by the then-unknown P.J. Proby, "Farmer John" by Don and Dewey, which hadn't yet become a garage-rock standard (and indeed seems to have become so largely because of the Searchers' version), and a cover of "Love Potion #9", a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK, but later became their biggest hit in the US (and a quick content note for this one -- the lyric contains a word for Romani people which many of those people regard as a slur): [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Love Potion #9"] Their second single was an attempt to repeat the "Sweets For My Sweet" formula, and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn't know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time, was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms so the record label didn't necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case he brought the group a song that he claimed had been written by one "Fred Nightingale", and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, "Sugar and Spice", was a blatant rip-off of "Sweets For My Sweet", and recorded in a near-identical arrangement: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sugar and Spice"] The group weren't keen on the song, and got very angry later on when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two on the charts. But it was their third single that was the group's international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like "You Got What I Like": [Excerpt: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, "You Got What I Like"] The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Sheeley, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran's girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they'd started covering live, though, was not one that DeShannon was the credited songwriter on. "Needles and Pins" was credited to two other writers, both of them associated with Phil Spector.  Sonny Bono was a young songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cooke, Larry Williams, and Don and Dewey, and his most famous song up to this point was "She Said Yeah", the B-side to Williams' "Bad Boy": [Excerpt: Larry Williams, "She Said Yeah"] After working at Specialty, he'd gone on to work as Phil Spector's assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector he'd got to know Jack Nitzsche, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own like "The Lonely Surfer": [Excerpt: Jack Nitzsche, "The Lonely Surfer"] Bono and Nitzsche are the credited writers on "Needles and Pins", but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her -- both Nitzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egomaniacs, and it's easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, DeShannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the Wrecking Crew, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot One Hundred, though it actually made number one in Canada: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "Needles and Pins"] Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song, and fixed the main flaw with DeShannon's original.  There's really only about ninety seconds' worth of actual song in "Needles and Pins", and DeShannon's version ends with a minute or so of vamping -- it sounds like it's still a written lyric, but it's full of placeholders where entire lines are "whoa-oh", the kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but that didn't really work for her record. The Searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics -- instead of the middle eight leading to a long freeform section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus, in the new key of C sharp, with Curtis harmonising this time: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins" (middle eight on)] The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon's version, while repeating the original verse after the key change, and adding in Curtis' high harmony, gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiralling – he keeps thinking the same things over and over, at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It's a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. Incidentally, one thing I should note here because it's not something I normally do -- in these excerpts of the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", I'm actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what I'm excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis' drumkit, which isn't particularly audible if you're listening to it on early sixties equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which on modern digital copies of the track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here's a couple of seconds of the unmodified track, so you can see what I mean: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQ'd it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn't noticeable, but I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I've compromised and used the mono mix but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I'm talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half minute pop song, but the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music.  The riff in DeShannon's version is there, but it's just one element -- an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It's a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff -- you basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff -- and it's the backbone of the song, but there's also a piano, and horns, and the Blossoms singing: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "Needles and Pins"] But what the Searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb. They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C which DeShannon's version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric twelve-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using twelve-string Rickenbackers to get the same sound: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That record is the root of jangle-pop and folk-rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy, trebly guitars and Everly Brothers inspired harmonies is one that leads directly to the Byrds, Love, Big Star, Tom Petty, REM, the Smiths, and the Bangles, among many others. While the Beatles were overall obviously the more influential group by a long way, "Needles and Pins" has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Merseybeat era. It went to number one in the UK, and became the group's breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number sixteen. The follow-up, "Don't Throw Your Love Away", a cover of a B-side by the Orlons, again featuring Pender on lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies, also made number one in the UK and the US top twenty, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, "Someday We're Gonna Love Again", a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number eleven, and caused journalists to worry if the Searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group's members was going to leave, but it wasn't Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group's lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, It's The Searchers, which included "Needles and Pins", Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal -- even John McNally got one, while Jackson's only lead was an Everlys style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members -- at one point it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fistfight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group's move towards more melodic material. It's important to remember that the Searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage -- listen for example to their performance of "What'd I Say" at the NME poll-winners' party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "What'd I Say (live)"] The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group -- whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read -- and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers.  Jackson didn't take this replacement well, and publicly went round telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendoes to this effect in Mike Pender's autobiography -- although Allen denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship, and says that he doesn't actually know what Curtis' sexuality was, because they never discussed that kind of thing, and presumably Allen would know better than anyone else whether he was in a relationship with Curtis.  Curtis is widely described as having been gay or bi by his contemporaries, but if he was he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There's some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn't get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, "Bye Bye Baby", made number thirty-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, "Bye Bye Baby"] However, his later singles had no success -- he was soon rerecording "Love Potion Number Nine" in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, "Love Potion Number Nine"] Meanwhile, Allen was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group's run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new lineup, "When You Walk In The Room", was a cover of another Jackie DeShannon song, this time written by DeShannon on her own, and originally released as a B-side: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "When You Walk In The Room"] The Searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon's original, and by this time playing it on real twelve-strings, and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Allen: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "When You Walk In the Room"] Do you think the Byrds might have heard that? That went to number three on the charts. The next single was less successful, only making number thirteen, but was interesting in other ways -- from the start, as well as their R&B covers, Curtis had been adding folk songs to the group's repertoire, and there'd been one or two covers of songs like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" on their albums, but "What Have They Done to the Rain?" was the first one to become a single.  It was written by Malvina Reynolds, who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties, and who also wrote "Morningtown Ride" and "Little Boxes". "What Have They Done to The Rain?" was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn't as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style, and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top twenty at all seems quite an achievement. [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What Have They Done To The Rain?”] Their next single, "Goodbye My Love", was their last top ten hit, and the next few singles only made the top forty, even when the Rolling Stones gave them "Take It Or Leave It". The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs, and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicate as for enjoyment as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis' departure, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody", was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as an Everly Brothers album track: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody"] Unfortunately for the Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it: [Excerpt: Paul and Barry Ryan, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody"] Neither single made the top forty, and the Searchers would never have a hit single again. Nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, "Aggravation", a cover of a Joe South song: [Excerpt: Chris Curtis, "Aggravation"] The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Joe Moretti, but it didn't chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple. The Searchers didn't put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of rerecordings of their old hits, in 1972. But then in 1979 Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering "Needles and Pins" to sign the Searchers to a two-album deal, which produced records that fit perfectly into the late seventies New Wave pop landscape, while still sounding like the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hearts in Her Eyes"] Apparently during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn't involved. Unfortunately, while those albums had some critical success, they did nothing commercially, and Sire dropped them. By 1985, the Searchers were at breaking point. They hadn't recorded any new material in several years, and Mike Pender and John McNally weren't getting on at all -- which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool, and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members -- the group were so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the two of them. One of them would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No-one except them knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren't amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways (the drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group). Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other Searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as "Mike Pender's Searchers", so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as The Searchers with a new singer. A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Allen are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved -- there were now two groups with near-identical names, playing the same sets, in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other, to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway, comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn't happen. Pender still tours -- or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year -- and McNally and Allen's band continued playing regularly until 2019, and only stopped performing because of McNally's increasing ill health. Having seen both, Pender's was the better show -- McNally and Allen's lineup of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesiser for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar/bass/drums sound -- but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020, as a reward for his services to the music industry. Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Allen are now in well-deserved retirement. While Allen and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmates' funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn't even say hello to each other, and even though McNally and Allen's band has retired, there's still a prominent notice on their website that they own the name "The Searchers" and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly twelve-string electric guitar, you're hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison, a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts.

This week’s episode looks at “Needles and Pins”, and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey. 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/ —-more—- Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many recordings by the Searchers.  My two main resources for this episode have been the autobiographies of members of the group — Frank Allen’s The Searchers and Me and Mike Pender’s The Search For Myself.  All the Searchers tracks and Tony Jackson or Chris Curtis solo recordings excerpted here, except the live excerpt of “What’d I Say”, can be found on this box set, which is out of print as a physical box, but still available digitally. For those who want a good budget alternative, though, this double-CD set contains fifty Searchers tracks, including all their hits, for under three pounds.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Last week we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren’t the only influential band on the Merseybeat scene, and while we won’t have much chance to look at Merseybeat in general, we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today we’re going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they’re rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We’re going to look at The Searchers, and “Needles and Pins”: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] The story of the early origins of the Searchers is, like everything about the Searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven’t spoken to each other in thirty-six years, and didn’t get on for many years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group’s history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group’s bass player from 1964 on and someone who took McNally’s side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a skiffle group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer then known as Chris Crummey, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis.  According to Pender, he never liked skiffle, never played skiffle, and “if McNally had a skiffle group, it must have been before I met him”. He is very insistent on this point — he liked country music, and later rock and roll, but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn’t led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up, and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson — and he’s very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during  a period when he didn’t know McNally — and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group’s name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film The Searchers — the same film which had inspired the group’s hero Buddy Holly to write “That’ll Be The Day” — but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named “Big Ron”, who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron’s replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who at the time he was with the Searchers used the stage name Johnny Sandon (though he later reverted to his birth name). The group performed as Johnny Sandon and The Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo Four, a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sandon made some records with the Remo Four in 1963, but they went nowhere, but they’ll give some idea of how Sandon sounded: [Excerpt: Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four, “Lies”] The Remo Four later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song the Beatles wrote for him. With Sandon out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman, and were in trouble — they were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon’s backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking most of them. And, in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group’s front-man and second lead singer. Even at this point, though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The Searchers were the most clean-living of the Liverpool bands — they were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seem to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally — Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways — he seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no-one’s ever spoken about a diagnosis — the Beatles apparently referred to him as “Mad Henry”. Curtis and Jackson didn’t get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Pender’s, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band’s musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much of their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music — country and rockabilly, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly — while Jackson preferred harder, stomping, music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group’s repertoire, and who was the group’s unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists like The Clovers and Richie Barrett — while many Liverpool groups played Barrett’s “Some Other Guy”, the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, “Tricky Dicky”, a song written by Leiber and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music, and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the Searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B, and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Everlys than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around Liverpool. Other than the Beatles, the Searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool, and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the Searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there, and their live version of Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s” later got released as a single after they became successful: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweet Nothin’s”] Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool, and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles’ success, the Searchers were having no luck getting any attention from the London music industry. In part that was because of one bit of bad luck — the day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage, and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and send that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest-driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the Searchers were no exception, and it’s interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Let’s Stomp”] The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter — EMI and Decca between them had something like eighty-five percent of the market, and basically *were* the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible, chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some big acts, most notably Petula Clark — indeed the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark’s records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she’d had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit “Sailor”: [Excerpt: Petula Clark, “Sailor”] The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark’s hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits — we’ve heard several songs he was involved in over the course of the series. Most recently, we heard last week how “She Loves You” was inspired by “Forget Him”, which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell: [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, “Forget Him”] Hatch heard the group’s demo, and was impressed, and offered to sign them. The Searchers’ manager at the time agreed, on one condition — that Hatch also sign another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertakers also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune: [Excerpt: The Undertakers, “What About Us?”] The biggest mark that the Undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, “Sour Milk Sea”, which George Harrison wrote for him. The Searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group’s first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, which had been a top twenty hit in the US for the Drifters a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Sweets For My Sweet”] That had become a regular fixture in the Searchers’ live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with “Twist and Shout”, they’d flattened out the original record’s Latin cha-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances, as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door sessions: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweets For My Sweet (live at the Iron Door)”] As you can hear, they’d also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of “your tasty kiss”, Jackson sang “Your first sweet kiss”. In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweets For My Sweet”] That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool, and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups, their only real competition being the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers — and though nobody could have known it at the time, the Pacemakers’ career had already peaked at this point.  Their first album, Meet The Searchers, featured “Sweets For My Sweet”, along with a selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Merseybeat band — “Money”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Twist and Shout”, “Stand By Me”, and the Everly Brothers’ “Since You Broke My Heart”, with more obscure songs like “Ain’t Gonna Kiss Ya”, by the then-unknown P.J. Proby, “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey, which hadn’t yet become a garage-rock standard (and indeed seems to have become so largely because of the Searchers’ version), and a cover of “Love Potion #9”, a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK, but later became their biggest hit in the US (and a quick content note for this one — the lyric contains a word for Romani people which many of those people regard as a slur): [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Love Potion #9”] Their second single was an attempt to repeat the “Sweets For My Sweet” formula, and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn’t know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time, was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms so the record label didn’t necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case he brought the group a song that he claimed had been written by one “Fred Nightingale”, and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, “Sugar and Spice”, was a blatant rip-off of “Sweets For My Sweet”, and recorded in a near-identical arrangement: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sugar and Spice”] The group weren’t keen on the song, and got very angry later on when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two on the charts. But it was their third single that was the group’s international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like “You Got What I Like”: [Excerpt: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, “You Got What I Like”] The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Sheeley, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they’d started covering live, though, was not one that DeShannon was the credited songwriter on. “Needles and Pins” was credited to two other writers, both of them associated with Phil Spector.  Sonny Bono was a young songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cooke, Larry Williams, and Don and Dewey, and his most famous song up to this point was “She Said Yeah”, the B-side to Williams’ “Bad Boy”: [Excerpt: Larry Williams, “She Said Yeah”] After working at Specialty, he’d gone on to work as Phil Spector’s assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector he’d got to know Jack Nitzsche, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own like “The Lonely Surfer”: [Excerpt: Jack Nitzsche, “The Lonely Surfer”] Bono and Nitzsche are the credited writers on “Needles and Pins”, but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her — both Nitzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egomaniacs, and it’s easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, DeShannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the Wrecking Crew, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot One Hundred, though it actually made number one in Canada: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins”] Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song, and fixed the main flaw with DeShannon’s original.  There’s really only about ninety seconds’ worth of actual song in “Needles and Pins”, and DeShannon’s version ends with a minute or so of vamping — it sounds like it’s still a written lyric, but it’s full of placeholders where entire lines are “whoa-oh”, the kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but that didn’t really work for her record. The Searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics — instead of the middle eight leading to a long freeform section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus, in the new key of C sharp, with Curtis harmonising this time: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins” (middle eight on)] The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon’s version, while repeating the original verse after the key change, and adding in Curtis’ high harmony, gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiralling – he keeps thinking the same things over and over, at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It’s a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. Incidentally, one thing I should note here because it’s not something I normally do — in these excerpts of the Searchers’ version of “Needles and Pins”, I’m actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what I’m excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis’ drumkit, which isn’t particularly audible if you’re listening to it on early sixties equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which on modern digital copies of the track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here’s a couple of seconds of the unmodified track, so you can see what I mean: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQ’d it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn’t noticeable, but I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I’ve compromised and used the mono mix but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I’m talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half minute pop song, but the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music.  The riff in DeShannon’s version is there, but it’s just one element — an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It’s a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff — you basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff — and it’s the backbone of the song, but there’s also a piano, and horns, and the Blossoms singing: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins”] But what the Searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb. They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C which DeShannon’s version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric twelve-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using twelve-string Rickenbackers to get the same sound: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] That record is the root of jangle-pop and folk-rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy, trebly guitars and Everly Brothers inspired harmonies is one that leads directly to the Byrds, Love, Big Star, Tom Petty, REM, the Smiths, and the Bangles, among many others. While the Beatles were overall obviously the more influential group by a long way, “Needles and Pins” has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Merseybeat era. It went to number one in the UK, and became the group’s breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number sixteen. The follow-up, “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”, a cover of a B-side by the Orlons, again featuring Pender on lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies, also made number one in the UK and the US top twenty, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, “Someday We’re Gonna Love Again”, a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number eleven, and caused journalists to worry if the Searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group’s members was going to leave, but it wasn’t Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group’s lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, It’s The Searchers, which included “Needles and Pins”, Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal — even John McNally got one, while Jackson’s only lead was an Everlys style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members — at one point it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fistfight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group’s move towards more melodic material. It’s important to remember that the Searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage — listen for example to their performance of “What’d I Say” at the NME poll-winners’ party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What’d I Say (live)”] The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group — whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read — and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers.  Jackson didn’t take this replacement well, and publicly went round telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendoes to this effect in Mike Pender’s autobiography — although Allen denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship, and says that he doesn’t actually know what Curtis’ sexuality was, because they never discussed that kind of thing, and presumably Allen would know better than anyone else whether he was in a relationship with Curtis.  Curtis is widely described as having been gay or bi by his contemporaries, but if he was he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There’s some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn’t get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, “Bye Bye Baby”, made number thirty-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, “Bye Bye Baby”] However, his later singles had no success — he was soon rerecording “Love Potion Number Nine” in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, “Love Potion Number Nine”] Meanwhile, Allen was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group’s run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new lineup, “When You Walk In The Room”, was a cover of another Jackie DeShannon song, this time written by DeShannon on her own, and originally released as a B-side: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “When You Walk In The Room”] The Searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon’s original, and by this time playing it on real twelve-strings, and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Allen: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “When You Walk In the Room”] Do you think the Byrds might have heard that? That went to number three on the charts. The next single was less successful, only making number thirteen, but was interesting in other ways — from the start, as well as their R&B covers, Curtis had been adding folk songs to the group’s repertoire, and there’d been one or two covers of songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on their albums, but “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was the first one to become a single.  It was written by Malvina Reynolds, who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties, and who also wrote “Morningtown Ride” and “Little Boxes”. “What Have They Done to The Rain?” was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn’t as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style, and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top twenty at all seems quite an achievement. [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What Have They Done To The Rain?”] Their next single, “Goodbye My Love”, was their last top ten hit, and the next few singles only made the top forty, even when the Rolling Stones gave them “Take It Or Leave It”. The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs, and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicate as for enjoyment as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis’ departure, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”, was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as an Everly Brothers album track: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”] Unfortunately for the Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it: [Excerpt: Paul and Barry Ryan, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”] Neither single made the top forty, and the Searchers would never have a hit single again. Nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, “Aggravation”, a cover of a Joe South song: [Excerpt: Chris Curtis, “Aggravation”] The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Joe Moretti, but it didn’t chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple. The Searchers didn’t put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of rerecordings of their old hits, in 1972. But then in 1979 Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering “Needles and Pins” to sign the Searchers to a two-album deal, which produced records that fit perfectly into the late seventies New Wave pop landscape, while still sounding like the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Hearts in Her Eyes”] Apparently during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn’t involved. Unfortunately, while those albums had some critical success, they did nothing commercially, and Sire dropped them. By 1985, the Searchers were at breaking point. They hadn’t recorded any new material in several years, and Mike Pender and John McNally weren’t getting on at all — which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool, and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members — the group were so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the two of them. One of them would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No-one except them knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren’t amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways (the drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group). Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other Searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as “Mike Pender’s Searchers”, so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as The Searchers with a new singer. A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Allen are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved — there were now two groups with near-identical names, playing the same sets, in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other, to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway, comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Pender still tours — or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year — and McNally and Allen’s band continued playing regularly until 2019, and only stopped performing because of McNally’s increasing ill health. Having seen both, Pender’s was the better show — McNally and Allen’s lineup of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesiser for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar/bass/drums sound — but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020, as a reward for his services to the music industry. Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Allen are now in well-deserved retirement. While Allen and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmates’ funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn’t even say hello to each other, and even though McNally and Allen’s band has retired, there’s still a prominent notice on their website that they own the name “The Searchers” and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly twelve-string electric guitar, you’re hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison, a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts.

Together with American Songwriter, we had the pleasure of interviewing Topic and ATB over Zoom video! Legendary German producer/DJ/songwriter ATB teams up with Topic and A7S on “Your Love (9pm)” – the first-ever official remake of ATB’s breakthrough 1998 hit, “9pm (Till I Come).” Working together in a German studio, ATB and Topic flawlessly blended their musical styles to create the track, along with A7S, who finalized the lyrics via video call.“Over the past 20 years, I've received so many requests for collaborations, remakes and cover versions of my song ‘9pm (Till I Come)’ but I passed on them all because I was never really satisfied with the sound of the approach nor the final,” explains ATB. “Then I listened to Topic's ‘Breaking Me’ together with Rudi (management) and we immediately had the feeling that these two sound worlds could fuse together perfectly.”Fit for the TikTok generation, ATB & Topic’s reimagined version features A7S’ soaring vocals and a powerful, full-bodied bassline alongside the distinctive guitar hook and sun-kissed trance energy that made the original a worldwide hit.“‘9pm (Till I Come)’ is an absolute dance classic that I've known and loved since I was little,” says Topic. “It is therefore a great honor to be the first to reissue this number together with ATB. The typical ATB guitar riff paired with my ‘melancholic dance music’ sound and the unmistakable voice of A7S results in a perfect symbiosis!”“Your Love (9pm)” follows on from what has been a career-defining year for German/Croatian producer Topic and Swedish singer/songwriter A7S. Their first collaboration, “Breaking Me,” became one of the most successful singles of 2020, amassing more than one billion combined global streams. The song hit No. 1 on the Mediabase U.S. dance radio tally, iTunes and the Global Top 200 Shazam chart, earning certifications in 27 countries around the world, including Gold status in the U.S. and Platinum in the U.K. The duo enlisted GRAMMY®-nominated U.S. rapper Lil Baby for the follow-up single, “Why Do You Lie To Me,” which has racked up over 35 million Spotify streams and garnered strong U.K. radio support from the likes of BBC Radio 1, Capital FM and Kiss FM.ATB’s “9pm (Till I Come)” topped the U.K.’s Official Singles chart in 1999, becoming the first trance song to reach No. 1 in Britain. It entered the top 10 in numerous countries, including Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart in the U.S., where it opened the door for electronic dance music on mainstream radio. The song’s enduring appeal is highlighted in this clip, which shows Ed Sheeran and Max Martin dancing to “9pm.” ATB’s subsequent string of hits – which included “Don’t Stop,” “Ecstasy,” “Let U Go,” “What About Us,” “Move On” and ‘When It Ends It Starts Again” – has consistently earned him a spot in the prestigious DJ Mag “Top 100” poll for nearly two decades. He has released 10 studio albums and more than 40 singles, earning Platinum and Gold awards in numerous countries.While paying homage to an iconic ‘90s dance track, ATB, Topic and A7S have delivered a thoroughly modern anthem with “Your Love (9pm).”We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com.www.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod  #foryou #foryoupage #stayhome #togetherathome #zoom #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetworkListen & Subscribe to BiBFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! 

This No Format Friday kicked off with Bo declaring that he’s hopping on all the bandwagons he can find! So reach out to him right now! Quick! Do it! Bo also shocked us with a difficult Impossible Question of the Day. He asked, what costs just $5 today, but used to cost more than $20k when it first came out? Think of something you never want to see in your house unless you already know it’s there. The Associate Caller of the Day was Sarah from Store 1457 in Riverton, Wyoming. She wanted to shout out her whole store. She also said she’s just going to hang out this weekend. Sarah, you know what else you can do? Find a bandwagon to join with Bo! In hip-hop news, Mike D. from the Beastie Boys is auctioning off his VMA and gold records for charity. What a cool way to continue the Beastie Boys legacy! And, in even more bandwagon news, Bo and Iyube break down Wanda Vision. Yeah, you guessed it. Bo’s on board! Bo also catches up with Pink in Celebrity Chit-Chat. She reveals “What About Us” is one of her favorite songs that she’s ever made. We agree. It’s an absolute banger! Bo is in the studio with Yes or No Way, Bo! and entertainment news. Listen to all that and more, right now!

Perceived problems with the 2020 election are historical but many things like government IDs, long lines, limited hours, closed polling places, intimidation and misinformation have been chipping away at our ability and willingness to vote for years. We the people will need to overcome voter fraud in all its forms or risk losing our right to self-govern. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Odette was raised in a rural village in Burkina Faso, West Africa with her extended family of 30 people. When she moved to the capitol city of Ouagadougou she adapted to a very different way of life with money and food bought in markets. In 2016 Odette and her children moved to the United States, arriving in Maine on Christmas Day, knowing no one. Since then she has adapted to yet another very different way of life in Maine. The organization called In Her Presence was integral in helping Odette to feel she was seen and supported while quickly learning English. When she relocated to the Bath area she invested herself in a community building organization called Mid-Coast New Mainers Group where she now serves on their board. Through this organization she was invited to work in a community garden during this Covid/BLM/political summer. Gardening was transformational for her and gave her satisfaction beyond her expectations.Odette currently studies nursing at University of Maine Augusta. Through nursing she has learned, more than ever, that we can be known by strangers through our shared humanity--we are all connected. Music:Song Referenced: Pink sings "What About Us?"Closing song: Amy Koita-Faman sings "Djiguy."

Dr. John Palisano, former Professor at the University of the South, joins again to talk about the Coronavirus and why it has proven to be so deadly, but also about the amazing science and technology that will bring us vaccines in the next few weeks. How do vaccines work and why it is so important to get one? Effective and safe - welcome back science, we missed you! What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

All of our great Rural Caucus candidates were defeated. TNDP Rural Caucus Chair Anne Quillen tells us why Democrats struggle to win in Tennessee. In reality, we all have many similarities in our ideas and dreams of a good life but when misinformation and divisiveness rule no one will be able to achieve them. We discuss how Democrats can better get their message to more voters and create a better Tennessee. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Brian Butler has had an illustrious career as an educator--and he's still going strong. Faced with challenges in his own education as a child, he refused to be lost in the system. With the assistance of important people in his life, he rose to the top, becoming a professional basketball player and then a teacher, coach, and a school administrator. In 2016, he led Mason Crest Elementary School in Virginia to become Solution Tree's first DuFour Award-winning PLC. Read about Brian's journey here and find out more about What About Us?, his latest book, which shares ideas for using PLC principles in grades preK-2.

This is a rebroadcast of the August 27, 2020 episode of with Dr. Andrea Hatcher. This election we DO have a clear winner in both the electoral college and popular vote but it hasn’t always been the case. Donald Trump would never have been President if not for the antiquated and un-Democratic Electoral College. Dr. Hatcher also proposes that spreading misinformation about a candidate or election is a form of fraud. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

We hear "Erasing history" and "destroying our heritage” but what does one family member raised in the South and great-grandson of a revered Confederate General think about the removal of a monument from the public square? Louis Rice joins to discuss. What About Us? is honored to be a part of The TN Holler Podcast Network.

A new MP3 sermon from Living Way Reformed Presbyterian Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: #97 - What About Us? Subtitle: The Gospel of Matthew Speaker: Steve Rockhill Broadcaster: Living Way Reformed Presbyterian Church Event: Sunday - AM Date: 11/1/2020 Bible: Matthew 19:27-30 Length: 42 min.

Rev. Williams concludes our "What About Us?" series preaching from Luke Luke 11:1-2.

We conclude our interviews with Tennessee state candidates with Dr. Jenn Foley running for House District 65. She summarizes issues and concerns expressed by constituents across the state and the need for relief from the GOP super-majority agenda. We need more discussion, representation and balance, along with less arrogance and paternalism. Please go out and vote for a better Tennessee for all Tennesseans. What About Us? is honored to be a part of The TN Holler Podcast Network.

Rev. Williams continues our "What About Us?" series preaching from Acts 17:22-24.

Elizabeth Madiera, House Candidate for District 63, discusses the murkiness surrounding the passage of the voucher bill under her opponent Glen Casada’s “leadership”. It’s unpopular, unconstitutional, under investigation by the FBI, and unseated him as leader of the house. We need the General Assembly to be out of the Republican supermajority, better balanced, and more transparent to achieve better legislation. What About Us? is honored to be a part of The TN Holler Podcast Network.

Robyn Deck, candidate for Tennessee's State House District 25, needs better broadband service. It is vital for rural health services, business, and education. So why do so many other things take priority in the General Assembly? Robyn has a plan and we need a change. How about we elect some people with new ideas willing to do the work for rural priorities? What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Mariah Phillips, candidate for State House Rep in District 37, joins Sandy to talk about what it means to be a “Right to Work” state. They both urge caution as the General Assembly considers chiseling the law into the Tennessee State Constitution. Unions get a bad rap and low wages have bought many jobs to Tennessee but what are the long-term consequences of handing our future to big corporations? Hasn’t the pandemic uncovered many inequalities in worker’s safety and security? What might this mean for our future? What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Candidate Jarvus Turnley for State House District 66 and I talk about legalizing medical marijuana. A Vanderbilt study reports that 80% of Tennesseans support it and 33 states already do but the GOP General Assembly balks. We also review CBD and THC as well as efforts to decriminalize marijuana possession and criminal justice reform. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Executive Director of the Mountain Goat Trail Alliance Patrick Dean discusses the amazing success of this multi-use former rail bed. Currently stretching across the Cumberland plateau from Sewanee to Tracy City, it is a perfect example of ecotourism. It conserves the natural environment also has improved the welfare of local people. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Yes, yes, yes! This is yet another piping hot episode of the Not For Prophets Stereo Podcast, the world record holding, only all Arkansas focused podcast that covers all the weird and wacky happenings here in the Natural State as well as all the true crime, crooked cops, corrupt politicians, and whatever else that happens to finds its way into your hearing holes. But that's still not quite all you get. The interviews you already have access to are TREMENDOUS! Folks, we are only just getting started! How's about a little taste of what's waiting for you in this episode: - tons of thank yous -artbyjessicajones.com - more hand solo than Han Solo -double double: world record two podcasts, world record two errors in a single episode -Class Action Park: here - tell me your Wild River County stories - coming of age: first unscheduled tit - homeless no more: Osborne  - a slight tire miscalculation - more owls in the moss - Starks calls it quits -Starks on a hood video -Mel and Tawney -Operation: Into the Dirtbags - Pine Bluff is headed toward a cliff -the other White Nose Syndrome - the great cave caper - place your bets: if you'll ever even step foot in the place - 800+ years AND two life sentences - fanny pack profiling - s/o Ronel Williams - underreporting or over-reporting: police, make up your mind -man charges police with machete and lives? -Operation: Bear Mountain Bingo -always ask for Chuy -arresting the kooky? -Cottonballs out there stunting -April Michelle Poor sends school to her house -who wants to eat next to Louisianans? -Another happy ending for Alpina and Walt Record, RIP -the song is "What About Us" by Gary Clark Jr. ...and so much more. As always, thank you for listening to the Not For Prophets Stereo Podcast. You're helping build this behemoth. This is all part of the takeover!  Bribes: Leave an Apple Podcasts review (with words) and you're automatically entered into a $25 raffle. You win, $25 straight to Cash App. Don't want the money? Name your charity and it's $50. All this is so we can get the the ONLY all Arkansas focused podcast to the top of the results when someone types in "Arkansas" into the podcast search field. Thanks for hopping on the ride with me and I hope you dig it. Tap the SUBSCRIBE button to make sure you never miss a new weekly episode, or any of the bonus episodes that come out by surprise. If you're liking what's happing here, tell someone. Better yet, just grab their phone and subscribe for them. Do them the favor, okay? Interested in sponsoring the podcast, or want to reach out? Feel at any time. mail@notforprophets.net Web: notforprophets.net Instagram: notforprophets Twitter: @notfor_prophets Spotify playlist

Anne Ferrell Quillen is the President of the recently formed and awesome TNDP rural caucus. Although rural areas are represented by elected officials, they don’t seem to have us in mind when they vote with the GOP supermajority. Expanding Medicaid for rural hospitals, funding for public schools and infrastructure, and developing economic opportunities for our businesses, communities and way of life are all essential issues for rural Tennessee. We do make up 93% of the state. Let’s elect some homegrown candidates to make some change. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Who chooses the President, the people, or the Electoral College? “It’s complicated,” says my guest Dr. Andrea Hatcher, professor of politics and pre-law at The University of the South. The founders would be surprised that we are still using this system despite its flaws and threat to democracy. Would the popular vote be a more equitable way? How could this be changed? Please vote. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

The 856th journey into sound takes you through a trance cover of P!nk's classic «What About Us», brand new music from Burak Harsitlioglu, and emotional anthem, brand new music from Ronski Speed and many, many more. Take a journey into sound with TranceChill every week! TranceChill is a non-profit, independent trance show. Please don't upload this episode to paid download sites! Tune in for several hours of pure uplifting trance awesomeness! Stay safe! This episode was streamed live on Twitch.tv/djskoen & YouTube at August 23rd, 2020 at 22:00 CEST/16:00 EDT, and broadcasted on ETN.fm Ch. 1 (www.etn.fm) at August 24th, 2020 at 22:00 CEST/16:00 EDT, on NoGrief FM (t.co/tuQU60mMq3) at August 25th, 2020 at 19:00 CEST/13:00 EDT, Discover Trance Radio (www.discovertrance.com) at August 26th, 2020 at 23:00 CEST/18:00 EDT, and on Beats2Dance Trance (www.beats2dance.com) at August 29th, 2020 at 12:00 CEST/06:00 EDT. 1. Standerwick ft Linney - What About Us (Extended Mix) [Armind] 2. Novan Ft. Amy Kirkpatrick - Full of Life (Extended 2020 Mix) [RaveUp] 3. Markus Schulz & Adina Butar - In Search of Sunrise (Solarstone Extended Pure Mix) [Coldharbour] 4. Khoa Tran - Reality Somewhere (SounEmot Remix) [Sundance] 5. W!SS with Ash K & Junior Ft. Ahmad Fares - Aman (Jeïtam Oshéen Remix) [Nahawand] 6. Checho Suarez - Restart (Original Mix) [Aural Sonic: 138] 7. Adam Foley - Trip Switch (Danny Powers Remix) [Discover] 8. Burak Harsitlioglu - Fragile (Original Mix) [Ahura Mazda Nitro] 9. AlexRusShev - Christina Emotional Anthem (Original Mix) [Neostatic] 10. Mr. & Mrs. Smith - Get Loose (The Conductor & The Cowboy Extended Rework) [Pure Trance NEON] 11. Masaru Hinaiji feat. Kayumai - Warm Wind (Original Mix) [Aural Sonic: 138] 12. Phykro12 - Dawn On My Heart (Original Mix) [Sundance] 13. Sensorica - Equilibrium (Original Mix) [Discover] 14. Michael Lee - Everblue (Original Mix) [Discover] 15. The Conductor & The Cowboy - Feeling This Way [Serious] 16. Armin Van Buuren Pres. Perpetuous Dreamer - The Sound of Goodbye (Pedro Del Mar & Beatsole Extended Mix) [A&R] 17. Synthetic Fantasy - Tales Of Kingdom (Original Mix) [Gert] 18. Ronski Speed & DJ T.H. pres. Sun Decade ft. Clara Yates - Too Far Tonight (Extended Mix) [Digital Society] 19. Ben Gold & Senadee - Today (Filo and Peri Remix) [Discover] 20. Above & Beyond Feat Richard Bedford - Sun & Moon (Club Mix) [Anjunabeats] 21. Elenski - Touch The Strings Of The Soul (Extended Mix) [Neostatic] 22. Victor Special - Frio Con Fuego [RTO] 23. Fisical Project - Breaking Silence (Extended Mix) [Always Alive] 24. Ashley Gibson - I Am (Original Mix) [Neostatic] Website: www.trancechill.com iTunes: www.trancechill.com/itunes TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Podcasts/TranceChill-p1122215/ Twitch: https://twitch.tv/djskoen Program site on Facebook: www.facebook.com/TranceChill Program site on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TranceChill Program site on Discord: https://discord.gg/4qg99Fw

Carol Abney, candidate for TN House District 38, knows about distressed counties and closed rural hospitals. Fentress and 3 other TN counties were removed from the bottom 10% of economic performers across the country but 2 more in this district remain on the list. A licensed CPA, Carol discusses the tax burdens, limited resources, inaccessible medical care, and lack of job opportunities that keep rural residents distressed. The TN Rural Initiative provides" window dressing” when real financial support from the state government is needed. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Senate Candidate District 16, Sheila Younglove, joins us again to answer the question: Why Medicaid Expansion is supported by every Democrat running for state office. It is because it is outrageous that affordable health care for thousands of Tennesseans has barely been discussed in the General Assembly since Governor Haslam’s Insure Tennessee was rejected in committee in 2014. With the pandemic, an estimated 750,000 Tennesseans could become uninsured! It is unlikely that the 3rd legislative session will even consider adopting Medicaid Expansion as have 38 states. We really need some change in our state government. Vote wisely. What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Join me, Adam Hampton for Episode 3 where we explore the life and music of the rebel juggernaut P!NK. In this episode we explore P!nk's happy start to life before her world was turned upside down by her parents divorce causing her to rebel and get involved in the wrong crowds. She would pull herself out of a life of drugs and crime through her passion for music and performing and overcome many obstacles along the way to become known as the superstar entertainer with the acrobatic skills, deep and honest lyrics and raw and powerful voice we know and love today. In this episode we take a look at the meaning behind her songs and explore her charting success, albums and everything in between. As we celebrate the life and music of this incredible artist. We take a look at the meaning behind the songs: Family Portrait, Don't Let Me Get Me, Stupid Girls, Trouble, Who Knew, So What, Just Like a Pill, What About Us, True Love, Just Give Me A Reason, Try, Beautiful Trauma and many more. Be sure to tune in to Episode 4 featuring Robbie Williams This episode was written, researched, narrated, edited and produced by Adam Hampton. If you enjoyed this episode feel free to subscribe for future episodes and please feel free to leave a positive review. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Lyrics of their Life Podcast and if you're feeling really generous you can support us further at Patreon, so we can continue to bring you more great episodes in the future. https://www.patreon.com/Lyricsoftheirlifepodcast Thanks for tuning in and enjoy.

Franklin High School’s mascot is a colonel and if you wonder if he is a Confederate - the school colors of blue and grey, fight song “Dixie” and the depiction of the bars and stars of the battle flag on the school seal make it obvious. Their mascot is a rebel against the United States to maintain slavery and a rebel against an order to desegregate schools, so no wonder African-American students and alumnae have asked for decades to have these symbols of oppression and exclusion removed. Guest Shanae Williams knows her history, and so do the hearts of community members who have signed a petition for change (change.org/changeFCHS). How will they fare with the county school board and conservative residents in this time of sustained desire to end to systemic racism in all its forms? What About Us? is honored to be a part of the TN Holler Podcast Network.

Make sure to keep your webpages updated. Look especially at your About Us and Contact Us pages. The post HMBT #226: What About Us? appeared first on .

The March edition of UP! is always a 2 parter. I do this because of the history of club anthems played at the party over the years. Part 13 of Mardi Gras anthems arrives a little sooner than usual as Mardi Gras falls on the 29th of February 2020, this year being a leap year. So, preparations need to be made. The front end of the set has new remixes of classic diva tracks starting off with the Dirty Disco remix of Whitney's "I'm Every Woman". Madonna and Donna Summer get standout mixes from Dario Xavier and Barry Harris works his magic on the classic Weather Girls hit "It's Raining Men". From here on, there are anthems from Corona, Katy Perry, P!nk, Australia's Tina Arena and Kesha, who will be performing live at the party. Killer mixes come from Sagi Kariv, Tommer Mizrahi, 7th Heaven and Toy Armada & DJ GRIND. Throw in some Rihanna to close out the set and MG anthems 13 is ready to rock. Enjoy Anthony 1/ "I'M EVERY WOMAN" (Dirty Disco Eagle Houston Remix) - WHITNEY HOUSTON 2/ "MATERIAL GIRL" (Dario Xavier 2020 Club Mix) - MADONNA 3/ "HOT STUFF" (Dario Xavier Club Mix) - DONNA SUMMER 4/ "IT'S RAINING MEN" (Barry Harris Refreshed Club Mix) - THE WEATHER GIRLS 5/ "BABY BABY" (Sagi Kariv Club Rework) - CORONA 6/ "NEVER ENOUGH" (Tommy Love & Toy Armada Club Mix) - LOREN ALLRED 7/ "UNCONDITIONALLY" (Toy Armada & DJ GRIND Mardi Gras Club Mix) - KATY PERRY 8/ "WHAT ABOUT US" (Sagi Kariv Club Mix) - P!NK 9/ "SYMPHONY" (Tommer Mizrahi Remix) - CLEAN BANDIT ft. ZARA LARSSON 10/ "DON'T HIDE" (7th Heaven Club Mix) - TINA ARENA 11/ "PRAYING" (Russ Rich Club Mix) - KESHA 12/ "DIAMONDS" (Cosmic Dawn Club Remix) - RIHANNA

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Searchin'" by The Coasters, and at the group's greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Tears on My Pillow" by Little Anthony and the Imperials.   ----more----   Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists -- part one, part two.  I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner's take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!)   The Coasters by Bill Millar is an excellent, long out-of-print, book which provided a lot of useful information. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has the A- and B-sides of all the group's hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript When we last left the Coasters, they'd just taken on two new singers -- Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones -- to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit -- for most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley among others.   Leiber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people in the business had at that point. They were independent writer/producers -- an unusual state in itself in the 1950s -- but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn't overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars -- not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Leiber and Stoller's normal music. That contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis, but didn't end up being comfortable for either party, and ended after a year or so, but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors. And at the same time, they were also attached to Atlantic, where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired, such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic that they were working with the Coasters, who unlike those other artists were Leiber and Stoller's own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group's biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] For the most part, Leiber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Leiber had started out as a songwriter who couldn't play an instrument or write music -- he'd just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head -- while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally one would contribute ideas to the other's sphere. Normally, we don't know exactly how much each contributed to the other's work, because they didn't go into that much detail about how they wrote songs, but in the case of "Yakety Yak" we know exactly how the song was written -- everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Leiber and Stoller's was how they wrote "Yakety Yak". According to the anecdote, they were in Leiber's house, in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea it might be suitable for the Coasters, while Leiber was in the kitchen. Leiber heard him playing and called out the first line, "Take out the papers and the trash!", and Stoller immediately replied "Or you don't get no spending cash". They traded off lines and had the song written in about ten minutes. "Yakety Yak" featured a new style for the Coasters' records. Where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist -- usually Carl Gardner -- on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by the other members, here the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Leiber and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy, but I'm pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner's voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there's the chorus line, where the group sing "Yakety Yak", and then Dub Jones takes the single line "Don't talk back": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] This formula would be one they would come back to again and again -- and there was one more element of the record that became part of the Coasters' formula -- King Curtis' saxophone part: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] While “Yakety Yak” seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn't seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Leiber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success, and wanted to put another Leiber and Stoller song on the B-side, so they'd be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Leiber, though, thought they needed a proven song for the B-side -- something safe for if "Yakety Yak" was a flop. They went with Leiber's plan, and the B-side was a version of the old song "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart"] Leiber shouldn't have worried -- "Yakety Yak" was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter's sister Gloria, which Cornell sang backing vocals on: [Excerpt: Gloria Gunter, "Move on Out"] With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Leiber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group's vocal arrangements, Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines, and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal -- but when they did, they'd be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they'd been shown by Leiber. From the very start of Leiber and Stoller's career, Leiber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines -- you may remember from the episode on "Hound Dog", one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song. When Leiber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Leiber's phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the Coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group's records, and it's one that must be taken seriously -- though of course Otis had personal issues with Leiber and Stoller, resulting from the credits on "Hound Dog". But other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It's also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I'm a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn't racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I'd say is this -- the Coasters' performances, and *especially* Dub Jones' vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture, and reappropriates stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing, just like this, songs just like this that they had written themselves, there would be no question -- it wouldn't be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements, in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist -- it would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance, and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the Coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people -- Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller -- and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos 'n' Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can't answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves -- though that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren't writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Leiber said of "Riot in Cell Block #9" "It was inspired by the Gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black. But they could have been white actors on radio, saying, “Pass the dynamite, because the fuse is lit.”" [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] That may be the case as well -- their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coasters' biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture, and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it's very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coasters' songs as being about black experiences specifically -- and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Leiber and Stoller, "They weren't racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelled entirely on a sort of street society. It's a very fine point -- sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that's where he was. He wasn't a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it's not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community". The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn't in the songwriting, but in the performance -- and that performance was clearly directed by Leiber. I think it makes a difference, as well, that the Coasters had two different audiences -- they had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there's a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don't have any easy answers on this one. I don't think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I'm not the right person to judge whether the Coasters' music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was "Charlie Brown", which most people refer to as the follow-up to "Yakety Yak". In fact, after "Yakety Yak" came a blues song called "The Shadow Knows", based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Welles. While Leiber and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio plays gave them for their songs for the group, that didn't translate to chart success -- several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of "The Shadow Knows". It's a more adult record than "Yakety Yak", and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coasters' white teenage audience -- and in Leiber and Stoller's autobiography, they skip over it completely, and talk about "Charlie Brown" as being immediately after "Yakety Yak". "Charlie Brown" took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that "Yakety Yak" had taken -- while Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Leiber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title "Charlie Brown", and came up with the basic idea for the lyric -- which, again, Stoller helped with. It's clear, listening to it, that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Charlie Brown"] "Charlie Brown" was almost as big a hit as "Yakety Yak", reaching number two on the pop charts, so of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines, "Along Came Jones". This time, the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Along Came Jones"] While that's a fun record, it “only” reached number nine in the pop charts – still a big success, but nowhere near as big as “Charlie Brown” or “Yakety Yak”. Possibly "Along Came Jones" did less well than it otherwise would have because The Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record, "Western Movies": [Excerpt: The Olympics, "Western Movies"] Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison-vocals-and-honking-sax formula -- while the next single was meant to be a song called "I'm a Hog For You Baby" which was another iteration of the same formula (although with a more bluesy feel, and a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics) listeners instead picked up on the B-side, which became their biggest hit among black audiences, becoming their fourth and final R&B number one, as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called "Poison Ivy", and it's frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it's blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases -- the song is about a woman called "Poison Ivy", and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that "Poison Ivy will make you itch" and "you can look but you'd better not touch". It's hardly subtle: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Poison Ivy"] Shortly after that, Adolph Jacobs left the group. While he'd always been an official member, it had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member -- and that that member wasn't even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller's piano and King Curtis' saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. "Poison Ivy" would be the group's last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Leiber and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group's songs would be in the older style that they'd used with the Robins -- songs making social comments, and talking about adult topics. The next single, "What About Us?", which was a protest song about how rich (and by implication) white people had an easy life while the singers didn't have anything, "only" reached number seventeen, and there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard "Besame Mucho", which extended over two sides -- the second side mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number seventy. Then they released the first single written by a member of the group -- "Wake Me, Shake Me", which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song "Stewball", and didn't do much better, reaching number fifty-one on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and that did even worse in the charts, but it's now considered one of the Coasters' great classics. "Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)" was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and His Solid Crew, and it seems to have been modelled both on the early Robins songs that Leiber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berry's "No Money Down": [Excerpt: Boogaloo and His Solid Crew: "Clothes Line (Wrap it Up)"] Leiber and Stoller told various different stories over the years about how the Coasters came to record what they titled "Shopping For Clothes", but the one they seem to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record, and knew about half the lyrics, and they'd reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They'd been unable to find out who had written it, so had just credited it to "Elmo Glick", a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Shopping For Clothes"] The record only reached number eighty-three on the charts, and of course Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Leiber and Stoller. While it didn't chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coasters' very best records. It's also notable for being the first Coasters record to feature a young session musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leiber and Stoller's mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures, and was currently the Coasters' manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who'd had a big hit with a song called "To Know Him Is To Love Him", which he'd written for his group the Teddy Bears: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, "To Know Him Is To Love Him"] That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sill had set up with another producer, Lee Hazlewood. Sill said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leiber and Stoller, and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them, so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sill, and even though they found they disliked the kid once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber's spare room for a while. We'll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that "Shopping For Clothes" came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fanbase was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while, and try to transition into the adult white market -- the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the Coasters. So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album -- something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. This record was to be titled "One By One", and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs, and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn't work out like that. The album wasn't a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group -- he was an excellent singer, and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn't really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group's shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Easy Living"] For comparison, this is Washington's version of the same song: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Easy Living"] Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were, it did nothing, and by this time the group's commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline. Looking at their releases around this period, it's noticeable as well that the Coasters stop being produced exclusively by Leiber and Stoller -- several of their recordings are credited instead to Sill and Hazlewood as producers. There could be several explanations for this -- it could be that Leiber and Stoller were bored of working with the Coasters, or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost -- after all, Sill and Hazlewood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group's last top thirty hit was another Leiber and Stoller song -- one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Little Egypt"] "Little Egypt" was originally the stage name for three different belly-dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public, and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s -- nearly sixty years after their careers -- there was a highly fictionalised film supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Leiber and Stoller were inspired by the film, or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the Coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornell Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Dinah Washington's backing group. He was replaced by Earl "Speedo" Carroll, who had previously sung with a group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was "Speedoo": [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] Carroll, according to Leiber and Stoller, was so concerned about job security that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Dinah Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been the Penguins, since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously -- Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter's group weren't allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter's own name, or as "Cornell Gunter and the Cornells": [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “In a Dream of Love”] But while he couldn't make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name -- and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter's version of the group, rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you'd see live, even if you did go and see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter he didn't quit the group. Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy's solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coasters name, even though no other Coasters were involved: [Excerpt: Billy Guy, "It Doesn't Take Much"] The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades, pretty much everyone who'd been involved with the Coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name "the Coasters", and would sue people using it without his permission, but that didn't stop other members performing under names like "Cornel Gunter's Coasters", which isn't precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the Coasters ended up dying violently. King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only thirty-seven. One of Cornell Gunter's Coasters was murdered by Gunter's manager in 1980, after threatening to expose some of the manager's criminal activities. And finally Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990, and his killer has never been found. These days there are three separate Coasters groups touring. "Cornell Gunter's Coasters" is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death. "The Coasters" is managed by Carl Gardner's widow. And Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters but was gone by the time of "Yakety Yak", tours as "Leon Hughes and His Coasters". The Coasters are now all gone, other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many, other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone. They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do. And making comedy music that's still enjoyable more than sixty years later? No-one else in rock and roll has ever done that.

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the group’s greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two.  I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!)   The Coasters by Bill Millar is an excellent, long out-of-print, book which provided a lot of useful information. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has the A- and B-sides of all the group’s hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript When we last left the Coasters, they’d just taken on two new singers — Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones — to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit — for most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley among others.   Leiber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people in the business had at that point. They were independent writer/producers — an unusual state in itself in the 1950s — but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn’t overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars — not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Leiber and Stoller’s normal music. That contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis, but didn’t end up being comfortable for either party, and ended after a year or so, but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors. And at the same time, they were also attached to Atlantic, where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired, such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic that they were working with the Coasters, who unlike those other artists were Leiber and Stoller’s own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group’s biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] For the most part, Leiber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Leiber had started out as a songwriter who couldn’t play an instrument or write music — he’d just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head — while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally one would contribute ideas to the other’s sphere. Normally, we don’t know exactly how much each contributed to the other’s work, because they didn’t go into that much detail about how they wrote songs, but in the case of “Yakety Yak” we know exactly how the song was written — everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Leiber and Stoller’s was how they wrote “Yakety Yak”. According to the anecdote, they were in Leiber’s house, in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea it might be suitable for the Coasters, while Leiber was in the kitchen. Leiber heard him playing and called out the first line, “Take out the papers and the trash!”, and Stoller immediately replied “Or you don’t get no spending cash”. They traded off lines and had the song written in about ten minutes. “Yakety Yak” featured a new style for the Coasters’ records. Where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist — usually Carl Gardner — on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by the other members, here the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Leiber and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy, but I’m pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner’s voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there’s the chorus line, where the group sing “Yakety Yak”, and then Dub Jones takes the single line “Don’t talk back”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] This formula would be one they would come back to again and again — and there was one more element of the record that became part of the Coasters’ formula — King Curtis’ saxophone part: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] While “Yakety Yak” seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn’t seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Leiber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success, and wanted to put another Leiber and Stoller song on the B-side, so they’d be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Leiber, though, thought they needed a proven song for the B-side — something safe for if “Yakety Yak” was a flop. They went with Leiber’s plan, and the B-side was a version of the old song “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”, performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”] Leiber shouldn’t have worried — “Yakety Yak” was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter’s sister Gloria, which Cornell sang backing vocals on: [Excerpt: Gloria Gunter, “Move on Out”] With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Leiber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group’s vocal arrangements, Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines, and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal — but when they did, they’d be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they’d been shown by Leiber. From the very start of Leiber and Stoller’s career, Leiber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines — you may remember from the episode on “Hound Dog”, one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song. When Leiber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Leiber’s phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the Coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group’s records, and it’s one that must be taken seriously — though of course Otis had personal issues with Leiber and Stoller, resulting from the credits on “Hound Dog”. But other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It’s also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I’m a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn’t racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I’d say is this — the Coasters’ performances, and *especially* Dub Jones’ vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture, and reappropriates stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing, just like this, songs just like this that they had written themselves, there would be no question — it wouldn’t be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements, in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist — it would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance, and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the Coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people — Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos ‘n’ Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can’t answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves — though that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren’t writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Leiber said of “Riot in Cell Block #9” “It was inspired by the Gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black. But they could have been white actors on radio, saying, “Pass the dynamite, because the fuse is lit.”” [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] That may be the case as well — their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coasters’ biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture, and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it’s very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coasters’ songs as being about black experiences specifically — and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Leiber and Stoller, “They weren’t racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelled entirely on a sort of street society. It’s a very fine point — sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that’s where he was. He wasn’t a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it’s not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community”. The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn’t in the songwriting, but in the performance — and that performance was clearly directed by Leiber. I think it makes a difference, as well, that the Coasters had two different audiences — they had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there’s a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don’t have any easy answers on this one. I don’t think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I’m not the right person to judge whether the Coasters’ music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was “Charlie Brown”, which most people refer to as the follow-up to “Yakety Yak”. In fact, after “Yakety Yak” came a blues song called “The Shadow Knows”, based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Welles. While Leiber and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio plays gave them for their songs for the group, that didn’t translate to chart success — several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of “The Shadow Knows”. It’s a more adult record than “Yakety Yak”, and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coasters’ white teenage audience — and in Leiber and Stoller’s autobiography, they skip over it completely, and talk about “Charlie Brown” as being immediately after “Yakety Yak”. “Charlie Brown” took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that “Yakety Yak” had taken — while Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Leiber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title “Charlie Brown”, and came up with the basic idea for the lyric — which, again, Stoller helped with. It’s clear, listening to it, that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of “Yakety Yak”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Charlie Brown”] “Charlie Brown” was almost as big a hit as “Yakety Yak”, reaching number two on the pop charts, so of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines, “Along Came Jones”. This time, the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Along Came Jones”] While that’s a fun record, it “only” reached number nine in the pop charts – still a big success, but nowhere near as big as “Charlie Brown” or “Yakety Yak”. Possibly “Along Came Jones” did less well than it otherwise would have because The Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record, “Western Movies”: [Excerpt: The Olympics, “Western Movies”] Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison-vocals-and-honking-sax formula — while the next single was meant to be a song called “I’m a Hog For You Baby” which was another iteration of the same formula (although with a more bluesy feel, and a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics) listeners instead picked up on the B-side, which became their biggest hit among black audiences, becoming their fourth and final R&B number one, as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called “Poison Ivy”, and it’s frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it’s blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases — the song is about a woman called “Poison Ivy”, and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that “Poison Ivy will make you itch” and “you can look but you’d better not touch”. It’s hardly subtle: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Poison Ivy”] Shortly after that, Adolph Jacobs left the group. While he’d always been an official member, it had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member — and that that member wasn’t even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller’s piano and King Curtis’ saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. “Poison Ivy” would be the group’s last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Leiber and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group’s songs would be in the older style that they’d used with the Robins — songs making social comments, and talking about adult topics. The next single, “What About Us?”, which was a protest song about how rich (and by implication) white people had an easy life while the singers didn’t have anything, “only” reached number seventeen, and there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard “Besame Mucho”, which extended over two sides — the second side mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number seventy. Then they released the first single written by a member of the group — “Wake Me, Shake Me”, which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song “Stewball”, and didn’t do much better, reaching number fifty-one on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and that did even worse in the charts, but it’s now considered one of the Coasters’ great classics. “Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)” was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and His Solid Crew, and it seems to have been modelled both on the early Robins songs that Leiber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down”: [Excerpt: Boogaloo and His Solid Crew: “Clothes Line (Wrap it Up)”] Leiber and Stoller told various different stories over the years about how the Coasters came to record what they titled “Shopping For Clothes”, but the one they seem to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record, and knew about half the lyrics, and they’d reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They’d been unable to find out who had written it, so had just credited it to “Elmo Glick”, a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Shopping For Clothes”] The record only reached number eighty-three on the charts, and of course Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Leiber and Stoller. While it didn’t chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coasters’ very best records. It’s also notable for being the first Coasters record to feature a young session musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leiber and Stoller’s mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures, and was currently the Coasters’ manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who’d had a big hit with a song called “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, which he’d written for his group the Teddy Bears: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is To Love Him”] That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sill had set up with another producer, Lee Hazlewood. Sill said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leiber and Stoller, and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them, so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sill, and even though they found they disliked the kid once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber’s spare room for a while. We’ll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that “Shopping For Clothes” came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fanbase was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while, and try to transition into the adult white market — the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the Coasters. So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album — something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. This record was to be titled “One By One”, and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs, and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn’t work out like that. The album wasn’t a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group — he was an excellent singer, and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn’t really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group’s shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Easy Living”] For comparison, this is Washington’s version of the same song: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Easy Living”] Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were, it did nothing, and by this time the group’s commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline. Looking at their releases around this period, it’s noticeable as well that the Coasters stop being produced exclusively by Leiber and Stoller — several of their recordings are credited instead to Sill and Hazlewood as producers. There could be several explanations for this — it could be that Leiber and Stoller were bored of working with the Coasters, or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost — after all, Sill and Hazlewood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”] But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group’s last top thirty hit was another Leiber and Stoller song — one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] “Little Egypt” was originally the stage name for three different belly-dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public, and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s — nearly sixty years after their careers — there was a highly fictionalised film supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Leiber and Stoller were inspired by the film, or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the Coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornell Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Dinah Washington’s backing group. He was replaced by Earl “Speedo” Carroll, who had previously sung with a group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Carroll, according to Leiber and Stoller, was so concerned about job security that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Dinah Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been the Penguins, since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously — Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter’s group weren’t allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter’s own name, or as “Cornell Gunter and the Cornells”: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “In a Dream of Love”] But while he couldn’t make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name — and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter’s version of the group, rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you’d see live, even if you did go and see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter he didn’t quit the group. Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy’s solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coasters name, even though no other Coasters were involved: [Excerpt: Billy Guy, “It Doesn’t Take Much”] The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades, pretty much everyone who’d been involved with the Coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name “the Coasters”, and would sue people using it without his permission, but that didn’t stop other members performing under names like “Cornel Gunter’s Coasters”, which isn’t precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the Coasters ended up dying violently. King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only thirty-seven. One of Cornell Gunter’s Coasters was murdered by Gunter’s manager in 1980, after threatening to expose some of the manager’s criminal activities. And finally Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990, and his killer has never been found. These days there are three separate Coasters groups touring. “Cornell Gunter’s Coasters” is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death. “The Coasters” is managed by Carl Gardner’s widow. And Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters but was gone by the time of “Yakety Yak”, tours as “Leon Hughes and His Coasters”. The Coasters are now all gone, other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many, other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone. They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do. And making comedy music that’s still enjoyable more than sixty years later? No-one else in rock and roll has ever done that.

Episode sixty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Searchin'” by The Coasters, and at the group’s greatest success and split, and features discussion of racism, plagiarism, STDs and Phil Spector. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Tears on My Pillow” by Little Anthony and the Imperials.   —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two.  I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. Yakety Yak, I Fought Back: My Life With the Coasters by Carl and Veta Gardner is a self-published, rather short, autobiography, which gives Gardner’s take on the formation of the Coasters. Those Hoodlum Friends is a Coasters fansite, with a very nineties aesthetic (frames! angelfire domain name! Actual information rather than pretty, empty, layouts!)   The Coasters by Bill Millar is an excellent, long out-of-print, book which provided a lot of useful information. And The Definitive Coasters is a double-CD set that has the A- and B-sides of all the group’s hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript When we last left the Coasters, they’d just taken on two new singers — Cornell Gunter and Dub Jones — to replace Leon Hughes and Bobby Nunn. The classic lineup of the Coasters had finally fallen into place, but it had been a year since they had had a hit — for most of 1957, their writing and production team, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had been concentrating on more lucrative work, with Elvis Presley among others.   Leiber and Stoller had a rather unique setup, which very few other people in the business had at that point. They were independent writer/producers — an unusual state in itself in the 1950s — but they were effectively under contract to two different labels, whose markets and audiences didn’t overlap very much. They were contracted to RCA to work with white pop stars — not just Elvis, though he was obviously important to them, but people like Perry Como, who were very far from Leiber and Stoller’s normal music. That contract with RCA produced a few hits outside Elvis, but didn’t end up being comfortable for either party, and ended after a year or so, but it was still remarkable that they would be working as producers for a major label while remaining independent contractors. And at the same time, they were also attached to Atlantic, where they were recording almost exclusively with the black performers that they admired, such as Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and the Drifters. And it was, of course, also at Atlantic that they were working with the Coasters, who unlike those other artists were Leiber and Stoller’s own personal project, and the one with whom they were most identified, and for whom they were about to write the group’s biggest hit: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] For the most part, Leiber and Stoller had the classic songwriting split of one lyricist and one composer. Leiber had started out as a songwriter who couldn’t play an instrument or write music — he’d just written lyrics down and remembered the tune in his head — while Stoller was already an accomplished and sophisticated jazz pianist by the time the two started collaborating. But they wrote together, and so occasionally one would contribute ideas to the other’s sphere. Normally, we don’t know exactly how much each contributed to the other’s work, because they didn’t go into that much detail about how they wrote songs, but in the case of “Yakety Yak” we know exactly how the song was written — everyone who has had a certain amount of success in the music business tends to have a store of anecdotes that they pull out in every interview, and one of Leiber and Stoller’s was how they wrote “Yakety Yak”. According to the anecdote, they were in Leiber’s house, in a writing session, and Stoller started playing a piano rhythm, with the idea it might be suitable for the Coasters, while Leiber was in the kitchen. Leiber heard him playing and called out the first line, “Take out the papers and the trash!”, and Stoller immediately replied “Or you don’t get no spending cash”. They traded off lines and had the song written in about ten minutes. “Yakety Yak” featured a new style for the Coasters’ records. Where their earlier singles had usually alternated between a single lead vocalist — usually Carl Gardner — on the verses, and the group taking the chorus, with occasional solo lines by the other members, here the lead vocal was taken in unison by the two longest-serving members of the group, Gardner and Billy Guy, with Cornell Gunter harmonising with them. Leiber and Stoller, in their autobiography, actually call it a duet between Gardner and Guy, but I’m pretty sure I hear three voices on the verses, not two, although Gardner’s voice is the most prominent. Then, at the end of each verse, there’s the chorus line, where the group sing “Yakety Yak”, and then Dub Jones takes the single line “Don’t talk back”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] This formula would be one they would come back to again and again — and there was one more element of the record that became part of the Coasters’ formula — King Curtis’ saxophone part: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Yakety Yak”] While “Yakety Yak” seems in retrospect to be an obvious hit record, it didn’t seem so at the time, at least to Jerry Leiber. Mike Stoller was convinced from the start that it would be a massive success, and wanted to put another Leiber and Stoller song on the B-side, so they’d be able to get royalties for both sides when the record became as big as he knew it would. Leiber, though, thought they needed a proven song for the B-side — something safe for if “Yakety Yak” was a flop. They went with Leiber’s plan, and the B-side was a version of the old song “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”, performed as a duet by Dub Jones and Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”] Leiber shouldn’t have worried — “Yakety Yak” was, of course, a number one hit single. The song was successful enough that it spawned a few answer records, including one by Cornell Gunter’s sister Gloria, which Cornell sang backing vocals on: [Excerpt: Gloria Gunter, “Move on Out”] With the new lineup of the group in place, they quickly settled into a hit-making machine. Everyone had a role to play. Leiber and Stoller would write the songs and take them into the studio. Stoller would write the parts for the musicians and play the piano, while Leiber supervised in the control room. Cornell Gunter would work out the group’s vocal arrangements, Dub Jones would always take his bass solo lines, and either Carl Gardner or Billy Guy would take the lead vocal — but when they did, they’d be copying, as exactly as they could, a performance they’d been shown by Leiber. From the very start of Leiber and Stoller’s career, Leiber had always directed the lead vocalist and told them how to sing his lines — you may remember from the episode on “Hound Dog”, one of the very first songs they wrote, that Big Mama Thornton was annoyed at him for telling her how to sing the song. When Leiber and Stoller produced an artist, whether it was Elvis or Ruth Brown or the Coasters or whoever, they would get them to follow Leiber’s phrasing as closely as possible. And this brings me to a thing that we need to deal with when talking about the Coasters, and that is the criticism that is often levelled against their records that they perpetuate racist stereotypes. Johnny Otis, in particular, would make this criticism of the group’s records, and it’s one that must be taken seriously — though of course Otis had personal issues with Leiber and Stoller, resulting from the credits on “Hound Dog”. But other people, such as Charlie Gillett, have also raised it. It’s also a charge that, genuinely, I am not in any position to come to a firm conclusion on. I’m a white man, and so my instincts as to what is and isn’t racist are likely to be extremely flawed. What I’d say is this — the Coasters’ performances, and *especially* Dub Jones’ vocal parts, are very clearly rooted in particular traditions of African-American comedy, and the way that that form of comedy plays with black culture, and reappropriates stereotypes of black people. If black people were performing, just like this, songs just like this that they had written themselves, there would be no question — it wouldn’t be racist. Equally, if white people were performing these songs, using the same arrangements, in the same voices, it would undoubtedly be racist — it would be an Amos and Andy style audio blackface performance, and an absolute travesty. The problem comes with the fact that the Coasters were black people, but they were performing songs written for them by two white people — Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — and that Leiber and Stoller were directing how they should perform those songs. To continue the Amos ‘n’ Andy analogy, is this like when Amos and Andy transferred from the radio to the TV, and the characters were played by black actors imitating the voices of the white comedians who had created the characters? I can’t answer that. Nor can I say if it makes a difference that Leiber and Stoller were Jewish, and so were only on the borders of whiteness themselves at the time, or that they were deeply involved in black culture themselves — though that said, they also claimed on several occasions that they weren’t writing about black people in particular in any of their songs. Leiber said of “Riot in Cell Block #9” “It was inspired by the Gangbusters radio drama. Those voices just happened to be black. But they could have been white actors on radio, saying, “Pass the dynamite, because the fuse is lit.”” [Excerpt: The Robins, “Riot in Cell Block #9”] That may be the case as well — their intent may not have been to write about specifically black experiences at all. And certainly, the Coasters’ biggest hits seem to me to be less about black culture, and more about generic teenage concerns. But still, it’s very obvious that a large number of people did interpret the Coasters’ songs as being about black experiences specifically — and about a specific type of black experience. Otis said of Leiber and Stoller, “They weren’t racist in the true sense of the word, but they dwelled entirely on a sort of street society. It’s a very fine point — sure, the artist who performed and created these things, that’s where he was. He wasn’t a family person going to a gig, he was in the alleys, he was out there in the street trying to make it with his guitar. But while it might be a true reflection of life, it’s not invariably a typical reflection of the typical life in the black community”. The thing is, as well, a lot of this isn’t in the songwriting, but in the performance — and that performance was clearly directed by Leiber. I think it makes a difference, as well, that the Coasters had two different audiences — they had an R&B audience, who were mostly older black people, and they had a white teenage audience. Different audiences preferred different songs, and again, there’s a difference between black performers singing for a black audience and singing for a white one. I don’t have any easy answers on this one. I don’t think that whether something is racist or not is a clear binary, and I’m not the right person to judge whether the Coasters’ music crosses any lines. But I thought it was important that I at least mention that there is a debate to be had there, and not just leave the subject alone as being too difficult. The song Johnny Otis singled out in the interview was “Charlie Brown”, which most people refer to as the follow-up to “Yakety Yak”. In fact, after “Yakety Yak” came a blues song called “The Shadow Knows”, based on the radio mystery series that starred Orson Welles. While Leiber and Stoller often talked about the inspiration that radio plays gave them for their songs for the group, that didn’t translate to chart success — several online discographies even fail to mention the existence of “The Shadow Knows”. It’s a more adult record than “Yakety Yak”, and seems to have been completely ignored by the Coasters’ white teenage audience — and in Leiber and Stoller’s autobiography, they skip over it completely, and talk about “Charlie Brown” as being immediately after “Yakety Yak”. “Charlie Brown” took significantly longer to come up with than the ten minutes that “Yakety Yak” had taken — while Stoller came up with some appropriate music almost straight away, it took Leiber weeks of agonising before he hit on the title “Charlie Brown”, and came up with the basic idea for the lyric — which, again, Stoller helped with. It’s clear, listening to it, that they were trying very deliberately to replicate the sound of “Yakety Yak”: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Charlie Brown”] “Charlie Brown” was almost as big a hit as “Yakety Yak”, reaching number two on the pop charts, so of course they followed it with a third song along the same lines, “Along Came Jones”. This time, the song was making fun of the plethora of Western TV series: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Along Came Jones”] While that’s a fun record, it “only” reached number nine in the pop charts – still a big success, but nowhere near as big as “Charlie Brown” or “Yakety Yak”. Possibly “Along Came Jones” did less well than it otherwise would have because The Olympics had had a recent hit with a similar record, “Western Movies”: [Excerpt: The Olympics, “Western Movies”] Either way, the public seemed to tire of the unison-vocals-and-honking-sax formula — while the next single was meant to be a song called “I’m a Hog For You Baby” which was another iteration of the same formula (although with a more bluesy feel, and a distinctly more adult tone to the lyrics) listeners instead picked up on the B-side, which became their biggest hit among black audiences, becoming their fourth and final R&B number one, as well as their last top ten pop hit. This one was a song called “Poison Ivy”, and it’s frankly amazing that it was even released, given that it’s blatantly about sexually transmitted diseases — the song is about a woman called “Poison Ivy”, and it talks about mumps, measles, chicken pox and more, before saying that “Poison Ivy will make you itch” and “you can look but you’d better not touch”. It’s hardly subtle: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Poison Ivy”] Shortly after that, Adolph Jacobs left the group. While he’d always been an official member, it had always seemed somewhat strange that the group had one non-singing instrumental member — and that that member wasn’t even a particularly prominent instrumentalist on the records, with Mike Stoller’s piano and King Curtis’ saxophone being more important to the sound of the records. “Poison Ivy” would be the group’s last top ten hit, and it seemed to signal Leiber and Stoller getting bored with writing songs aimed at an audience of teenagers. From that point on, most of the group’s songs would be in the older style that they’d used with the Robins — songs making social comments, and talking about adult topics. The next single, “What About Us?”, which was a protest song about how rich (and by implication) white people had an easy life while the singers didn’t have anything, “only” reached number seventeen, and there seems to have been a sort of desperate flailing about to try new styles. They released a single of the old standard “Besame Mucho”, which extended over two sides — the second side mostly being a King Curtis saxophone solo. That only went to number seventy. Then they released the first single written by a member of the group — “Wake Me, Shake Me”, which was written by Billy Guy. That was backed by the old folk song “Stewball”, and didn’t do much better, reaching number fifty-one on the charts. The song after that was an attempt at yet another style, and that did even worse in the charts, but it’s now considered one of the Coasters’ great classics. “Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)” was a comedy blues song written by a singer called Kent Harris and performed by him under the name Boogaloo and His Solid Crew, and it seems to have been modelled both on the early Robins songs that Leiber and Stoller had written, and on Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down”: [Excerpt: Boogaloo and His Solid Crew: “Clothes Line (Wrap it Up)”] Leiber and Stoller told various different stories over the years about how the Coasters came to record what they titled “Shopping For Clothes”, but the one they seem to have settled on was that Billy Guy vaguely remembered hearing the original record, and knew about half the lyrics, and they’d reconstructed the song from what he remembered. They’d been unable to find out who had written it, so had just credited it to “Elmo Glick”, a pseudonym they sometimes used. The new version of the song was reworked significantly, and in particular it became a dialogue, with Billy Guy playing the shopper and Dub Jones playing the sales assistant: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Shopping For Clothes”] The record only reached number eighty-three on the charts, and of course Kent Harris sued and was awarded joint writing credit with Leiber and Stoller. While it didn’t chart, it is usually regarded as one of the Coasters’ very best records. It’s also notable for being the first Coasters record to feature a young session musician that Leiber and Stoller were mentoring at the time. Lester Sill, who had been Leiber and Stoller’s mentor in their early years, had partnered with them in several business ventures, and was currently the Coasters’ manager, phoned them up out of the blue one day, and told them about a kid he knew who’d had a big hit with a song called “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, which he’d written for his group the Teddy Bears: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is To Love Him”] That record had been released on Trey Records, a new label that Sill had set up with another producer, Lee Hazlewood. Sill said that the kid in question was a huge admirer of Leiber and Stoller, and wanted to learn from them. Would they give him some kind of job with them, so he could be like an apprentice? So, as a favour to Sill, and even though they found they disliked the kid once he got to New York, they signed him to a publishing contract, gave him jobs as a session guitarist, and even let him sleep in their office or in Leiber’s spare room for a while. We’ll be hearing more about how their collaboration with Phil Spector worked out in future episodes. Around the time that “Shopping For Clothes” came out, the group became conscious that their time as a pop chart act with a teenage fanbase was probably close to its end, and they decided to do something that Carl Gardner had wanted to do for a while, and try to transition into the adult white market — the kind of people who were buying records by Tony Bennett or Andy Williams. Gardner had wanted, from the start, to be a big band singer, and his friend Johnny Otis had always encouraged him to try to sing the material he really loved, rather than the stuff he was doing with the Coasters. So eventually it was agreed that the group would do their first proper album — something recorded with the intention of being an LP, rather than a collection of singles shoved together. This record was to be titled “One By One”, and would have the group backed by an orchestra, singing old standards. Each song would have a single lead vocalist, with the others relegated to backing vocal parts. Gardner took lead on four songs, and seems to have believed that this would be his big chance to transition into being a solo singer, but it didn’t work out like that. The album wasn’t a particular success, either commercially or critically, but to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they mostly commented on how good Cornell Gunter sounded. Gunter had always been relegated to backing roles in the group — he was an excellent singer, and a very strong physical comedian, but his sweeter voice didn’t really suit being lead on the material that made the group famous. Gunter had always admired the singer Dinah Washington, and he used to do imitations of her in the group’s shows. Getting the chance to take a solo lead on three songs, he shone with his imitation of her style: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Easy Living”] For comparison, this is Washington’s version of the same song: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Easy Living”] Despite the record showing what strong vocalists the group were, it did nothing, and by this time the group’s commercial fortunes seemed to be in terminal decline. Looking at their releases around this period, it’s noticeable as well that the Coasters stop being produced exclusively by Leiber and Stoller — several of their recordings are credited instead to Sill and Hazlewood as producers. There could be several explanations for this — it could be that Leiber and Stoller were bored of working with the Coasters, or it could be that they thought that getting in another production team might give the group a boost — after all, Sill and Hazlewood had recently had a few hits of their own, producing records like “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”] But nothing they produced for the group had any great commercial success either. The group’s last top thirty hit was another Leiber and Stoller song — one that once again shows the more adult turn their writing for the group had taken: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Little Egypt”] “Little Egypt” was originally the stage name for three different belly-dancers, two of whom performed in Chicago in the mid-1890s and introduced the belly dance to the American public, and another who performed in New York a few years later and was the subject of a scandal when a party she was performing at was raided and it was discovered she planned to perform nude. These dancers had been so notorious that as late as the early 1950s — nearly sixty years after their careers — there was a highly fictionalised film supposedly based on the life of one of them. Whether Leiber and Stoller were inspired by the film, or just by the many exotic dancers who continued using variations of the name, their song about a stripper would be the last time the Coasters would have a significant hit. Shortly after its release, Cornell Gunter decided to leave the group and take up an opportunity to sing in Dinah Washington’s backing group. He was replaced by Earl “Speedo” Carroll, who had previously sung with a group called the Cadillacs, whose big hit was “Speedoo”: [Excerpt: The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] Carroll, according to Leiber and Stoller, was so concerned about job security that he kept his day job as a school janitor after joining the Coasters. Unfortunately, Gunter was soon sacked by Dinah Washington, and he decided to form his own group, and to call it the Coasters. A more accurate name might have been the Penguins, since the other three members of his new group had been members of the Penguins previously — Gunter had come out of the same stew of vocal groups as the Penguins had, and had known them for years. Gunter’s group weren’t allowed to record as the Coasters, so they made records just under Gunter’s own name, or as “Cornell Gunter and the Cornells”: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “In a Dream of Love”] But while he couldn’t make records as the Coasters, his group could tour under that name — and they were cheaper than the other group. Gunter was friends with Dick Clark, and so Clark started to book Gunter’s version of the group, rather than the version that was in the studio. Not that the group in the studio was exactly the same as the group you’d see live, even if you did go and see the main group. Billy Guy decided he wanted to try a solo career, but unlike Gunter he didn’t quit the group. Instead, he had a replacement go out on the road for him, but still sang with them in the studio. None of Guy’s solo records did particularly well, and several of them ended up getting reissued under the Coasters name, even though no other Coasters were involved: [Excerpt: Billy Guy, “It Doesn’t Take Much”] The band membership kept changing, and the hits stopped altogether. Over the next few decades, pretty much everyone who’d been involved with the Coasters started up their own rival version of the group. Carl Gardner apparently retained the legal rights to the name “the Coasters”, and would sue people using it without his permission, but that didn’t stop other members performing under names like “Cornel Gunter’s Coasters”, which isn’t precisely the same. Sadly, several people associated with the Coasters ended up dying violently. King Curtis was stabbed to death in the street in 1971, outside his apartment building. Two people were making a drug deal outside his door, and he asked them to move, as he was trying to carry a heavy air-conditioning unit in. They refused, a fight broke out, and he ended up dead, aged only thirty-seven. One of Cornell Gunter’s Coasters was murdered by Gunter’s manager in 1980, after threatening to expose some of the manager’s criminal activities. And finally Gunter himself was shot dead in 1990, and his killer has never been found. These days there are three separate Coasters groups touring. “Cornell Gunter’s Coasters” is a continuation of the group that Gunter led before his death. “The Coasters” is managed by Carl Gardner’s widow. And Leon Hughes, who is the only surviving original member of the Coasters but was gone by the time of “Yakety Yak”, tours as “Leon Hughes and His Coasters”. The Coasters are now all gone, other than Hughes, but their records are still remembered. They created a sound that influenced many, many, other groups, but has never been replicated by anyone. They were often dismissed as just a comedy group, but as anyone who has ever tried it knows, making music that is both funny and musically worthwhile is one of the hardest things you can do. And making comedy music that’s still enjoyable more than sixty years later? No-one else in rock and roll has ever done that.

Kross ID By Taao Kross | Chapter 009 Kross ID podcast semanal dirigido, mezclado y presentado por Taao Kross en emisión nacional para la emisora HIT FM en España. 60 minutos de los auténticos sonidos que caracterizan al artista, mashup, remixes, y bootleg originales basados en el mainstream con pinceladas de sonidos provenientes del Big Room, Tech House, Progressive y cualquiera de las variantes de la electrónica. Un radioshow entretenido cargado de secciones imparables como los 3 by taao, el clasicazo o el mashup de la semana... te harán conocer de mejor manera lo que TAAO KROSS hace por medio planeta en sus shows y cual es su ADN musical. TRACKLIST 009 1. Zonderling feat. Josh Cumbee & Damon Sharpe - Lifetime (VIP Mix) 2. Baian (Jack Back Club Remix) 3. Keanu Silva & Mo Falk - You Got The Love (Extended Mix) 4. Syn Cole - Cool With That 5. BTS - New World Sound 6. Fisher Vs Missy Elliott - Im Really Losing It Luke DB Mash Up Mix 7. Ummet Ozcan - I Don't Care (feat. Robin Valo) 8. Arty feat Cimo Frankel - Daydreams 9. Mike Williams - Day Or Night (Extended Mix) 10. DubVision - Young Money 11. DJ Kuba, Neitan, David Puentez - Bad Habit (Extended Mix) 12. Dr Dre Snoop Dogg Liu vs Honey Badger - The Next Episode vs Manneken Peace (WeDamnz Mashup) 13. What About Us vs. Dreamer (Mike Williams Mashup) 14. Mesto vs. OneRepublic,Timbaland - Apologie vs. Give Me Love (MAT Mashup) 15. Oliver Heldens vs. Sonny Fodera & Biscits - Gecko vs. Insane (Oliver Heldens Mashup) 16. Mark Deluxe - LET IT GO 17. Abel Ramos & Oscar Madrid - Feel It 18. Kideko - What is it TAAO KROSS: A BLOW OF FRESH AIR! Taao Kross is a Dj and Spanish producer with greater international projection. His long career has led him to perform in 2018 before more than 1,000,000 people in a total of 17 different countries with more than 70 shows in 4 of the 5 continents. To these numbers we must add a total of 19 performances at his summer residence in Pacha Ibiza with big heads such as Calvin Harris, Alesso or David Guetta on 15 times in the prestigious party F ??? ME! I'M FAMOUS. His spectacular staging and a breakthrough direct makes his show a brutal show that has been presented in recent months by the UK, Brazil, Qatar, France, Italy, Switzerland, Malta, China, Greece, Holland or Hungary among other countries. Included in the Lineups of some of the best festivals in Europe such as Balaton Sound or Summer Park in Amsterdam and for the second consecutive year has closed the prestigious and massive Tomorrowland Unite in Malta. He currently combines his shows with his studio hard work, where he is producing his new music along with world-renowned artists such as Chris Willis, with whom he has prepared a track that, together with the rest, will be released in 2019 by a renowned record company. Social Networks: Facebook www.facebook.com/TaaoKross Twitter www.facebook.com/taaokross Instagram www.instagram.com/taaokross Soundcloud @taao-kross Spotify open.spotify.com/artist/0Al4ayMbqJHdmKp7DzDLjI

We spend so much time as mothers worrying, planning, and implementing techniques to get our babies to sleep...but WHAT ABOUT US?! We need sleep too! And as I am experiencing sleep deprivation myself I am sharing with you my tools on how I plan on moving forward to help get some more rest.  Don't forget to share with a tired mama who could benefit from this epsiode!  https://www.instagram.com/theashcarroll www.theashcarroll.com

This episode is about how we feel on reparation. Should we get them or not? We touch on other cultures in America and how they were paid reparation. WHAT ABOUT US!!!!!! So TUNE IN --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/Mac_N_Julio/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/Mac_N_Julio/support

Are all experiences a part of your perfect journey unfolding? This week using an example from the writing of Pink's song "What About Us," Cassie and Ginny discuss essential elements to any manifesting journey unfolding. Listen to learn how to deepen your manifesting practice by connecting the dots and feeling the power of each step to your desire. 

My new track (125bpm) with a sample from Jodeci's "What About Us" (1993) , readapted by Pi'erre Bourne and Playboi Carti in 2018 with the song "R.I.P." . Download it for free (.wav format). Master by Jazz E cut , jazzecut@hotmail.com Instagram : @simkid_ldn Twitter : @Simkidldn

The "What About Us" is a podcast that will discuss the way state policies impact rural residents in Tennessee. Interviews, discussions and personal stories with factual information will cover topics such as health care, education, small business and employment.Support the show (https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/362855.rss)

"Episode 6: What About Us?" - MusiqTruth tackles the idea of competing oppressions and visits the words of Audre Lorde, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Martin Niemoller to discuss competition for pain, empathy, intersectionality within the Black community and the shared benefits enjoyed when we address indirect issues among us all.

Heard Lil' Duval's new song and it was on. we start off with a Brandy song called "What About Us". It's a remix I've always loved.  We end with "Pull Up" by Lil' Duval:-) Its just a fun Friday is here mix. Enjoy,  Dj Shizz

Welcome to the What About Us! Podcast Married couple Joi and L sit down to discuss any and everything from their relationship to what is happening in the world. Join in on the laughs and the conversation. Please send any questions or comments to whataboutuspodcast@gmail.com and make sure to visit our IG page @whataboutus_pod

Introduction to Episode 086 The Podcast that elevates the Black Entrepreneur Experience globally. Tall women desires stylish, specially designed and modern clothing and Nicaise Ndoh, is the Founder of "What About Us" a Paris based apparel clothing line for tall women. Your host, Dr. Frances Richards a technology savvy senior having engaging conversations with experts, entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers.   Quotables “Thinking about the business and how to make it better.” “I was not experienced in fashion, I took a course.”   Recommended Resources   Website: https://wauapparel.com/  

001Welcome to Episode One of the Love & Light Podcast! Thanks for joining us (Mary and Peggy) as we introduce ourselves and the format for this show. The outline we will follow includes a PMS segment (what does PMS stand for in your world?), what we are loving, stuff we’re thinking about, songs we love and what we are celebrating. Our songs for this week are “What About Us” by Pink, and “Hammer and a Nail” by Indigo Girls. Don’t be a honyocker, and tune in next time! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey Guys, Sorry so long between episodes! Things have been busy! :) I've had a lot of guys asking to post my sets from The Chapel @ The Abbey so I tried to bring you the energy we spin there on Saturdays and Sunday Funday! But you guys already know the energy I bring to the dancefloor. :) Hope you like and as always, Thanks for listening! See ya on the danceflorr!! ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Coping – Toni Braxton 2. Cold – Ralphi Rosario ft Donna Blakely 3. Greedy – Ariana Grande 4. Stay – Zedd ft Alessia Cara 5. Wolves – Marshmello x Selena Gomez 6. Jump 2k18 – Madonna 7. Havana – Camila Cabello 8. Came Here For Love – Sigala ft Ella Eyre 9. What About Us – Pink 10. Children – Esteban Lopez & Pedro Pons 11. TamborZao - F Marx, Mauro Mozart & Ennry Senna 12. Shake It 2k17 – Lee Cabrera 13. It’s Not Right 2K18 – Whitney Houston 14. Pose – Rihanna 15. This Is Me – Keala Settles

It’s been a beat since my last podcast – I headed back to a full-time job this past fall and most of my free time has been focused on production work and live gigs, so I’ve let my podcast output suffer a bit. But I’m excited to start 2018 off right with a new high-energy installment of my #PugLife series. I decided to bookend this podcast with P!nk, because, well, I’m obsessed. The opener is a mashup I made and have been using in my recent live sets of Block & Crown and Luca Debonaire’s new track (two of my favorite producers right now!), “Discoteca,” with “What About Us”... and the I close the Podcast with my new remix of “Beautiful Trauma.” (head to my Soundcloud for a free download!) https://soundcloud.com/djblacklow/pnk-beautiful-trauma-dj-blacklow-remix I’m already at work on “House Is a Feeling (Vol. 4)” and “Tech-nically Speaking (Vol. 3)”… so look for those soon! Here’s where you can catch up with me over the next couple of months: Jan. 29th - Private event, West Hollywood Feb 10 - Verotica Indulge, Seattle Feb 17 - COMMODORE, Hollywood March 15-18 – ELEVATION: Mammoth Gay Ski Week The Tracklist: 1) What About Discoteca (DJ Blacklow Edit) - Block & Crown, Luca Debonaire vs. P!nk 2) Get Up, Get Down, Get Funky, Get Loose feat. Kriis (Marco Santoro Remix) - Lexa Hill 3) Freed From Desire. - Leandro Da Silva, Jude & Frank 4) Addicted To My Music (Isak Salazar Reconstruction Mix) - Phunkjump Vs Eric Laville Ft. Miss Flava 5) Dreams of Good Love (DJ Blacklow Edit) - Junior Senna vs. Inner City 6) Don't Call Me Baby (Original Mix) - Nikki, GSP, Erez Ben Ishay 7) Havana (Sagi Kariv Remix) - Camila Cabello 8) One Night Stand (Guy Scheiman Remix) – Division 4 9) Ain't No Mountain High Enough (Joe Gauthreaux & Leanh Remix) – Diana Ross 10) Missing You (Original Mix) - Antoine Clamaran, Nacho Chapado 11) Fusion (Hoxton Whores Remix) - Hoxton Whores, Krysten Cummings 12) Love So Soft Without Music (DJ Blacklow Edit) - Kelly Clarkson vs. Micky Friedmann & Sagi Kariv Ft. Michael G. 13) There Is Only One World Behind (Mauro Mozart) - Lula & Alan T vs. Deborah Cox 14) Blame (Alex Acosta Remix) - Skylar Stecker 15) This Is Me (The Constellasians Anthem Remix) - Kesha 16) Beautiful Trauma (DJ Blacklow Remix) – P!nk Bookings: Michael Benedetti — michael@executiveprandtalent.com, Mark Warner — mark@executiveprandtalent.com Twitter / Instagram: @DJBlacklow | www.facebook.com/DJBlacklow | www.soundcloud.com/DJBlacklow | www.mixcloud.com/DJBlacklow | www.hearthis.at/DJBlacklow

The first episode of #JCsMusicology focuses on the career of Michael Jackson between 1988 and 1993. Using archival interviews and never before heard music, the podcast explores the concept of “Decade”, to its eventual blockbuster album, “Dangerous” and takes a peek into some early sessions for “HIStory: Past, Present & Future Book I”. https://www.facebook.com/JohnCameronProductions https://twitter.com/Cameron_John

The second installment in the essential P!nk collection contains a mixture of tracks from her early career to current releases. Remixes come from Division4, Barry Harris, Funk3d & Tracy Young to name a few. Enjoy Anthony 1/ "GET THIS PARTY STARTED" (Division4 Club Mix) 2/ "JUST LIKE A PILL" (Thunderpuss Club Mix) 3/ "FUCKIN' PERFECT" (Funk3d Club Mix) 4/ "HEARTBREAK DOWN" (Funk3d Remix) 5/ "SLUT LIKE YOU" (Tyler Nelson Vocal Club Mix) 6/ "SO WHAT" (Brutal Bill Unreleased Club Mix) 7/ "BLOW ME" (ONE LAST KISS) (Bit Error Big Room Club Mix) 8/ "SOBER" (Alex Dubbing Revolution Club Mix) 9/ "DON'T LET ME GET ME" (Tracy Young Juicy Horn Club Mix) 10/ "WHO KNEW" (Eddie Baez Unreleased Club Mix) 11/ "JUST GIVE ME A REASON" (Liam Keegan Club Mix) ft. Nate Ruess 12/ "TRY" (Cosmic Dawn Club Mix) 13/ "WHAT ABOUT US" (Barry Harris Club Mix)

THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN! Masterbeat’s legendary New Year’s celebration returns to Los Angeles with 5 massive events to help you ring in 2018! This special promo podcast will help you get ready for the big night, with over an hour of uplifting house and circuit tracks – including my remix with Toy Armada of P!nk’s “What About Us.” Join me and DJ Alex Acosta on Sunday, December 31st for Kingdom 2018: New Year’s Eve at The Mayan! Tickets now on sale: www.masterbeat.com #Masterbeat #NewYearsEve2018 #WhatAboutUs - - - - - November 2017 Mix | Masterbeat New Year’s Los Angeles Official Promo Podcast 1. Give It Up (Original Mix) – Jack Wins 2. I Miss You (Cahill Remix) – Clean Bandit feat. Julia Michaels 3. Think Before I Talk (Cahill Club Mix) – Astrid S 4. Can't Get Enough (Leandro Da Silva Remix) – Chris Montana & Vinylsurfer feat. Alexandra Prince 5. Reach Out to Me (Mike Newman & Antoine Cortez Remix) – ATFC, Inaya Day 6. Meet in the Middle (StoneBridge Extended Mix) – StoneBridge feat. Haley Joelle 7. So Many Time (Antoine Clamaran 2k17 Remix) – Gadjo 8. Instruction (Leo Blanco Remix) – Jax Jones, Demi Lovato, Stefflon Dion 9. Believe 2017 (Federico Scavo Remix) – Stefano Sorge feat. Miss Helen 10. Love in Ruins (Danny Verde Club Mix) – Gryffin feat. Sinead Harnett 11. Cola (Josh Hunter Remix) – CamelPhat & Elderbrook 12. Used to Have it All (André Grossi Bootleg) – Fais & Afrojack, James Anthony, Tommy Love 13. Move Your Body (Edson Pride & André Grossi Reconstruction Mix) – Sia 14. What About Us (Toy Armada & DJ GRIND Club Mix) – P!nk 15. Growing Wings (Offer Nissim Remix) – Lara Fabian 16. All We Need is Love (Jude & Frank Extended Remix) – Robbie Rivera & Ky-Mani Marley www.djgrind.net | www.facebook.com/djgrindsf | www.twitter.com/djgrind | www.instagram.com/djgrindofficial

DJ Kevin DuRard - Atlanta Pride 2017   1^EDX - Feel the Rush 2^Joe Stone - Make Love 3^Rita Ora - Your Song 4^P!nk - What About Us 5^Clean Bandit f. Zara Larsson - Symphony 6^Felon f. Halyley May - Bittersweet 7^Gemellini - Ciano 8^Fedde Le Grand - Coco's Miracle 9^Demi Lovato - Sorry Not Sorry 10^Vinyljackers f. Chris Willis - Blood In My Veins 11^Lady Gaga - The Cure 12^Fedde Le Grand - Keep on Rising 13^Offer Nissim - Ain't No Mountain 14^Deborah Cox - Let the World Be Ours Tonight 15^Luque + Thiago f. Giovanna - Back for Your Love

The October '17 edition of UP! is a luscious house journey with a combination of new, charting tracks and some classic tracks which have been given a new makeover. The set kicks off with Ultra Nate's classic "Free" made over by Sean Finn. 70's dance legend Sylvester has two of his hits covered by Lady Bee and Vizin. You will recognise them instantly when you hear them. The Cube Guys & Barbara Tucker remake their remake of Whitney's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody"& Hernando Moldonado delivers a killer mix of Kristine W's classic "Some Lovin". I played most of these tracks at the last "Rise & Shine" day recovery party at the Midnight Shift in Sydney on October 1st. A landmark venue which sadly closed its doors after this event. Enjoy Anthony 1/ "FREE" (Crazibiza Remix) - SEAN FINN ft. TERRI B. 2/ "CATCH THE LIGHT" (Division 4 Infinity Remix) - MARTHA WASH 3/ "AIN'T NO LOVE, AIN'T NO USE" (StoneBridge & Damien Hall Classic House Club Mix) - SUBESQUE ft. MELANIE WILLIAMS 4/ "ADDICTED" (Marco Rodriguez & Tony Martinez Remix) - TAITO TIKARO ft. VANESSA KLEIN 5/ "DO YOU WANNA FUNK" (Cutmore Club Mix) - LADY BEE 6/ "DO WHAT WE DO" (Division 4 & Matt Consola Club Mix) - BIT ERROR & COUNTRY CLUB MARTINI CREW ft. INAYA DAY 7/ "I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY" (The Cube Guys 100th Club Mix) - THE CUBE GUYS ft. BARBARA TUCKER 8/ "YOU MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL" (Taito Tikaro Ibiza Club Mix) - VIZIN 9/ "SOME LOVIN" (Hernando Moldonado Afterlife Club Mix) - KRISTINE W. 10/ "ST ELMO'S FIRE" (House Of Labs vs Joe Gauthreaux Vocal Club Mix) - TOY ARMADA & DJ GRIND ft. JASON WALKER 11/ "STAND BY ME" (Joe Gauthreaux Club Mix) - TOY ARMADA & DJ GRIND 12/ "WHAT ABOUT US" (Toy Armada & DJ GRIND Club Mix) - P!NK 13/ "LOVE IN RUINS" (Danny Verde Remix) - GRYFFIN ft. SINEAD HARNETT

SAY YES TO LOVE BY DJ HARRY K 1. Came Here For Love – Sigala 2. Young Hearts – Henry Fong Ft Nyla & Stylo G 3. Yeah – User 4. All Stars – Martin Solveig 5. Solo Dance – Martin Jenson 6. Perfect Places – Lorde 7. I Wanna Dance With Somebody Again – Whitney Houston 8. Same Love – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis 9. Liar – Britney Spears 10. Woman – Kesha 11. In De Ghetto – Crystal Waters 12. Shined On Spread – Praised Cats 13. Touch Me – Starley 14. There’s Nothing Holding Me Back – Shawn Mendes 15. Feel In The Name Of Love – Martin Garrix 16. Bad Up – David Guetta 17. Say My Name – Destiny Child Vs Florence 18. Love So Soft – Kelly Clarkson 19. What About Us – Pink 20. Dusk Till Dawn – Zayn Ft Sia 21. Good Old Days – Macklemore Ft Kesha 22. Ready For It? – Taylor Swift 23. Titanium – Sia COMPILED & MIXED BY HARRY K [OCT 2017]

La portada de GH 151 es para el DJ de Noruega KYGO con observando las estrellas STARGAZING una balada electrónica que se ubica en el top 15 de las canciones más sonadas a nivel mundial según Itunes, Amazon Music y Spotify. 9 semanas después de su lanzamiento ROBARTE UN BESO de SEBASTIAN YATRA Y CARLOS VIVES se acerca a los 200 millones de reproducciones en VEVO.FEEL IT STILL Del octavo Album de PORTUGAL THE MAN WOODSTOCK. FEEL IT STILL se está convirtiendo en un hit grande del género rock alternativo en USA y Rusia donde lleva varias semanas en el # 1.La joven cantante de USA BECKY G y el rapero de puerto rico Bad Buny llegan a 300 millones en VEVO y avanza en las listas de américa latina con su pegajosa melodía MAYORES.TOO GOOD AT GOODBYES, soy muy bueno para las despedidas, permanece por tercera semana consecutiva en el # 1 de Official charts en la Gran Bretaña. PROBABLEMENTE del español DAVID BISBAL y el mexicano CHRISTIAN NODAL es la canción más radio-trasmitida en toda la república mexicana esta semana en el conteo de ML.POST MALONE es el nombre del momento en el ambiente del HIP HOP con ROCK STAR y llega directamente al # 2 del Hot 100 de BB en USA. MI GENTE del DJ Francés WILLY WILLIAM y el colombiano J BALVIN. Es una de las 10 más escuchadas en Rusia, Líbano, Francia, Noruega, Bélgica, Brasil; Dinamarca, Finlandia, Suecia, Suiza, Eslovaquia y Alemania. Ha sido # 1 en Italia y España. Monitor Latino esta semana le da # 3 en Argentina, 2 en USA y Ecuador y Colombia # 1 en México, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay y R. Dominicana. Sigue en alza WHAT ABOUT US la canción que varios críticos consideran un himno con tinte político, con la siempre sorpresiva y original compositora estadounidense PINK.El encuentro ocasional de WISIN Y YANDEL enciende las expectativas de sus millones de seguidores en América Latina por un regreso permanente del popular dúo; En el mercado hispano de USA llegan al # 1 de ML.En Octubre de 2017 la BANDA MS hace olas con EL COLOR DE TUS OJOS una balada muy sentida, interpretada por el vocalista ALAN RAMIREZ sencillo del Álbum LA MEJOR VERSION DE MI; Es el nuevo # 2 de Monitor Latino en México. El inglés ZAYN Y la australiana SIA crean una balada poderosa que llega al tope del mundo: DUST TILL DAWN desde el anochecer hasta el amanecer, referenciada por la revista Forbes como fuerte e candidata al premio Grammy como mejor dúo pop. Con 4 semanas en el mercado oscila entre el número 3 y el número uno mundial en todas las plataformas de audio, llega al # 5 de Inglaterra, Portugal y Canadá, es top 10 en 17 países de Europa, Asia y África: En Grecia ya es # 1; Esta semana el Top de Global HitsGracias. platavoice@gmail.com

In this week's headlines: • The Trump administration throws it's support to an anti-gay baker from Colorado at the US Supreme Court • A new study in the UK shows gay folks are still afraid to hold hands in public • A new computer algorithm can determine sexuality by scanning a photo - not a good thing • Ellen DeGeneres admits she was told to tone down the gay talk in the early years of her talk show • Trans actress Laverne Cox books another network series • Out recording artist Jeb Havens covers Pink's "What About Us" All that and more in this episode of The Randy Report!

This month's edition of UP! starts with a more progressive house feel with tracks from Ally Ryan, DJ Khaled and Joe Gauthreaux & DJ Grind. The set moves into more vocal house territory with Katy Perry's track "Swish Swish" and Taylor Swift's "Look What U Made Me Do". Esteban Lopez does a killer cover of Anastacia's classic "Left Outside Alone" ft. Alicia Nilsson & the Barry Harris remix of P!nk's "What About Us" and Russ Rich's Remix of Kesha's "Praying" are standout tracks on the September '17 edition of UP! Enjoy Anthony 1/ "WASTED" (JAMES HURR REMIX) - ALLY RYAN 2/ "WILD THOUGHTS" (Mike Cruz Club Remix) - DJ KHALED ft. RIHANNA & BRYSON TILLER 3/ "KEEP THE HANDS CLAPPING" (Vocal Club Mix) - JOE GAUTHREAUX & DJ GRIND ft. SANDY B. 4/ "SWISH SWISH" (Barry Harris Anthem Club Mix) - KATY PERRY 5/ "IF FEELS GOOD" (Slipstream Club Mix) - TRES GRAND ft. VELMA DANDZO 6/ "GIVE ME YOUR LOVE" (Original Club Mix) - SIGALA ft. JOHN NEWMAN 7/ "LEFT OUTSIDE ALONE" (Original Club Mix) - ESTEBAN LOPEZ ft. ALICIA NILSSON 8/ "LOOK WHAT U MADE ME DO" (Felipe Angel Remix) - TAYLOR SWIFT 9/ "CUT TO THE FEELING" (Toy Armada & DJ GRIND Anthem Club Mix) - CARLY RAE JEPSEN 10/ "GREEN LIGHT" (Original Club Mix) - KLUBB-X 11/ "WHAT ABOUT US" (Barry Harris Remix) - P!NK 12/ "PRAYING" (Russ Rich Remix) - KESHA 13/ "HUDSON RIVER" (Rich B. & Phil Marriott Club Mix) - K SYRAN

La portada de Global Hits 145 es para la cantante, compositora y productora musical estadunidense PINK con su nuevo impacto mundial WHAT ABOUT US.J BALVIN hace historia al destronar a despacito del # 1 mundial de Spotify y Shazam, y pega MI GENTE Europa, América y África.El DJ. AVICII despega como top 5 mundial en plataformas de audio con WITHOUT YOU con la voz del cantante de Suecia SANDRO CAVAZZA.CHRISTIAN NODAL, un joven de 18 años original de Cabo San Lucas México es la nueva sensación al fusionar el género regional mexicano con mariachi. Lugo de once semanas en el primer lugar El DJ ingles CALVIN HARRIS le quita el reinado a Despacito en la Gran Bretaña con FEELS.CIERRA LAS VENTANAS es la canción más escuchada y más vendida en Venezuela esta semana.Surge NO VACANCY como nuevo éxito del grupo estadounidense multiplatino nominado a los Grammy ONE REPUBLIC y el Colombiano SEBASTIAN YATRA.La versión salsa de FELICES LOS 4 se corona como la segunda canción más escuchada en américa latina esta semana.VERSACE ON THE FLOOR de BRUNO MARS con DAVID GUETTA es el tercer éxito del LP 24K. GABRIEL un joven talento dominicano egresado de la escuela de música Berkeley de Boston triunfa en su país con una fusión de lo urbano y la música tropical.“Una Amante no tiene un hogar ni será amada por un hombre que no va a ser fiel” eso dice MARILIA MENDONCA en AMANTE NAO TEM LAR Top 3 de Acharts, Top 40charts y I tunes Brasil.La coautora de DESPACITO, la panameña Érica Sanders, recibe cientos de solicitudes de artistas que quieren grabar ahora sus canciones. Luis Fonsi ha sido nombrado Embajador Turístico de Puerto Rico, Despacito empata la marca como # 1 en USA impuesta en 1996 por Macarena; Aumenta la marca mundial en YouTube a 3.300 millones de visualizaciones; ha sido # 1 en 60 naciones; está certificada con 100 discos de platino; y continua como Top de Global Hits.Gracias.platavoice@gmail.com

This week on This is for the Birds, we listen to Pink, "What About Us?", and we've got a big news about the podcast! Louis C.K. is directing a new movie, Eric talks about Russ' mom, Seth Meyers is remaking The Munsters, dudes at the gym, Tom Cruise injures himself on set and what that vagina do. Enjoy!

Daddy English continues the authentic Reggae vibe with brand new music from the Big Ship Captain Freddie Mcgregor with the song called What About Us. The Benevolent selector also features new music from Stephanie, Randy Valentine and many more. @ReggaeInTheCityPodcast @DaddyEnglishBi

Jamie Catto co-produced and directed the double Grammy nominated film ‘1 Giant Leap' which encountered high profile writers, thinkers, spiritual gurus and entertainers including Bob Geldof, Robbie Williams, Steven Fry, Susan Sarandon, Deepak Chopra, Michael Stipe, Brian Eno, and Dennis Hopper. Having sold over 300,000 albums, and won numerous awards globally. '1 Giant Leap' was subsequently commissioned and made into a Channel 4 documentary series in 2008 to explore the complexities of human nature through music. As founder member, singer, art director and video director of Dance Music super-group Faithless, Jamie has been part of continued run-away successes in music since the Faithless greatest hits album became the fastest selling dance album of all time in 2005. Jamie now holds creative master classes throughout the year to help others emulate his own success. ‘Transforming Shadows', ‘What About You?' and ‘What About Us' are workshops which provide a highly accessible concoction of light humour and love, designed with the use of his own genius music to spark both professional and personal breakthroughs. Jamie also speaks and performs at conferences, events and festivals all around the world.

Coole Dance-Rhythmen an der Spitze der UK-Charts! "What About Us" sorgt für ein richtiges Partyfeeling. Hör jetzt die aktuellen UK-Charts in 60 Sekunden!

Russell Simmons "Baby Phat" Mondays@Lotus 14th St. NYC 1.The Light (Toolappella) by: Jamie Lewis & Michelle Weeks 2.Do You Remember House (feat Palmer Brown) by: Blaze 3.Take Me In Your Arms Tonight by: Teddy Pendergrass ft. Stephanie Mills 4.All I Do (Club Mix) by: Cleptomaniacs ft. Bryan Chambers 5.Do You Love What You Feel by: Foreal People 6.Streetlife (Vocal Club Mix) by: Class A 7.White Label Promo by: Unknown 8.Backfired ft. La India (Joey Negro club mix) by:M.A.W. 9.WHAT ABOUT US by: Brandy 10.It Just Won't Do by: Tim Deluxe 11.Lazy (Feat David Byrne) by: X-press 2 12.Where Love Lives by: Alison Limerick

Add some sparkle to your life! Song listing: Alex Roque & Marcelo Vak feat. Leon Cormack - Finally I Inner Life - Ain't No Mountain High Enough Christina Aguilera - Your Body Leona Lewis - Trouble Prok & Fitch - Symphony Monster Taxi, BeShine - Cluck Old Hen Kristine W - Everything That I Got Aleps Drums - Shake 4 Mi Piatto, Luigi Rocca - Cosmic Girl Gina Star - I Want It Now Rihanna - Diamonds Demi Lovato - Give Your Heart A Break Tony Moran, Anastacia - If I Was Your Boyfriend Featuring Anastacia The Deepshakerz - Jack Your Booty Tom Flynn - Do You Like Bass? Stereo Missile vs Carlotta Chadwick - Freak Maroon 5 - One More Night Uto Karem - Taking Me Trent Cantrelle - Ride Richard Grey, The Cube Guys - Don't You Want Me Chris Lake & Marco Lys vs Copyright feat. Tasita D'Mour - La Tromba Risin' Zoe Badwi - Shoot Me Down Adele - Skyfall Squicciarini - Street Funk Player Trent Cantrelle - Prowler Sander Gravell & Alex Branch - Saxo Station Solara feat. Andrea Brown - Trippin' Whitney Houston - Emotional Kwanza Jones - Supercharged Danity Kane - Damaged The Saturdays - What About Us Kelly Clarkson - Catch My Breath Happy Listening,

Jason Barnard speaks to the author of “What About Us?”, Bruce Welsh, an excellent new rocklopedia of Britain's other recording groups 1962-1966. Bruce picks some of his favourite tracks from almost 1700 singles he researched from the essential period of British beat. Bruce Welsh and Jason Barnard  The Redcaps – Talkin Bout You (Single A-side, […] The post What About Us? appeared first on The Strange Brew.

This is a song I wrote called "What About Us". Here are the lyrics. What about us This is a song, about a girl, who doesn’t know.... That I, have written a song about her.... So hypothetically, this could be, about anyone in this room,.... If you’re a girl, and in this room..... She turned to me, an said, will you write a song about me.... So here’s your stupid song, but you’ll never know, like I never knew.... The way I felt, about your feelings.. Chorus So what about you what about me what about us What about this what about that what about trust What about love what about life What about man what about wife What about truth, what about strife What about lust What about us This is a song, about a girl Who isn’t perfect, who isn’t beautiful Who I don’t love And she campaigns for weird political parties And I think that’s really cute Which might make me a sexist But I don’t care Because I like her, just the way she is Chorus Bridge So what about you what about me what about us What about a family tree Of your dad and your mom and my dad and my mom And your little sister who looks just like you And my little brother who looks like me too And your older brother who don’t like me much But I think that’s cause I saw me touching you so softly On that summer day But what’s a summer day Without softly touching your soft skin Anyway Outro This is a song, about a girl And I think I’m going to tell her Here are my influences. Regina Spektor, Panic at the Disco, Neil Young, Radiohead, John Mayer, Pearl Jam, The Killers, U2,Metric, Tragically Hip, Death Cab for Cutie, Tegan and Sara, Elton John, Those guys from the movie Once, Jenny Owens Young, Lights, The Midway State, Neverending White Lights, Paramore, The Weakerthans, Wintersleep, Audioslave, Smashing Pumpkins, Sloan, Semisonic, Treble Charger, Ill Scarlett, Our Lady Peace, Raine Maida, Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Oasis, Nellie Mckay, Muse, Matt Mays, Matt Good, Kanye West, Jonathan Coulton, John Butler Trio, Jason Mraz, Jeremy Fisher, Incubus, Imogen Heep, Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls, Foo Fighters, Feist, Elliot Smith, Die Mannequin, CSNY, Counting Crows, Coldplay, The Beatles, Joni Mithell, Something Corporate, The Rocket Summer, Gavin Degraw, Billey Joel, Jack Johnson, Metro Station, Michael Jackson

Once again, I bring forth superb house music that currently moves me to better and brighter places. In this session, I try to keep a laid back and relaxed vibe (for the most part). You will experience some old school disco-funk flavors that have been updated to fit today’s sound. I begin the set with Knee Deep featuring Cathy Battistess, “All About Love” – this is simply a brilliant vocal. Later on in the set, I had to run the Lovebirds Suite Instrumental. I’m sure everyone will enjoy. Other highlights: I didn’t realize when I was mixing but I have featured a lot of tracks either produced or remixed by Knee Deep. Then there is the Motooo Project, “Give Me Love” – I’ve been trying to include this into a show for a while and here it is! Later, you'll find material from Jeremy Sylvester, who has a killer tracked titled “So Addicted” – Major! I finish up with some classics – Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams” – I always enjoy David Morales remixes. Then I progress into Kim English’s “Nite Life” – This record just sums up my life. As always, let me know what you think at djhenryhall@yahoo.com and feel free to share with your friends - http://www.djhenryhall.podomatic.com 1. Knee Deep Feat. Cathy Battistessa – All About Love (Knee Deep Vocal Mix) (www.kneedeep.de) 2. Lem – Red Light District (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/lemsounds) 3. The Freddy Turner Project Feat. The Three Kings – Spread Love (Danny Krivit Edit) (http://www.myspace.com/freddyturner1) (http://www.dannykrivit.net) (http://www.kingstreetsounds.com) 4. Physics Feat. Simone Moreno – Estrelas (Izzy Stardust Mix) (http://www.seamlessrecordings.com) 5. Vienna – Knock Me Down (Black Liquid Mix) (Shanghai Sessions) (http://www.myspace.com/shanghaisessions) 6. Kevin Bryant - Who You Wanna Be (Ananda Project Main Vocal Mix) (http://www.myspace.com/iamkevinbryant) & http://www.myspace.com/launchentinc) 7. Bopstar Feat. Zara McFarlane – Captured (Reprise) (http://www.soul-heaven.com) 8. Beta One Feat. Carlos Morgan – Pashmina Girl (Mystery & Matt Early Reprise) (http://www.betaone.ca) (http://www.brainkatrecords.com) (http://www.myspace.com/brainkatrecords) 9. Ralf Gum - Kissing Strangers Feat. Monique Bingham (DJ Le Roi Soulful Mix) (www.GOGO-Music.net) (www.RalfGUM.com) (www.myspace.com/RalfGUM) 10. Knee Deep Feat. Cathy Battistessa – All About Love (Lovebirds Suite) (www.kneedeep.de) 11. King Unique – Love is What You Need (Look Ahead) (Knee Deep Classic Club Mix) (http://www.myspace.com/kinguniqueuk) (http://www.defected.com ) (www.kneedeep.de) 12. J Nitti Feat. Shirley Davis (Andy Ward Remix) (http://www.vinylpusher.com.au) 13. Motoo Project – Give Me Love (Deep Nota Records) (http://www.myspace.com/deepnotarecords) (http://www.myspace.com/jnitti) 14. Jeremy Sylvester – So Addicted (Instrumental and Vocal Mix) (http://www.myspace.com/lovehouserecords) (http://www.myspace.com/jeremycsylvester) 15. Kaje Feat. Sacha Williamson – Butterflies (Guy Robin Main) (http://www.myspace.com/guyrobin) (http://www.myspace.com/solechannelmusic) 16. Jovonn – Elements (http://www.nextmoovrecords.com) (http://www.myspace.com/coderedrecords) 17. Kerri Chandler – What About Us (http://www.myspace.com/kerrichandler) 18. Fuldner vs. Pooley - La Mania - Pooley Main (http://www.vendetta-music.com) 19. Miq Puentes – Aye Que Lindo (Miq Puentes Summer Breeze Mix) (www.myspace.com/soulheatrecords) (www.soulheatrecords.com) 20. Knee Deep – The It (Sick Love EP) (www.kneedeep.de) 21. Jaydee – Plastic Dreams (David Morales Club Mix) (http://www.davidmorales.net) (http://www.myspace.com/randsrecords) 22. Timmy Regisford & Filsonik – Movement (Main) – Restricted Access (http://www.clubshelter.com) 23. Kim English – Nite Life (Seamus Haji Remix) (http://www.myspace.com/thekimenglish) (http://www.myspace.com/djseamushaji) (http://www.biglovemusic.co.uk)