Podcasts about world needs now

Send us a textIn this special Pride Month solo episode, Wil Fisher honors Pride by reading his Queer Manifesto essay titled, "Queer Love is the Medicine the World Needs Now," featured in the upcoming queer anthology Spirits Queer, Spirits True.Wil explores queer love as a sacred, rebellious, and deeply healing force. Through poetic reflection and bold truth-telling, he invites listeners into a space of radical inclusion, where love transcends binaries, borders, and outdated beliefs.This episode dives into:- What makes queer love so powerfully unique. - The societal barriers that get in the way of fully embodying it. - How rituals, community, and self-acceptance help us access queer love's full magic. - Why this kind of love might just be the medicine our world is craving right now.Enjoy this episode as a celebration of Pride Month in the form of a living prayer. Mentioned in this episode:

Millions of student loan borrowers in default could soon see their wages garnished under the Trump administration's policies, and Americans who entered public service fields expecting loan forgiveness could see that promise broken. CBS News' Nancy Chen explains. A new FBI report reveals cybercrime spiked last year, with older Americans losing the most money. CBS News senior business and tech correspondent Jo Ling Kent breaks down the data and trends. Investigators say they have identified human remains found near a group of murder victims on Gilgo Beach after partial remains were first discovered in 1997. Police say the remains may not be connected to Rex Heuermann, who has pleaded not guilty to killing seven women, six of whom were found near Gilgo Beach. Starting at 14 years old, Jelly Roll spent a decade in and out of jail for drug possession, dealing, shoplifting and aggravated robbery. Now, he wants to be a role model for others looking for a second chance. The Tennessee Board of Parole voted to recommend a pardon for the 40-year-old country artist. CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil takes on a hands-on mission to build a house as part of our "Never Too Late" series, exploring the value of learning new skills and reconnecting with family traditions. Award-winning chef José Andrés joins "CBS Mornings" to talk about his new book, "Change the Recipe," which shares powerful lessons from his decades in the kitchen and his mission to make the world a better place. Global Citizen ambassador Hugh Jackman and CEO Hugh Evans join "CBS Mornings" to preview next week's Global Citizen Now summit in New York, which brings together leaders and artists to drive action toward ending extreme poverty. Music legend Smokey Robinson joins "CBS Mornings" to mark 50 years since "A Quiet Storm" and talk about his new album "What the World Needs Now," featuring soulful covers and messages of gratitude. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In honor of National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, medical oncologist Dr. Andrea Cercek shares the latest advances in colon and rectal cancer research. Also, Smokey Robinson stops by to catch up and discuss the release of his new album, ‘What the World Needs Now.' Plus, the story behind a program at Clemson University that's increasing diversity in the classroom. And Bellamy Young joins to talk about teaming up with the humanitarian organization CARE for a podcast called ‘She Leads with Care.'

Get ready to feel the music as Amanda and Chris dive into the rich, powerful, and timeless world of Soul!This week, they'll be swapping songs from legendary soul artists and introducing some rising stars in the genre.From classic Motown grooves, Stax Records classics, to modern soul vibes, this episode is all about heart, emotion, and music that moves you.Swapped Songs:Whatcha See is Whatcha Get by The Dramatics Think by the Blues Brothers and Aretha FranklinDon't You Know by Durand Jones & The Indications You've Really Gotta Ahold on Me by Smokey RobinsonWhat the World Needs Now by Jackie DeshannonIf You Wanna Be Happy by Jimmy Soul

Frank Mills Heart of the City Paul Mauriat AHO Love is Blue Johnny Mathis Misty Roses Herb Alpert Girl Talk Henry Mancini Orch & Chorus  In The Arms of Love Doris Day It's Easy to Remember Manuel & the Music of the Mountains Strangers In The Night The Johnny Mann Singers Cherish Antonio Carlos Jobim The Sight of You James Last AHO Games That Lovers Play Engelbert Humperdinck The Last Waltz Don Costa AHO Society's Child The Brass Ring Amy's Theme Glen Campbell Wichita Lineman  Marty Gold Orchestra & Chorus What the World Needs Now is Love Skitch Henderson AHO The Eyes of Love Frank & Nancy Sinatra Somethin' Stupid Hugo Winterhalter AHO Summer Wind The Golden Gate Strings I Wanna Be Free Percy Faith AHO Sim The Doddletown Pipers Sweet Maria Bert Kaempfert AHO Lady Dean Fanconi Strings I Remember You The Pozo Seco Singers If I Fell Glen Campbell Gentle on My Mind Chad Mitchell She Was Too Good Too Me The New Christy Minstrels Kisses Sweeter Than Wine Vic Damone Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars Tommy Garrett's 50 Guitars Our Day Will Come Jimmy Sedlar Senza Fine Andy Williams The From 'The Sand Pebbles' George Martin Behind Closed Doors Felix Slatkin Street of Dreams Mystic Moods Orchestra Days of Wine and Roses Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 Goin' Out of My Head Jane Morgan Monday, Monday Columbia Musical Treasuries Orchestra & Chorus A Taste of honey Grady Martin Theme From Malamondo Frank Mills Heart of the City

In this episode Dr. Oord discusses an essay from Deanna Young entitled, What the World Needs Now...Amipotence.  This essay is one of many compiled in volume 2 of a 2 volume work interacting further with the ideas of amipotence in Dr. Oord's book, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence.Deanna Young will be one of approximately 30 authors participating in the upcoming ORTLINE25 Open and Relational Theology Online Conference (Feb. 20 - 22, 2025)

We welcome Core Teacher Ruth Zwald as she contributes Angels to the series What the World Needs Now.

Rockshow Episode 206 Public Image LtdPublic Image Ltd (PiL) is a post-punk band formed in 1978 by John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) after the breakup of the Sex Pistols. The group is renowned for its experimental approach, blending elements of punk, dub, dance, and avant-garde music. Lydon's provocative lyrics and distinctive vocal style have been central to the band's identity.Key Features and History:1.Formation and Early Years:•After leaving the Sex Pistols, Lydon teamed up with guitarist Keith Levene (formerly of The Clash) and bassist Jah Wobble.•Their debut album, First Issue (1978), introduced a stark departure from punk's raw simplicity, featuring a more experimental, bass-heavy sound.2.Breakthrough Album: Metal Box (1979):•Metal Box, their second album, is often hailed as a post-punk masterpiece. It featured hypnotic rhythms, dissonant guitars, and dub-inspired bass lines, with songs like “Death Disco” and “Albatross.”•The album was originally released in a metal film canister, emphasizing their avant-garde ethos.3.Lineup Changes:•PiL has gone through numerous lineup changes over the years, with Lydon being the only consistent member. Key collaborators have included Martin Atkins (drums) and later musicians like Bruce Smith and Lu Edmonds.4.Musical Evolution:•Over the decades, PiL has experimented with a wide range of styles, from danceable grooves on albums like Album (1986) to a more stripped-down rock approach on later works.•Their hit “Rise” (1986) remains one of their most accessible songs, with the refrain “Anger is an energy” becoming iconic.5.Hiatus and Reformation:•After releasing That What Is Not (1992), the band went on hiatus as Lydon pursued other projects.•PiL reformed in 2009 and released new material, including This is PiL (2012) and What the World Needs Now… (2015).6.Legacy:•PiL is credited with influencing numerous genres and artists, from post-punk to industrial and alternative rock.•Their emphasis on innovation and boundary-pushing has solidified their reputation as one of the most daring and original bands of their era.Notable Songs:“Public Image”“Death Disco”“Rise”“This is Not a Love Song”“Flowers of Romance”PiL remains a vital force in music, with Lydon continuing to challenge norms and redefine his artistic output.https://www.pilofficial.com/https://www.facebook.com/share/17tcHb1i8G/?mibextid=LQQJ4dhttps://www.instagram.com/pilofficial?igsh=MmQ0ajVibTA2N3Ixhttps://x.com/pilofficial?s=21&t=Mzw5de5zsR-SDDbhyzH0Lghttps://youtube.com/@pilofficial?si=BcHd6fXVRXQxQfrb#PublicImageLtd#PiL#JohnLydon#PostPunk#ExperimentalMusic#MetalBox#AngerIsAnEnergy#Rise#ThisIsNotALoveSong#PostPunkLegend#AvantGardeMusic#PunkRockHistory#DubInfluence#80sMusic#MusicInnovation#AlternativeMusicIconsPlease follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.comhttps://linktr.ee/RobRossiGet your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedupAnd https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup

Lead Teacher Brad Ruggles advances the series What the World Needs Now with the intriguing noun (r)Evolution.

Casi ocho años desde que iniciáramos nuestra emisión, llegamos al episodio numero 200. Más de 200 horas de música y cerca de 3000 temas compartidos con todos vosotros y vosotras. Para este episodio, titulado Crooners Románticos, he preparado una selección de vocalistas masculinos que cantan canciones de amor, algunas de desamor, ideales para escuchar en noches estrelladas, tardes lluviosas o cuando el invierno llama a la puerta. Almost eight years since we started our broadcast, we have reached episode number 200. More than 200 hours of music and nearly 3000 songs shared with all of you. For this episode, entitled Romantic Crooners, I have prepared a selection of male vocalists who sing songs of love, some of heartbreak, ideal for listening on starry nights, rainy afternoons or when winter knocks at the door. Playlist: - Ahmad Jamal - Isn't It Romantic?; - Anthony Strong - Unforgettable; - Benny Benack III - What the World Needs Now; - Sachal Vasandani - All the Way; - Mario Biondi - Dindi; - José James - Hello Like Before; - Curtis Stigers - The Way You Look Tonight; - Jamie Cullum - I Think, I Love; - Gregory Porter - Mona Lisa; - Kevin Mahogany - Teach Me Tonight; - Allan Harris - Haven't We Met; - Jeff Cascaro - Since I Fell For You; - Kurt Elling - Where Love Is.

Our ongoing series What the World Needs Now will be addressed by Professor of Political Science at Ferris State University David Takitaki. His contribution to the series is Capacity.

Every Autumn, the LBC offers The Urban Retreat: a week of free events exploring meditation, Buddhism and more. On the Urban Retreat 2023, we explored the theme: What the World Needs Now. Hear responses from experienced Buddhist practitioners. You can make a donation to the LBC here: https://www.londonbuddhistcentre.com/giving/donate

Two guest teachers join us, Reverend Luis Cypher and Minister Bendr Bones, from the Satanic Temple. They contend that Courage is What the World Needs Now, noting that courage is easy to fake, and that many people confuse courage with bravado. Courage isn't about being tough, but about standing up for what is right, even in despair.

Chip begins this program asking, With whom or what are you most angry, right now? He wraps up this study in the book of Matthew, with a reminder about what Jesus would say regarding that person or issue, helping us get a little Kingdom perspective - because perspective changes the very same circumstances from disaster to opportunity. Don't miss this powerful conclusion to What the World Needs Now. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/789/29

C3 Lead Teacher Brad Ruggles adds Upekkhā (Equanimity) to the series What the World Needs Now.

Every Autumn, the LBC offers The Urban Retreat: a week of free events exploring meditation, Buddhism and more. On the Urban Retreat 2023, we explored the theme: What the World Needs Now. Hear responses from experienced Buddhist practitioners. You can make a donation to the LBC here: https://www.londonbuddhistcentre.com/giving/donate

Our Core Teacher Beth Buelow brings the message that What the World Needs Now is Play.

Every year in Autumn, the LBC offers The Urban Retreat: a week of free events exploring meditation, Buddhism and more.  On the Urban Retreat 2023, we explored the theme: What the World Needs Now. Hear from experienced Buddhist practitioners on this theme.  You can make a donation to the LBC here: https://www.londonbuddhistcentre.com/giving/donate

Daryl Van Tongeren, Ph. D is the Professor of Psychology and Director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College. His contribution to our series What the World Needs Now is Humility.

Every Autumn, the LBC offers The Urban Retreat: a week of free events exploring meditation, Buddhism and more. On the Urban Retreat 2023, we explored the theme: What the World Needs Now. Hear responses from experienced Buddhist practitioners. You can make a donation to the LBC here: https://www.londonbuddhistcentre.com/giving/donate

Lead Teacher Brad Ruggles addresses What the World Needs Now with mettā, a Pali word, most often translated as loving-kindness, but also as universal goodwill or compassion.

Message from the final week of our series, What the World Needs Now. Delivered by Middle School and Families Pastor, Silas Crowell on 09/29/24. Follow us for more weekly messages from Eastside pastors! 

Guest Teacher Sarah Kornfield visits this week and adds Surrender to the list of What the World Needs Now. Her teaching title is Men Don't Retreat: Masculinity and Sovereignty in White Evangelicalism.

Every year in Autumn, the LBC offers The Urban Retreat: a week of free events exploring meditation, Buddhism and more.  On the Urban Retreat 2023, we explored the theme: What the World Needs Now. Hear from experienced Buddhist practitioners on this theme.  You can make a donation to the LBC here: https://www.londonbuddhistcentre.com/giving/donate

Our new series What the World Needs Now continues with Lead Teacher Brad Ruggles focusing on Balance.

Shelbie Rassler Interview | The Brett Allan Show 'Conductor' for the Fort Collins Leg of "Across the Spider-Verse" LIVE SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE LIVE IN CONCERT LANDS AT THE LINCOLN CENTER ON OCTOBER 4! Fort Collins – Building on the success of sold-out shows worldwide, a new 50+ city U.S. tour will kick off the next chapter of the Oscar®-winning Spider-Verse saga. The highly-anticipated sequel Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert will land in Fort Collins at The Lincoln Center on October 4, 2024. Tickets are available at LCtix.com or by calling The Lincoln Center Box Office at 970.221.6730. For the complete tour schedule visit spiderverseinconcert.com. View the tour announcement video here. In Spider-Man™: Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert audiences will see the film presented on a huge HD screen, accompanied by a range of musicians and instrumentalists performing music from the film's score and soundtrack live to picture. This will include an orchestra, a scratch DJ on turntables, percussion, and electronic instruments. ABOUT THE CONDUCTOR Shelbie Rassler, named Truthspaper's "Young Woman of the Year,” is a globally recognized musician whose work as a composer, music director, and producer spans prestigious performances and productions worldwide. Her compositions, arrangements, and orchestrations have been featured at The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The West End's His Majesty's Theatre. Following her viral production of Burt Bacharach's “What the World Needs Now,” Rassler received a CBS Sunday Morning Award and was featured on CNN's “The Fourth in America” alongside Mr. Bacharach, as well as appearing on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Forbes, and NPR. Rassler's film scoring and mixed media creations have premiered at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Amazon Prime, and various film festivals, as well as in commercials, jingles, and podcasts reaching millions. Connect with us on our website for more amazing conversations! www.brettallanshow.com Have you got some feedback? Let us know! openmicguest@gmail.com Follow us on social media! Facebook https://www.facebook.com/thebrettallanshow Instagram https://www.instagram.com/brettallanshow/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TheBrettAllanShow/videos LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-allan-009458168/ Support the show! VENMO @-Brett-Allan-7 Cash App @brettallanshow74 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Series: Hope Beyond the HorizonTitle: Week 1: What the World Needs Now is LoveText: 1 John 4:7-12Teacher: Andrew Haws

With so much fear and uncertainty going around our world, you may have asked the question, "what does this world need now?" In this sermon, Pastor Richard Hilton answers just that. We are not in this world alone. Instead God walks with us and desires to be with us. Knowing God's heart is to love us and be with us leads us to following in the footsteps of Jesus, therefore answering His call and loving others like He does as they see Him reflected in our lives. So, what does this world need? Jesus and Christians who look like Him. -------------- Welcome to Calvary Church of Johnson City, Tennessee's YouTube channel! Make sure you subscribe so you can get updates on the newest video releases and watch our live stream! FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS BELOW Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/visitcalvary/ Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/visitcalvary/ LINK TO OUR WEBSITE https://www.visitcalvary.com -------------- Chapters | 0:00 Intro 1:16 How God Sees Us 6:52 Living Like Christ 11:44 God is Walking With Us 19:10 We Have to Choose to Walk With God 30:10 What the World Needs Now

C3 Lead Teacher Brad Ruggles is back to kick off a new series, What the World Needs Now. In our first week, Refuge, we'll look at the growing need for safe spaces, where individuals can explore life's deep questions without expectations or judgement.

“What the World Needs Now...” – Greg Jones – Aug. 11 by Sermon

"What the World Needs Now is Minding Your Own Business" - Mike Glenn - July 28, 2024 by Sermon

"What the World Needs Now is Grace" - Jay Hutchens - July 7, 2024 by Sermon

One of the greatest rock and roll songwriters, Jackie De Shannon has a way of marrying a catchy pop melody with a fresh lyrical insight that is unparalleled. During that shift from Rockabilly into the British Invasion, Jackie (often with partner Sharon Sheeley), kept the pop charts humming - amassing an impressive discography for anyone - let alone little Sharon Lee Myers from Hazel, Kentucky, a pert blonde girl singer with a husky alto, who was being marketed as cheese cake. But Jackie had far too much grit and ambition to have her career begin and end as a Brenda Lee knock-off. She drove through the 60s racking up 2 top ten hits along the way.When You Walk in the Room is an excellent example of that magical melding of a great hook with an original turn of phrase. Starting as a B-Side in 1963, it was re-released a year later as an A side, and included in her album BREAKIN' IT UP ON THE BEATLES TOUR! That's right … She opened for the fucking Beatles. What with all this, It might seem odd to say, but I believe that Jackie was underrated. Of her two biggest hits as a vocalist, one (What the World Needs Now) was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and the other one (Put a Little Love in Your Heart) was a bit of treacle co-written with her brother and two other folks. Neither of these tunes exhibit the wit, the grit, the sexiness, or the spark of her own tunes. 

Stone Temple Pilots, often abbreviated as STP, burst onto the rock scene in the early 1990's, becoming one of the most commercially successful bands of that era.  Their debut album, Core, was released in late September 1992, and we're highlighting it in January 1993 when many of their hits were on the charts.The DeLeo brothers form the heart of the band:  Dean DeLeo's guitar work provides the sonic foundation, and Robert DeLeo's bass playing adds a groove to the band's sound.  Eric Kretz anchors the rhythm section on percussion.  And front man Scott Weiland completes the lineup with his charismatic presence and distinctive vocal style.  Weiland's emotion and raw energy helped make "Core" a pivotal release in the grunge movement."Core" hit he airwaves with a sonic explosion, with an energy that captured the angst and spirit of the early 90's grunge movement.  Several tracks from this album would become anthems of the 90's generation, led by tracks like "Plush" and "Sex Type Thing."  Despite its commercial success (reaching number 3 on the Billboard 200), "Core" was initially met with poor critical reviews, with many critics considering it too derivative of other grunge artists like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  Over time, however, "Core" would receive more positive reviews as it took its place as a seminal release of the grunge movement.Lynch takes us on this journey back to 1993, when the Stone Temple Pilots were introducing themselves to the world. CreepThis song is a slower, more introspective track that highlights the band's grunge influences.  The lyrics deal with feelings of isolation and alienation, with Weiland delivering a haunting vocal performance.  The acoustic arrangement is a nice contrast to the heavier tracks of the album.Sex Type ThingThe opening track to the album features an aggressive guitar riff and a powerful vocal performance from Weiland.  It was controversial due to its lyrical content, which is written from the perspective of a rapist.  Despite the controversy (or perhaps because of it) “Sex Type Thing” became one of STP's most recognized songs.PlushThis track is arguably the most famous song from the album.  “Plush” showcases STP's softer side with its acoustic guitar intro and catchy chorus.  Weiland's lyrics were inspired by a news story about a woman who was found dead in San Diego, adding a layer of mystery and intrigue to the song.  The video for "Plush" won the band an MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist and features the band playing in various desert scenes.Wicked GardenA hard-hitting rock track known for its gritty guitar riff and energetic chorus, this may be considered a deeper cut.  The song deals with the loss of innocence and the darker side of human nature, themes that recur throughout the album.  Over time “Wicked Garden” has become a fan favorite and a staple of STP's live shows. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme to Star Trek:  Deep Space NineThe third entry into the Star Trek franchise takes place on a fixed space station near the border of the Federation.  It had its debut in January of 1993. STAFF PICKS:Love Is On the Way by Saigon KickBruce leads off the staff picks with a one hit wonder.  Miami-based Saigon Kick released this single from their second album, "The Lizard," and it went to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Jason Bieler provides guitar, keyboards, and backing vocals for the band, and wrote this song.  Lead vocals are provided by Matt Kramer.  Additional band members were Tom DeFile on bass and Phil Varone on percussion. Regret by New OrderRob brings us the lead song from New Order's sixth studio album, "Republic."  The single went to number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100. New Order formed from the remnants of the band Joy Division.  The album was made in order to save the Hacienda - a Manchester club part owned by the band.  Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now) by CrackerWayne's staff pick is from Cracker's debut album, and features catchy, clever, ironic songs.  The lyrics take a swipe at late 80's and early 90's folk rock songs.  Interestingly, the lyrics do not include the words "Teen Angst."  The track got airplay on alternative radio stations, and went to number 1 on the new Billboard "Modern Rock" chart.All Apologies by NirvanaLynch closes out the staff picks with one of Nirvana's most poignant and introspective works from their third and final studio album "In Utero."  Songwriter and front man Kurt Cobain describes the song as a tribute to his wife and daughter, but it took on significance as a farewell note of sorts after Cobain's death. COMEDY TRACK:Bedrock Anthem by "Weird Al" YankovicWeird Al channels a couple of well-known songs from the Red Hot Chili Peppers for this prehistoric parody. Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock-worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.

Chris Kinsley joined me for Episode #116, and our coming together for this conversation resulted via collaboration with Chris's band, Arson Class, Sid Sowder's toomuchrock.com, and myself.Sid's Too Much Rock project has a number of intriguing aspects to it, i.e. concert reviews, stills, and footage. It also has a weekly podcast that is rapidly approaching the 700-episode mark. More pertinent to today, however, is the revitalization of his Too Much Rock Single Series, which -- with the release of Arson Class's new single, "Junior" -- celebrates its 11th installment.Tomorrow, then, Friday, May 3rd, Chris and Arson Class will be celebrating "Junior"'s release with a live set at Sister Anne's Records & Coffee, at 901 E. 31st Street, here in Kansas City."Junior" will be available for purchase at area record stores, via a few online retailers, as well as directly from the band. It is only available as a limited-edition 7" vinyl pressing, and features an Arson Class cover of John Cougar's "American Dream" as its B-side.Chris sat down with me to discuss family, band life, serving in the military, and -- of course -- a few of his favorite records.Those were these:Horse Bites Dog Cries (1986), D.I.The Cramps' Flamejob (1994)Do or Die (1998), Dropkick MurphysArson Class has an EP, an LP, and a pair of singles you can purchase or access from their bandcamp page. You can also find their stuff where you stream your music. You can give them a follow on Facebook or Instagram, or catch them live on either May 18th at Centennial Skate Park in Lawrence, KS, June 1st at miniBar in Kansas City, or on July 20th at Scene of the Crash in Sioux City, Nebraska.Too Much Rock can be followed on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Bluesky, and you can tune in to my conversation with Sid in Episode #105 of Badass Records.copyright disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the audio samples contained within this episode. They are portions of a track called, "Your Friendly Neighborhood Sugar Man" by The Sugarman 3. The tune comes from their 2012 release, What the World Needs Now, c/o Daptone Records.

Welcome Back Everyone! Thank You for joining us once again! The guys are back with another episode of rants opinions...and even a few laughs. Up First...Echo released...and Johnnie released his frustration of having to sit through the 5 episode mini series. Did Joey and Jacob have the same opinion? Adam Copeland made his debut as Aries on this weeks episode of Percy Jackson. Listen as as they discuss their thoughts on his new acting gig and where they think the series is going next.  Joey choose his movie pick this week and it was a first time watch for 2 of them. Enjoy as they talk about JK Simmons anger issues in his Oscar winning performance in Whiplash. Last but not least.. The STF Crew kneel before Lulu and get distracted by the fact that no matter who The Rock plays...he is always just be The Rock to them. Join them as they discuss the Dwayne Johnson / Kevin Hart DC League of Super-pets. What show would the guys watch if it wasn't such a commitment? Why did Supergirl seem to not do anything else after Whiplash? Will any of the podcast group leave to become a drummer? All this talked about and more... on this weeks...STRANGER THAN FLICK-TION! Thanks for Listening! Email:   Strangerthanflicktion@gmail.com Twitters:  Podcast- @SFlicktion Joey - @SpaceJamIsMyjam Jacob - @Jabcup Johnnie- @Shaggyroaddogg Catch Joeys reactions over at Joey Reacts on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@jwararmour/featured Time Stamps: ECHO Review and Rate - 20:20 Percy Jackson Episode 5 -  56:55 Whiplash! Review and Rate - 1:13:35 DC League of Super-pets - Review and Rate - 1:37:45 Jacobs Elevator Music - 2:04:21 Music Credits:  Burning by Yeah Yeah Yeahs  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSffKUyr0lk Whiplash - From The Movie Whiplash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jAtHf9RA4w&list=PL4QZuO1nhH5HPzyFuPRPj5KM0-58Etqag&index=4 What the World Needs Now is Love (feat. Rod Stewart) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC_e2SLX7Dg Jacobs Elevator Jingles - Jacob No Youtube link.....yet

What's Going OnSung by: Marvin GayeMother, motherThere's too many of you cryingBrother, brother, brotherThere's far too many of you dyingYou know we've got to find a wayTo bring some lovin' here todayFather, fatherWe don't need to escalateYou see, war is not the answerFor only love can conquer hateYou know we've got to find a wayTo bring some lovin' here todayPicket lines and picket signsDon't punish me with brutalityTalk to me, so you can seeOh, what's going onWhat's going onwhat's going onwhat's going onIn the mean timeRight on, babyRight onRight onFather, father, everybody thinks we're wrongOh, but who are they to judge usSimply because our hair is longOh, you know we've got to find a wayTo bring some understanding here todayOhPicket lines and picket signsDon't punish me with brutalityTalk to meSo you can seeWhat's going onYa, what's going onTell me what's going onI'll tell you what's going on - UhRight on babyRight on baby Studio Personnel, Recording Engineer: Art Stewart Composer Lyricist: Renaldo Benson Composer Lyricist: Al Cleveland Composer Lyricist: Marvin Gaye.  ℗ A Motown Records Release; ℗ 1971 UMG Recordings, Inc. Released on: 1971-05-21Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group What the World Needs Now is LoveSung by: Jackie DeShannon What the world needs now is love, sweet love It's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is love, sweet love No not just for some, but for everyoneLord, we don't need another mountain There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb There are oceans and rivers enough to cross Enough to last 'til the end of timeWhat the world needs now is love, sweet love It's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is love, sweet love No, not just for some, but for everyoneLord, we don't need another meadow There are cornfields and wheatfields enough to grow There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine Oh listen, Lord, if you want to knowWhat the world needs now is love, sweet love It's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is love, sweet love No, not just for some, oh, but just for every, every, everyoneSource: MusixmatchSongwriters: Burt F. Bacharach / Hal DavidWhat the World Needs Now Is Love lyrics © New Hidden Valley Music Co., New Hidden Valley Music Company, Casa David Music, New Hidden Valley Music Co, Bmg Rights Management (uk) Ltd (hal David)

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

Peter first came to prominence with Stylus in 1975, releasing four albums with hits such as ‘Summer Breeze' and ‘World of Make Believe' before the band split in 1980. A successful solo career followed throughout the 80's, with a top 20 hit for his first release, ‘Fear of Thunder', and success with the song ‘Blame it on the Weather' – not only for Peter but also for John Farnham, whose voice, incidentally, Peter's soaring vocals are often compared to. Peter also became a regular on TV shows such as The Midday Show, Hey Hey It's Saturday, Tonight Live, and Carols by Candlelight at the Myer Music Bowl. Other albums released include ‘Still Alive' (with a reformed Stylus); ‘Changes', ‘Bac2basix' – a roots album filled with wonderful storytelling songs such as ‘Pioneers', ‘Family' and the ‘Poor Man's Al Jolson; a jazz standards album, ‘About Time'; and ‘Home Grown' – Peter's own tribute to some of his favourite Aussie artists. Over the last decade, Peter has toured both solo and with Stylus, and with his close friend, Australian rock legend, the late Jon English. Their collaborative show, Uncorked', filled with nostalgia and good humoured banter, delighted audiences everywhere throughout Australia. Peter works with many charities and has written songs for the ‘Make a Wish Foundation' and the ‘Sacred Heart Foundation'. His album, ‘OBSERVATIONS' – which he describes as ‘a collection of songs that look at the heart of our everyday existence, some personal, some not' – was released in October 2016. “I am extremely proud of this album,' says Cupples. “I truly believe it is probably one of the best things I've ever done.” He is now bringing a night of great entertainment to the Taphouse with the songs of Burt Bacharach. From 'Say a Little Prayer' to 'What the World Needs Now' enjoy the songs you know and love.

Johnny Hickman has provided “bonehead guitar riffs,” memorable songs and a spark-plug energy to Cracker since the band debuted more than 30 years ago. Hickman and primary singer-songwriter David Lowery already were friends from Redlands, Calif., when Lowery called him after the implosion of his band Camper Van Beethoven. The ever-lively Hickman digs into the bounty of riffs, hooks and wit that went into Cracker's self-titled debut album, which includes “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now).” How did the band raise the bar with Kerosene Hat, propelled by the hits “Low” and “Get Off This?” Why did the formidable rhythm section leave, prompting Cracker to move to the “Steely Dan model”? What's the story behind Hickman's arrest after wielding his 1977 Les Paul as a weapon? Listening to Hickman play or speak is a cure for feeling low.

After his on-the-rise cult band Camper Van Beethoven imploded, singer-songwriter David Lowery formed Cracker, which delivered smart, tuneful, sharp-witted Americana through songs such as “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now),” “Low” and “Get Off This.” Lowery has continued performing with Cracker and the re-formed Camper, but his most recent works have been autobiographical solo albums, including this year's Vending Machine, which reflects on his music-biz triumphs and misadventures and why he keeps coming back for more. Lowery also is a leading artists' rights advocate and a University of Georgia business professor, and he has much to say about the creation of his music, the workings of the industry and why he'd rather release CDs than place his songs on streaming services. (Photo by Jason Thrasher.)

This content is for Members only. Come and join us by subscribing here In the meantime, here's some more details about the show: It's a warm welcome then to the man himself: Dr. Brad Stone - the JazzWeek Programmer of the Year 2017, who's here every Thursday to present The Creative Source - a two hour show, highlighting jazz-fusion and progressive jazz flavours from back then, the here and now, plus occasional forays into the future. Please feel free to get in touch with Brad with any comments or suggestions you might have; he'll be more than happy to hear from you: brad@soulandjazz.com or follow him via Facebook or Twitter. Enjoy! The Creative Source 20th April 2023 Artist - Track - Album - Year Ken Fowser    2020    Resolution    2023 Eddie Coburn Jazz Project feat. Rodney Rich    Now You Tell Me    Vol. 1    2022 Bill Warfield and the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra    Man in the Green Shirt    Time Capsule    2023 Vince Mendoza & Metropole Octet    Lake Fire    Olympians    2023 Marina Pacowski    Inner Urge    Inner Urge    2023 Angile Wells    I've Got a Feeling (Hymn Version)    Truth Be Told    2023 Angile Wells    Nick of Time    Truth Be Told    2023 JD Walter    Now It's Time to Go    What the World Needs Now    2023 Angile Wells    I've Got a Feeling (Music Box Version)    Truth Be Told    2023 DeWayne Pate    On the Upside    On the Upside    2023 Brendan Lanighan Octet    All Day Breckfast    A Little Optimism    2023 SFJazz Collective    Perseverance    New Works & Classics Reimagined: Live 2022 SFJazz Center    2022 Gaia Wilmer Large Ensemble    Baião Malandro    Folia: The Music of Egberto Gismonti    2023 Yelena Eckemoff    Song for Spark    Lonely Man and His Fish    2023 Michael Dease    The Sleeper    The Other Shoe: The Music of Gregg Hill    2023 Mark Lewis    Leaving Fall Behind    Sunlight Shines In    2023 Erica Seguine/Shon Baker Orchestra    …and the Tire Swing Keeps Spinning    The New Day Bends Light    2023 Gentle Giant    Pantagruel's Nativity    Three Piece Suite, Steven Wilson Remix (originally from "Acquiring the Taste", 1971)    2017 Gentle Giant    Aspirations (instrumental out-take)    The Power and the Glory, Steven Wilson Remix (originally 1974)    2014 Gentle Giant    Three Friends    Three Piece Suite, Steven Wilson Remix (originally from "Three Friends", 1972)    2017 Silvie Courvoisier & Cory Smythe    Spectre d'un Songe    The Rite of Spring/Spectre d'un Songe    2023 The post The Creative Source (#CreativeSource) – 20th April 2023 appeared first on SoulandJazz.com | Stereo, not stereotypical ®.

Episode 364: What the World Needs Now is Integrity in Entrepreneurial Leadership Episode NotesWhy does the world need integrity in entrepreneurial leadership now? We have always needed the skillset and mindset of entrepreneurs to evolve and revolutionize our world. Integrity has always been an important leadership value. Why is it highly relevant now?This topic comes from my inherent concern regarding entrepreneurial leaders with harmful intentions using our legal system interminably to delay justice and accountability. And how many laws can one break? Astonishingly, a lot. This brings me to ask more questions.Why are we allowing leaders, who lack integrity, egregiously break our laws, and have a sinister vision that is destroying our democracy, to not only hold the highest offices in the land but profit from doing so? If our democracy is everything to us, why are we the people, allowing a political party to prioritize their rights above all others? Why are we allowing ill-intentioned political entrepreneurs to disregard standards of decency, violate ethical principles and laws, and outpace accountability guardrails?Where others see problems, entrepreneurs see opportunities. Where entrepreneurs see opportunities, they solve problems. When ethical entrepreneurs solve problems, they add societal value.While pondering these big questions and sifting through the emotions that come from feeling unsettled and concerned about all of us, I devised an Eight Integrity Checkpoints exercise to bridge the gap between our professed values, how we live, and the leaders we support. Each checkpoint pair begins with a question you can ask yourself and a second question in reference to a leader you support.Read through each question. These questions are thought-provoking so allow time to reflect. I suggest returning to this exercise after you read the rest of these notes and listen to this episode. I give examples in the audio. You decide what works best for you. Eight Integrity CheckpointsHow am I taking 100% responsibility for what I think, feel, say, and do?How does the leader I support take 100% responsibility for what they think, feel, say, and do?What are my two core values, without which I feel off track and lost? Or, I get angry when someone doesn't respect my values.Are the words, feelings, and actions of the leader I support aligned with my core values? How do I know? What are their core values?Reflecting on my life, am I living my core values?As I reflect on the leader I support, are they living their core values?How am I being or leading the change I want to make in the world?What change does the leader I support role model to the world?The Research Rabbit HoleIntegrity in entrepreneurial leadership initially felt easy for me to discuss. I work with clients daily to live what they value and value how they live. I have written and taught about having integrity, and I hold myself accountable to integrity guideposts, my core values of wholeheartedness (compassion, connection, and courage) and respect.Instead, the research rabbit hole I entered ignited unresolved hurts such as anguish, despair, sadness, grief, and dread about the next election. I am exhausted from the slowness of our legal system and the emotional and financial cost to all of us from the 45th U.S. President's excruciatingly painful refusal to take responsibility for his criminal acts and threats to the fabric of our democracy because he can't put our democracy above his corrupted interests.We know of his egregious acts against our democracy and lack of integrity in business reporting including the latest 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his seedy behavior. He is like the Titanic. We know he is sinking. We don't know how long it will take or how many more people will go down with him. I know he will not take our democracy with him, dammit! Not on our watch!!! Kindred Voices are Speaking Up and Showing UpOnce below the surface and into t...

Episode 76: Pamela Cooper-White, part twoLike a football game, or a basketball game, we're trying to outline our podcast into four quarter. After checking in with each other, we begin by continuing our conversation from the last episode regarding Christian Nationalism. There are numerous resources mentioned in this conversation, especially scholars who are producing new research on Christian nationalism. Notably, these scholars represent the fields of politics, history, and social science. There is information below abut how to follow them. Also, some key quotes from some of their amazing work. In the second and third quarters, we hear the second half of Craig's conversation with Dr. Pamela Cooper-White. By the time we get to the fourth quarter, the hot topics have cooled and we do our muddled review of the Super Bowl. Our next episodes in this series will be with Drew Strait, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Anabaptist Mennonite Theological Seminary. Key scholars to follow (Twitter handles)Samuel Perry @profsamperry Philip Gorski @GorskiPhilipKristen Du Mez @kkdumezKathleen Belew @kathleen_belew Andrew Whitehead @ndrewwhitehead Bradley Onishi @BradleyOnishiMatthew Taylor @TaylorMatthewDJamar Tisby @JemarTisbyAngela Denker @angela_denker Jamar Tisby's definition: “White Christian Nationalism is an ethnocultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism to create a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.”Stephen Wolfe: a recent manifesto written as a defense and a directive for White Christian Nationalism. The Gospel Coalition provided a helpful review of Wolfe's book in which these Wolfe quotes were noted. Christian nationalism is, “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.” For example: Wolfe says a mark of nationalism is that “each people group has a right to be for itself” (118), and that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnicities” (135), and that our “instinct to conduct everyday life among similar people is natural, and being natural, it is for your good” (142), and that “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man” (145), and that “spiritual unity is inadequate for formal ecclesial unity” (200), and that “the most suitable condition for a group of people to successfully pursue the complete good is one of cultural similarity” (201).Whitehead and Perry: speak of CN as “Christianity co-opted in the service of ethno-national power and separation” and “Christian nationalism is a cultural framework–a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems–that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civil life”” (Taking America Back for God)Key categories of types of people: Accommodators and Ambassadors were both characterized as being “supportive” of “Christian nationalism” while Resisters and Rejecters “opposed” Christian nationalism.Also see the latest research from PRRI https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understanding-the-threat-of-christian-nationalism-to-american-democracy-and-culture/ Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home, “White power should be recognized as something broader than the Klan, encompassing a wider range of ideologies and operating simultaneously in public and underground. Such an understanding is vital lest we erroneously equate white power with covert violence and thereby ignore its significant inroads into mainstream society, which hardly came under cover of night.” Code words: Mating calls, Dog Whistles, Triggers (Samuel Perry)Music played in this episode is from Thrice, A Better Bridge, and Jackie DeShannon, What the World Needs Now

Heya! I bet you weren’t expecting this episode of Nerds Without Pants so soon! Well, since we got delayed a week with our first episode back from hiatus we decided to record this one a week later to stay on the schedule we had planned. It’s an all-Consumption Junction edition of NWP because we…had a ton of games to talk about! In a surprise twist Justin played The Sims 4. He also checked out Chained Echoes. Julian finished Crisis Core and has some thoughts about the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, and tries to explain some thoughts he’s been having about RPGs. Then it’s a quick mention of Theatrhythm Final Bar Line before an EXTENSIVE discussion of Fire Emblem Engage. We have a couple quick hits before ending with some bigger games like Hi-Fi Rush and God of War: Ragnarok!     NEXT EPISODE: STAGE SELECT: What are some games you wish you could play again for the very first time? VIDEO GAME CAGE MATCH: Dr. Muto vs Vexx SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS BY 7:30 CENTRAL ON FEBRUARY 24 TO BE ON THE SHOW! FEATURED MUSIC: Selections from Burt Bacharach (A House is Not a Home, I Say a Little Prayer, Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head, What the World Needs Now is Love, Make it Easy on Yourself)   For mom.

Andrzej Poczobut skazany na 8 lat więzienia o zaostrzonym rygorze po sfingowanym procesie. Białoruska opozycja i polskie władze protestują, Łukaszenka nie zmienia brutalnej polityki wobec wszystkich przeciwników politycznych i podejmuje działania przeciwko Polakom na Białorusi. Jak postępować z reżimem, który jest najbliższym sojusznikiem Rosji w wojnie z Ukrainą i niszczy własnych obywateli? Już ponad 21 tysięcy ludzi zginęło w wyniku trzęsienia ziemi w Turcji i Syrii. Czy możliwe jest zabezpieczenie się przed tego typu tragediami? Zmarł były prezydent Pakistanu Pervez Musharraf. Czy to on ponosi winę za trwającą od wielu lat przemoc w tym kraju? Czym różnią się deklaracje o sankcjach wobec Rosji od wprowadzania ich w życie? I dlaczego to drugie odbywa się tak wolno? Aktywiści społeczni w Malezji zmieniają architekturę tego kraju, a jedno z miast tego kraju staje się symbolem walki o zachowanie dziedzictwa kulturowego całego regionu. I jeszcze – jakie pieśni nadają się do śpiewania w czasie wojny? Rozkład jazdy: (2:00) Naviband - Inszimi (6:27) Piotr Pogorzelski o skazaniu Andrzeja Poczobuta (23:12) Naviband - Swiacy (26:30) Grzegorz Lizurek o trzęsieniach ziemi w Turcji i Syrii (53:39) Kardes Turkuller, Neset Ertas - Yaniyorum (57:31) Świat z boku - Grzegorz Dobiecki o wojennych pieśniach (1:02:21) Raport o książkach (1:10:51) Podziękowania (1:16:00) Anna Dudzińska o aktywistach w Malezji (1:32:51) Patryk Kugiel o śmierci prezydenta Pakistanu (1:54:37) Tom Keatinge o sankcjach wobec Rosji (2:18:48) Do usłyszenia (2:19:46) Dionne Warwick - What the World Needs Now

The cult classic film Easy Rider was released this month.  A landmark counter culture movie, the film traces the journey of Wyatt and Billy as they make their way on motorcycles from a successful drug deal in Los Angeles to the Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans.  Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern wrote the film, and it stars Fonda, Hopper, and Jack Nicholson.  Dennis Hopper directed the movie.  Originally the plan was for Crosby, Stills & Nash to do all the songs on the soundtrack.  When the editor plugged in contemporary songs as placeholders, the sound convinced Dennis Hopper to reverse this decision.The Easy Rider Soundtrack was crafted with contemporary late 60's music, and stands out as an excellent example of the music of the counterculture.  Each piece used in the movie was curated with the idea of maintaining the story.  Wayne brings us this forerunner of prog rock and heavy metal. Don't Bogart Me by Fraternity of ManPsychedelic and blues rock band the Fraternity of Man would have their biggest hit with this song.  It recommends generosity with illicit smoking materials.  This song originally appeared on their self-titled debut album in 1968 before being included in this soundtrack.Ballad of Easy Rider by Roger McGuinnBob Dylan was an uncredited contributor on this song.  The Byrds front man Roger McGuinn performed this as a solo work.  It was the only song originally written for this film, and appeared on one of McGuinn's albums later.The Weight by The BandThis song chronicles the experience of a visitor to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, even though much of its influence is from the American South.  Nazareth is the home of Martin guitars, and that is why the lyrics transfer to that location.  Licensing could not be gained for the soundtrack even though it was used in the film, so a group called Smith was used for the soundtrack instead of The Band.Born To Be Wild by SteppenwolfSteppenwolf's most successful single appeared on their debut album in 1968 before being used in "Easy Rider."  Many consider it to be the first heavy metal song, and the lyric "heavy metal thunder" contributes to that.  This song would be used as a motorcycle anthem from this time on. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Wasn't Born to Follow by The Byrds (from the motion picture “Easy Rider”)Yes, we get to do a little double dipping with our entertainment track this week. STAFF PICKS:Put a Little Love in Your Heart by Jackie DeShannonRob opens this week's staff picks with a song that hit number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it was used in the film "Drugstore Cowboy."  Jackie DeShannon is best known for the song, "What the World Needs Now is Love."  DeShannon also wrote "Betty Davis Eyes" for Kim Carnes.In the Ghetto by Elvis Presley Brian brings us The King with a poignant song about a child from the dirt street part of town.  Writer Mac Davis was inspired by the story of a friend who grew up in poverty.  Elvis completely identified with this song because of his impoverished upbringing.I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love Is Blue by the Dells Bruce's staff pick is a cover medley of Sing a Rainbow, best known in its 1955 rendition by Peggy Lee, and Love is Blue, originally a French song best known as an instrumental easy listening piece by Paul Mauriat that was a number 1 hit in March of 1968.  the Dells hit number 22 on the US charts with this version during the height of their success between 1966 and 1973.I'd Rather Be an Old Man's Sweetheart by Candi Staton Wayne features a soul hit from Muscle Shoals.  This is Staton's first hit, rising to number 9 on the R&B charts, and number 46 on the pop charts.  Staton is known as the "First Lady of Southern Soul."  "I'd rather be an old man's sweetheart than a young man's fool."  INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:A Boy Named Sue by Johnny CashCash released this novelty song telling the story of a boy who had to grow up tough after his absentee father left him with the name of Sue.

What the World Needs Now, is Leadership, sweet Leadership, it's the only thing that there's just too little of....Election season is upon us, which has me thinking about all the things I want to say to the next President. In this episode we explore why we need leadership in the first place. What do leaders provide and why do we need them?Authentic Leaders provide Vision, Unity, Inspiration and Strength, and we all know it when we see it.Visit www.kellybargabos.com to listen to all past episodes and/or connect with Kelly.

“You have to choose yourself and other people will choose you.” – Robbie Rozelle on what he learned from the late Jan Maxwell.  There's a lot of musical theatre references in this episode, folks. Proceed with caution!  Robbie Rozelle is a beloved performer, director, writer, graphic designer, and record producer who is responsible for some of the funniest and touching moments in the cabaret space of recent. Rozelle does shows all over the city… even across the pond in London. So how does he dominate the cabaret and concert scene?  “For me, I am very much a self starter. If I want to do something, I sort of will it into existence. A lot of that is a lot of cold emails. There are so many cold emails that I'll send out, 'Hi, I am beloved, fully ignored, cabaret sensation, Robbie Rozelle.' I'll send the album and I'll say, here's the pitch. 9 times out of 10, I'll never get an email back.” But don't worry, Robbie's concerts sell out in 26 minutes. That isn't an exaggeration. How does he do it? How does he sell his shows? If you're interested in producing your own cabaret and concert, this episode is loaded with goodies to help you. We also chat about social media helping or hindering the industry, pushing through performances even during a crumbling political environment, understanding that what we bring to the table in the industry is allowed to be specific, and the difference between a Renaissance person and the multi-hyphenate.  Robbie infiltrates the industry in such an interesting way, He has also directed and written or co-written sold-out cabaret shows for Tony Award nominee Melissa Errico (Amour), Tony nominee Kate Baldwin (Finian's Rainbow), Elena Shaddow (The Visit), Nikka Graff Lanzarone (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), Mauricio Martínez (On Your Feet), Nathan Salstone (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), RuPaul's Drag Race contestant Mrs. Kasha Davis, and frequent collaborator Jessica Vosk (15th Anniversary Elphaba in Wicked). In 2017, he sold out Feinstein's/54 Below twice with his debut cabaret solo act, "Songs From Inside My Locker", which was nominated for a BroadwayWorld Cabaret Award (in addition to nominations for Best Director). He returned to Feinstein's/54 Below in 2018 to headline Pride weekend with his new show "Bustin' Out", selling out and earning rave reviews. He recorded his debut solo album of “Songs From Inside My Locker” live in front of two sold-out audiences in 2019; the album was released to rave reviews in June 2020. He also created and hosted “Tuesdays at 54… with Robbie Rozelle!,” which ran for seven months at Feinstein's/54 Below in 2019-2020. Robbie is a Grammy voting member, and appears on the concert cast recording of Mia Moravis' Session Girls. For three years, Robbie served as the graphic designer and creative director for Playbill, culminating in the design of the branding of #PlaybillPride, a 30-day initiative of the LGBT movement in the theatre that included a redesign of their historic logo for the month of June 2014, which continues each June to this day. He currently serves as the A&R Director and in-house designer for Grammy-winning record label Broadway Records, where he designed the iconic "What the World Needs Now is Love" in response to Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. He also runs Ghostlight Design. When not designing, he can usually be found tweeting jokes and random musings at @divarobbie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#170 | +Spike O'Neill | +Andrew Rivers | Fresh Prints of Entitlement | Will Smith/Chris Rock | Ukraine/Our Proxy War | Defending Her Honor/Curb Your Savage | *The Problem With John Stewart* | Appeasing Putin | Peace, Love & Empathy | Social Desensitization | Causation, Narratives & False Equivalencies | What the World Needs Now... | Sugar High | *BOB (+blah blah) SHOW* | Ed'zzz