Podcasts about You Win Again

Happy New Year! ... but this NYE set by the Dead should put you in the mood to say goodbye to 2024 and to ring in a brand new 2025... This show occurred at an important turning point for the Dead, as they moved forward with many 'new' tunes and with Keith and Donna as members of the band (Donna makes her vocal debut here on 'One More Saturday Night'). The sound on this FM broadcast is generally very good and the band is tight. The boys play here with a great youthful enthusiasm.. They open with 'Dancin' In the Streets' which they wouldn't play again until June of 76.. This is a long and fun first set, clocking in at over 90 minutes.. Pig has some great moments here - Mr. Charlie, Chinatown Shuffle and Next Time You See Me are great..  All in all a great first set, we'll hear set 2 next week..    Grateful Dead Winterland Arena San Francisco, CA 12/31/1971 - Friday One      Dancing In The Street [#8:29]   Mr. Charlie [3:38]   Brown Eyed Women [4:22]   Beat It On Down The Line [2:56]   You Win Again [3:36]   Jack Straw [4:31]   Sugaree [7:01]   El Paso [4:14]>   Chinatown Shuffle [2:35]   Tennessee Jed [6:41]   Mexicali Blues [3:16]   China Cat Sunflower [4:40] > I Know You Rider [5:18]   Next Time You See Me [4:30]   Playing In The Band [6:09]   Loser [6:15]   One More Saturday Night (1) [4:23#]  You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod122724.mp3  Thanks for your support this year.. it means alot..  Happy New Year. 

This week we continue with a show from 52 years ago today - 7/26/72. We will pick up with the ending of set 1 then work into the second set..  We start with a sweet  'Playin' In the Band' - Donna is introduced before hand and its a fine start to this week's Deadpod. They close set one with ' Casey Jones'. Set 2 begins with a strong 'Promised Land' then goes into 'He's Gone' which had debuted only a few months before. 'Uncle' follows then 'You Win Again' which would only be played 2 more times before it was retired in September. A high energy 'Greatest Story' follows and we close this edition of the Deadpod with some fine Garcia work on 'Ramble on Rose'..   Grateful Dead Paramount Theater Portland, OR 7/26/1972 - Wednesday One (continued)     Playing In The Band [12:27] Casey Jones [4:48] Two      The Promised Land [2:58] He's Gone [8:46] Me And My Uncle [3:05] You Win Again [4:02] Greatest Story Ever Told [4:57] Ramble On Rose [6:09]  You can listen to this week's Deadpod here:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod072624.mp3  Stay tuned for the climax of this show on next week's Deadpod!   thank you for your kind support!   

Recorded from my living room at home on the fringes of downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Episode 004 of the Boots & Saddle [2.0] Show was a spirited affair featuring a fantastic mix of classic cuts and hot new jams. - - - BOOTS & SADDLE (2.0) | Episode 004 INTRO & THEME: The Boots & Saddle Jingle - Boots Graham [w. Catherine Robertson] (2024) Chaparral - Buck Owens' Buckaroos – A Night On The Town (1968) Shufflin' in to the Saddle: 1.  If She Could See Me Now - Ray Price (Night Life - 1963) Beautiful Country Music by Beautiful Country Music Singers: 2. Fist City - Loretta Lynn (Fist City - 1968) 3. Love Bug - George Jones (New Country Hits - 1965) 4. If You Won't Tell - Connie Smith (Miss Smith Goes to Nashville - 1966) New & Recent Releases: 5. I Only Exist [feat. Isaac Gibson] - Kelsey Waldon (There's Always A Song - 2024 6. Better Safe Than Sober - The Honkytonk Wranglers (Single - 2024) 7. A Thousand Ways - Wonder Women of Country (Willis, Carper, Leigh - 2024) 8. Make It Back Home - Pat Reedy (Make It Back Home  - 2024) Round-Up of “lost” Canadian Country [1989 Edition]: 9. Scene of the Crime - Lori Yates (Can't Stop the Girl - 1989) 10. The Legend of Dick Nolan - Barry Smith (Single - 1989) 11. Hello Again - Anita Perras (Touch My Heart - 1989) 2023 Highlights + Outro: 12. California poppy - Theo Lawrence (Chérie - 2023) 13. Lowland Trail - Margo Cilker (Valley Of Heart's Delight - 2023) You Win Again (instrumental) - Jeff Bradshaw & Dave Hamilton (Swingin' Country Dance Toons - 2003) 14. Half Forgotten Tunes - Ags Connolly (Siempre - 2023)  Closing/Oh! Susanna (show 11) - Hank Williams (The Garden Spot Programs, 1950)

Herzlich Willkommen zu einer neuen Podcast Folge. Heute feiern wir den Oster Montag und diese Folge handelt sehr tief von dem Thema Glauben. Dieses Mal durfte ich einen sehr jungen Menschen interviewen, Marvin ist 21 Jahre alt und erkrankte an einem Nephroblastom, Kindernierenkrebs. Hallo du

Bee Gees kendes i dag bedst fra deres disco æra, men de tre brødre har eksperimenteret med alverdens genrer i deres diskografi, der består af intet mindre end 22 albums. Episodens spilleliste spænder fra superhits til deep cuts, som tilsammen giver et helt nyt syn på gruppen.Brødrene fra ‘the land down under' var igennem mange op- og nedture i løbet af deres musikkarriere, der næsten varede et halvt århundrede. Specielt efter discoårene, hvor de gik fra at være nummer et på hitlisterne til at blive synonym med dårlig smag. Lyt med når Henrik Queitsch og Klaus Lynggard fortæller om Bee Gees vej til toppen og ned igen, og hvordan de gang på gang formåede at rejse sig fra asken og komme tilbage på hitlisterne.Værter: Henrik Queitsch og Klaus LynggardKlip og produktion: Mathilde Cortese RetsboSpilleliste:Spicks and Specks (1966)New York Mining Disaster (1967) Holiday (1967)Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You (1967)Massachusetts (1967)And the Sun Will Shine (1967)I've Got to Get a Message to You (1968)I Started a Joke (1968)First of May (1969)Odessa (City on the Black Sea) (1969)Lonely Days (1970)How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (1971)Sweet Song of Summer (1972)Jive Talkin' (1975)You Should Be Dancing (1976)How Deep Is Your Love (1977)Stayin Alive (1977)Night Fever (1977)Too Much Heaven (1978)Wildflower (1981)You Win Again (1987)Wish You Were Here (1989)This Is Where I Came In (2001)

Van Morrison & Linda Gail Lewis "You Win Again":”Crazy Arms”   ”Old Black Joe””Think Twice Before You Go”    ”No Way Pedro”             ”Shot of Rhythm and Blues”       ”Real Gone Lover”      Willy DeVille “(Live)”:   ”Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl”          ”Heart And Soul”            ”Can't Do Without It”    ”Maybe Tomorrow”      ”I Must Be Dreaming”     Pat Benatar ▪ Neil Giraldo "Live" -Summer Vacation Tour:”Hell Is For Children”   ”Heartbreaker”Escuchar audio

Van Morrison & Linda Gail Lewis “You Win Again”:”Let's Talk About Us”“You Win Again””Jambalaya (On the Bayou)””Crazy Arms””Old Black Joe””Think Twice Before You Go””No Way Pedro””Shot of Rhythm and Blues””Real Gone Lover””Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)?””Cadillac””Baby (You've Got What It Takes)””Boogie Chillen”John Lee Hooker “Boogie Chillen”Jerry Lee Lewis “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”Jerry Lee Lewis “Wall Around Heaven”Hank Williams “Your Cheating Heart”Escuchar audio

"The Sphere in Vegas: U2's Sonic Odyssey and the Future of Concert Venues"Larry Mishkin  is joined by great friend of the show, Alex Wellins to catch up and talk about a Grateful Dead concert held at Poly Pavilion on November 20th, 1971. Larry talks about the significance of the show, including the band's transition in music style, notable songs played, and the presence of famous basketball player Bill Walton in the audience. Later, Alex discusses recent concerts they attended, highlighting U2's performance at The Sphere in Las Vegas, known for its immersive audiovisual experience, and another show at the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco featuring the band St. Paul and the Broken Bones. Both Larry and Alex express enthusiasm about these diverse musical experiences..Produced by PodConx  Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast  Grateful DeadNovember 20, 1971Pauley Pavillion – UCLAL.A.Grateful Dead Live at Pauley Pavilion - University of California on 1971-11-20 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive By late 1971 Dead's transformation from Primal Dead to Americana Dead was well on it's way.  This concert is a great snapshot of that time, this show being more in the Americana camp with the a killer 25 minute jammed out Other One (including its Bill Kreutzman drum solo lead in) really being the only true nod to the Primal era . Also, the band was in transition as Pigpen missed the show as part of his descent into alcohol related illnesses that eventually took him in March 1973.  Keith had been playing with the band since February but Mickey began his “leave” in February after night one of the Capitol Theater run.  So this night is just five of them up on stage playing their hearts out for the fine students of UCLA and other Deadheads ( then a very brand new “thing” having just been recognized by the band in the liner message inside the Grateful Dead album stating:  “DEAD FREAKS UNITE!  WHO ARE YOU?  WHERE ARE YOU?  HOW ARE YOU? Send us your name and address and we'll keep you informed”) One fact that should be obvious given the venue and the time – an unknown UCLA student and want-a-be college basketball player, Bill Walton was in attendance along with some of his Bruins teammates for this first ever Dead show at Pauley Pavilion, famed home court for the UCLA Bruins, a team that following the amazing successes of Lew Alcindor (Kareem) and Sidney Wicks, now was being led for the first time by Bill and his teammates Jamaal Wilkes and Greg Lee (spoiler alert:  Bill has some success at UCLA too).  Bill, of course, went on to be an NBA All-Star and a regular attendee of Dead shows and, as Alex can attest, not unusual to see him at a West Coast dead show right up until the end – kind of hard to miss a 7 foot deadhead with his red hair and tie dye apparel.  Rumor has it when they knew he was going to be at a show the band would set up a basketball hoop backstage and that Bruce Hornsby was a hooper too. INTRO:               Bertha                           Track No. 1                           3:30 – 4:37 Great traditional opener although it was known to pop up in different spots during shows from time to time.  At this point, it is still “new” having been debuted earlier that year, on February 18th at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester.  Never released on a studio album, but it is the opening tune on the Dead's live album, “Grateful Dead” a/k/a Skull and Roses (or Phil's preferred name, “Skull Fuck” which was promptly rejected by their label, Warner Bros) on September 24, 1971.  From shows in NYC at the Fillmore East and the Hammerstein Ballroom in the Manhattan Center (plus Johnny B. Goode from Winterland – couldn't completely ignore the west coast). SHOW #1:          Tennessee Jed                           Track No. 5                           0:45 – 1:46 This is one of the “new” ones played in this show.  Along with Mexicali Blues, One More Saturday Night, Ramble On Rose and Jack Straw had all just been played for the first ever just two months earlier on October 19, 1971 at the Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis – also Keith's first show.  A tune that more than most really captures the change in the band's direction as you have Garcia previously of Dark Star, St. Stephen and Eleven fame twanging away, musically and vocally, on a song with a feel that is a cross between country, western and a dash of rock n roll.  Deadheads of Alex's and my era will note how much quicker the tempo is in this early version and Garcia's noticeable energy evident from his strong vocal performance. Played 436 times in concert, putting it at No. 15 of the list of the Dead's most played tunes.1st (again) on Oct. 19, 1971 in MPLSLast on July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago A great sing along tune that the Deadheads always enjoyed, normally found in the first set, towards the middle. SHOW #2:          Jack Straw                           Track No. 10                           :12 – 1:20 As just mentioned, this another “new” one just two months old.  Everyone loves Jack Straw, even the Band which is why it checks in at No. on list of most tunes played by the Band with 476 performances (last one on July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field).  But in this early version, there is a little bit of a change from the version we all know and love.  First, thing to know it is a tune by Hunter and Weir.  Garcia did not write it although he sang it with Weir in a “trading off of verses” style.  Second, in these early versions, before the Europe '72 tour, Weir sang all the verses like we just heard, “I just jumped the watchman, right outside the fence” was always sung by Jerry, but here, Weir sings it. Not sure of the reason for the change, but I like it a lot better with Jerry singing his verses (the other being “Gotta go to Tulsa, first train we can ride”).  First time with Jerry on vocals was May 3, 1972 at the Olympia Theater in Paris, that also just happens to be the version of the song that wound up on the Europe '72 album.  Although in its earlier years the song would appear in either first or second set, after their 1975 hiatus it became an almost exclusive first set song. And after Brent joined the band, almost always a show opener.  Home to the more than occasional Phil base bomb, it was one of the Band's most popular tunes and a great way to open any show (especially if they had just opened with Bertha the night before so you got to catch them both!). SHOW #3:          Ramble On Rose                           Track No. 18                           0:00 – 1:28 Last of the “new” ones that we will feature today.  Just like Tennessee Jed, upbeat, good energy, Jerry and the boys are having fun, like with any new creation.  Still working out all the details, the james, keeping track of the lyrics and Jerry has not yet developed his signature growl on “goodbye mamma and poppa, goodbye jack and jill”.  What I really like about this version and why I chose a clip from the beginning of the tune is to hear Keith's piano accompaniment that works so well with this song and adds another layer of creativity to the mix.  Garcia always seemed to get energy and inspiration from the band's keyboard players and Keith, even this early in his career, is no exception. After its introduction on Oct. 19, 1971 in Minny, played a total of 319 times, good for 39th place on the all time list, just behind US Blues and just ahead of Don't Ease Me In (really?).  Last played on June 27, 1995 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, MI. SHOW #4:          You Win Again                           Track No. 20                           1:12 – 2:21 "You Win Again" is a 1952 song by Hank Williams. In style, the song is a blues ballad and deals with the singer's despair with his partner. The song has been widely covered, including versions by Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, the Grateful Dead, Charley Pride, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. Hank Williams recorded "You Win Again" on July 11, 1952—one day after his divorce from Audrey Williams was finalized. Like "Cold, Cold Heart," the song was likely inspired by his tumultuous relationship with his ex-wife, "You Win Again" was released as the B-side to "Settin' the Woods on Fire", primarily because up-tempo, danceable numbers were preferable as A-sides for radio play and for the valuable jukebox trade. Nonetheless, "You Win Again" peaked at number ten on the Most Played in C&W Juke Boxes chart, where it remained for a single week. Over a time period of less than one year, the Dead played You Win Again 24 times in concert, the first on November 11, 1971 at the Municipal Auditorium in Austin, TX (this show in L.A. was only the third time it had been played) and the last on September 16, 1972 at The Music Hall in Boston.  A version of the song was released on the Europe '72 album (second album side), from their show on May 24, 1972 at The Strand Lyceum in London, one of the final shows on that tour. JGB recorded a version of the song in 1976 during the Reflections album sessions but not played live again.  It was briefly revived by The Dead with Dylan in 2003.  OUTRO:          Going Down The Road Feeling Bad                        Track No. 23                        3:45 – 5:12 "Going Down The Road Feeling Bad" (also known as the "Lonesome Road Blues") is a traditional American folk song, "a white blues of universal appeal and uncertain origin" The song was recorded by many artists through the years. The first known recording is from 1923 by Henry Whitter, an Appalachian singer,[2][3]as "Lonesome Road Blues". The earliest versions of the lyrics are from the perspective of an inmate in prison with the refrain, "I'm down in that jail on my knees" and a reference to eating "corn bread and beans."[4] The song has been recorded by many artists such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Skeeter Davis, Elizabeth Cotten, and the Grateful Dead, and the song is featured in To Bonnie from Delaney, "Mountain Jam", Born and Raised World Tour, The Grapes of Wrath, and Lucky Stars.Others who recorded it include Cliff Carlisle (also as "Down in the Jail on My Knees"), Woody Guthrie (also as "Blowin' Down This Road" or "I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way"), Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Roy Hall, Elizabeth Cotten and the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, Canned Heat and Dillard Chandler. Dead played it 302 times (No. 46 on the most played tunes list just behind a tie between Mama Tried and Terrapin and just ahead of Birdsong).  1st time on October 10, 1970 at Colden Auditorium, part of Queens College in Queens, NY.Last played on July 5, 1985 at the Riverport Amphitheater in Maryland Heights, MO. During the time period of this show it was almost always paired with Not Fade Away (as made famous at the end of the Grateful Dead album).  In later years, when Alex and I were regulars on tour, it would show up as a second set tune, usually, but not always after Drums/Space.  A very upbeat tune that the band obviously loved playing the crowd loved hearing. For our purposes, a great way to end the show and say goodbye and HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

Johnny Cash "Get Rhythm"The Replacements "I Hate Music"Lil Hardin Armstrong "Harlem On Saturday Night"Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses) "After Mardi Gras"Jake Xerxes Fussell "Jump for Joy"The Two Poor Boys - Joe Evans & Arthur McClain "Sitting On Top of the World"S.G. Goodman "Patron Saint Of The Dollar Store"Joseph Spence "We Shall Be Happy"Jimmie Lunceford "I'm Nuts About Screwy Music"Shovels & Rope "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain (feat. John Moreland)"Bessie Jones "Titanic"Etta Baker "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"Freakwater "Bolshevik and Bollweevil"The Breeders "Do You Love Me Now?"Billie and De De Pierce "Lonesome Road"Joan Shelley "Pull Me Up One More Time"Amos Milburn "After Midnight"The Both "Volunteers of America"Aretha Franklin "Never Grow Old"Slim Cessna's Auto Club "Port Authority Band"Butterbeans & Susie "Been Some Changes Made"Nina Nastasia "Just Stay in Bed"Bo Diddley "Cops and Robbers"McKinney's Cotton Pickers "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams - Take 1"Andrew Bird "Underlands"Superchunk "My Gap Feels Weird"John Fahey "St Louis Blues"Gillian Welch "I Made a Lovers Prayer"Huey "Piano" Smith "Don't You Just Know It"Billie Holiday "Sugar"Songs: Ohia "Blue Chicago Moon"Mississippi Fred McDowell "Poor Boy, Long Way From Home"Joel Paterson "Callin' the Cat"Chicago Stone Lightning Band "Do Yourself a Favor"Johnny Cash "You Win Again"Emile Barnes & Peter Bocage "When I Grow Too Old to Dream"The Yardbirds "Evil Hearted You"Muddy Waters "Hey, Hey"Bonnie "Prince" Billy "I Have Made a Place"Bessie Smith "After You've Gone"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Colour of the Blues"Ruth Brown "Teardrops from My Eyes"Furry Lewis "Judge Boushay Blues"Sons of the Pioneers "One More River to Cross"Marty Stuart "Hey Porter"Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash "Girl from the North Country"Johnny Cash "I See a Darkness"Chisel "The Last Good Time"

Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with Rob Fraboni, Renowned Record Producer and Sound Engineer About Harvey's guest: Today's special guest, Rob Fraboni, is a legendary record producer and sound engineer who's worked with some of the greatest music artists of all time, including The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, The Band, Eric Clapton, Patti LaBelle, Melissa Etheridge and Bonnie Raitt, whose “Green Light” album earned him a Grammy Award nomination.   As Vice President at Island Records, he oversaw the remastering of the entire Bob Marley catalog.  He produced the soundtrack on Martin Scorsese's groundbreaking concert movie, “The Last Waltz”, widely considered to be the greatest concert film ever made – and earning him another Grammy Award nomination.    He meticulously designed and built the world famous Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, where so many great albums were recorded.  In 1989 he was nominated for Producer of the Year at the New York Music Awards.   In 2002, he won a Grammy Award for best Country Album for his production of Keith Richards' performance of "You Win Again" on the Hank Williams tribute album, “Timeless”.   And in 2005, he received yet ANOTHER Grammy nomination for Best Blues Album, for Hubert Sumlin's album entitled, “About Them Shoes”.  And the following year, he won the award for Best Blues Album at The Blues Music Awards.   In his autobiography, Keith Richards said it all when he referred to our guest, quite simply, as a genius.   For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ https://www.robfraboni.com/https://www.facebook.com/rfraboni/ https://twitter.com/robfrabonihttps://www.instagram.com/robfraboni #robfraboni  #harveybrownstoneinterviews

"A girl I became friends with on a school trip in high school fell asleep on my shoulders on the ride back." "I'm still coasting on that memory."   Crimson and Clover and Crystal Blue Persuasion were on the same album. I was 11. It was one of my first and biggest music memories of "my" music...and perhaps it was the first record I wore out. Literally. Listening to Top 40 radio was a constant in the car. At home, the biggest memory and influence was my dad's 1962 Ray Charles' record, Modern Sounds of Country and Western Music. Side one 1. "Bye Bye Love" 2. "You Don't Know Me" 3. "Half as Much" 4. "I Love You So Much It Hurts" 5. "Just a Little Lovin' (Will Go a Long Way)" 6. "Born to Lose" Side two 1. "Worried Mind" 2. "It Makes No Difference Now" 3. "You Win Again" 4. "Careless Love" 5. "I Can't Stop Loving You" 6. "Hey, Good Lookin'"     My early music experiences consisted of great rhythm and harmonies. My sister loved The Lettermen and later on, The Carpenters. For me, Ray Charles was hard to beat. For a little kid, not yet a teenager, I was falling in love with music. The albums were played on a piece of furniture. Homes with music had stereo consoles. Junior high brought on a new music-related interest, hi-fi stereo gear. That fueled even deeper and broader interest in records. Tons of music memories have provided a good coasting surface for my life. Watching the documentary about Ben Fong-Torres, famous music editor for Rolling Stone magazine brought back lots of memories of the 1970s and the music that once dominated my life. But music is just part of the memories I coast on. Words increasingly mattered, and not just the song lyrics. I devoured Ben Fong-Torres' writing. And Hunter S. Thompson. And Cameron Crowe. Their writing wasn't like anything familiar to me. Ben wrote about music and musicians. Hunter, well, he wrote about lots of stuff. Popular culture. Politics. I didn't care that much about the topics, but I enjoyed how Hunter wrote. Crowe, like Ben, he was writing about musicians. I read their stuff regularly adding a new coasting surface for memories - words. Music. Technology. Words. The convergence of these 3 things happened in the 1970s. The song remains the same. Memories reflected my future. And my present. Memories don't determine the present or the future, but they influence it. Our memories are part of us. What has happened to us helps define us. The guy coasting on the memory of the girl who fell asleep on his shoulder indicates how something so small can linger for so long...and even fuel us along the way. It's not about coasting in the sense that we don't do anything. Not putting any effort into anything. I don't know what memories you may leverage for coasting, but it did make me think of what memories might be fueling me. I began the conversation with memories of music because music has accompanied every era of my life so far. I don't suspect it's going to stop until my life stops. But I'm not coasting on it. Any of it. It's not a driving force so much as a soundtrack, a key but minor player in the grand scheme of things. I started thinking of the memory this guy shared and wondering if I had any such memories. I'm not at a loss for pivotal memories, but I'm not sure I've got any single memory that fuels me like that. One of my first thoughts was about family and faith. And not separately, but how connected they are for me. I've long thought that I hit the lottery when it came to being born into a Christian home where I was taught the Bible and where I learned about God. And myself. From grandparents to parents to old men and old women, I was fortunate enough to have great teachers. I didn't have to go searching for God or the truth. It was handed to me on a platter. I only had to read, listen, learn and figure out on my own whether I'd embrace it or not. It wasn't about indoctrination as much as it was about exp...

BOOTS & SADDLE - May 31, 2022 1. Goodbye Seems So Easy - Skinny Dyck (Skinny Dyck & Friends: Twenty One-Nighters - 2017) 2. Remembering Gary [instrumental] - Dale Watson (Dale Watson Presents: The Memphians - 2021) 3. Big City - Merle Haggard (Big City - 1981) 4. I Won't Live That Long - Wynn Stewart (Love's Gonna Happen To Me - 1967) 5. Before You Go - Buck Owens (Before You Go / No One But You - 1965) 6. She Didn't Color Daddy - Kay Adams (Make Mine Country - 1967) 7. Roll, Truck, Roll - Red Simpson (Roll, Truck, Roll - 1966) 8. Jean Arthur - Robbie Fulks (Very Best Of - 2000) 9. Guitar Town - Steve Earle (Guitar Town 1986) 10. Maybe a Moment - Justin Townes Earle (Kids In the Street - 2017) 11. Relief is Just a Swallow Away - George Jones (The Ballad Side Of George Jones - 1963) 12. Oklahoma Hills - Ian Tyson (Ian Tyson - 1984) 13. Living Free - Carter Felker (Even The Happy Ones Are Sad - 2022) 14. Colour My Love - Shaela Miller (Bad Ideas - 2018) 15. Beautiful Texas Sunshine - Doug Sahm (The Return of Wayne Douglas - 2000) 16. En Mi Viejo San Juan - Trio Los Panchos Y Javier Solis (Los Panchos Y Las Voces De Javier Solis, Estela Raval Y Gigliola Cinquetti - 1972) 17. Medium Rare - Wade Mosher [instrumental] 18. Lonely Little World - Jean Shepard (Single - 1960) 19. The Carroll County Accident - Porter Wagoner (The Carroll County Accident - 1967) 20. Phantom 309 - Red Sovine (Phantom 309 - 1967) 21. Thanks a Lot - Ernest Tubb (Thanks A Lot - 1964) 22. Buckaroo - The Buckaroo (The Instrumental Hits of Buck Owens and His Buckaroos - 1965) 23. Apartment #9 - Tammy Wynette (Your Good Girls Gonna Go Bad - 1967) 24. OD' In Denver - Hank Williams Jr. (Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound - 1979) 25. Town Song (Live) | Andrew Neville w/ Lost Country (A Night of Country Music - 2019) 26. Washed up Troubadour - Leo Rondeau (Right On Time - 2019) 27. Listen With Your Eyes - Dennis J. Leise (State Of Fairs - 2019) 28. Leavin' on Your Mind - Patsy Cline (Single - 1963) 29. You Didn't Have to Go All the Way - Junior Brown (Guit with It - 1993) 30. Night Life - Ray Price (Night Life - 1963) 31. I'm The Fool (Who Told You To Go) - Asleep at the Wheel (Comin' Right At Ya - 1973) 32. Saginaw, Michigan - Lefty Frizzell (Saginaw, Michigan - 1964) 33. (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night - Tom Waits (The Heart Of Saturday Night - 1974) 34. You Win Again [instrumental] - Jeff Bradshaw & Dave Hamilton (Swingin' Country Dance Toons - 2003) 35. Tumbling Tumbleweeds - Sons Of The Pioneers (Single 1946) 36. Closing/Oh! Susanna (Show 9) - Hank Williams (The Garden Spot Programs, 1950 - 2014)

In this week's episode of 36 From The Vault we find the band prepping for their Europe ‘72 tour with a run of shows at the Academy of Music in New York City. Featuring a set with Bo Diddley, this volume highlights the emergence of Keith Godchaux in the band + showcases some of the best Pigpen we've ever heard through the Dick's Picks series. Disc One features the majority of The Dead's set with Bo Diddley on March 25. Showcasing their brilliance as a backing band, we hear them dip into the Blues for perhaps the last time in the 70s. Highlighted by a stunning “Jam” between Diddley and The Dead we see an alternate path for the band + their ability to linger in a variety of American styles throughout their career. The disc ends with a few one-off covers for the band + an excellent “Playin In The Band” from March 27.The final three discs encompass the entire May 28th show. Featuring a number of rarities through the Dick's Picks series, it's a great peek into the band during this period. On Disc Two, Pigpen shines on “Chinatown Shuffle, “Mr. Charlie,” and “Next Time You See Me.” Jerry's vocals on “You Win Again” showcase his ability to be as much a Blues man as he is a psych master, and “Cumberland Blues” rivals the version on the Europe ‘72 release. On Disc Three we hear perhaps the greatest “Looks Like Rain” ever played, plus we hear another excellent, early cut on “Playin In The Band,” before Pigpen highlights his emotional side with “The Stranger (Two Souls In Communion).” Disc Four displays the band's experimentation with a lengthy “The Other One,” before closing the set out with a laid back “Not Fade Away -> Going Down The Road Feelin Bad -> Not Fade Away.” It's a great snapshot of The Dead ahead of a transformative period in their career. By year's end they'd be a completely different band. 36 from the Vault is a production of Osiris Media. It is edited, produced and mastered by Brian Brinkman. All music composed by Amar Sastry, unless otherwise noted. Logo design by Liz Bee Art & Design. The executive producer of 36 from the Vault is RJ Bee. ---We're thrilled to be sponsored by Grady's Cold Brew. Use Promo Code: VAULT for 20% off your first orderVisit Sunset Lake CBD and use promo code VAULT for 20% off your purchase---Please consider reviewing this podcast on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We invite you to listen to Dick's Picks Vol. 31 in anticipation of our next episode, which will drop on Monday, May 23! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

BOOTS & SADDLE - February 1, 2022 1. Stop Feeling Sorry - Dick Damron (Single - 1963) | Starday Sessions - 1961 & 1963) 2. Folsom Prison Blues - Johnny Cash (At Folsom Prison - 1968) 3. Busted - Johnny Cash (At Folsom Prison - 1968) 4. Highway 87 - Corb Lund (Songs My Friends Wrote - 2022) 5. Crying Blues - Shaela Miller (Big Hair Small City - 2021) 6. Access to Joy - Skinny Dyck (Get To Know Lonesome - 2020) 7. Drive Day - Scott Nolan (Montgomery Eldorado - 2011) 8. Wake Up - Robbie Brass & Red Wine (Lonely Lady - 1981) 9. Frisky Fingers - The Stanley County Cut-Ups (The Stanley County Cut-Ups EP - 2021) 10. Hello Heartache - Scotty Campbell (Smokin' and Drinkin' - 2008) 11. It's All Over - Fern Dauth (Fern Dauth Of Country Music Hall - 1967) 12. I Wouldn't Take a Million Dollars for a Single Maple Leaf - Roy Payne (Goofy Newfie - 1969) 13. White Silver Sands [instrumental] - Roy Penney (Twistin' The Pick - 1965) 14. Handsome Ghost - Andrina Turenne w/ Damon Mitchell (We Still Gotta Lotta Livin' To Do - 2020) 15. Stop Your World - Diane Merritt (Angel Of My Dreams) 16. Lucky Crow - Vince Andrushko (Almost Home - 2009) 17. Let You Down - Romi Mayes (Devil on Both Shoulders - 2015) 18. ‘Cause I'm a Travelin' Man - Ray St. Germain (My Many Moods - 2003) 19. Listening to Keith Whitley - Lawrence Maxwell (Ballad of Miles - 2022) 20. The Simple Man - The Denim Daddies (Single - 2022) 21. Lefties - Gordie Tentrees (Mean Old World - 2021) 22. Running Away - Lester Slade (Burnt Out Lightning - 2022) 23. Trying to Survive - Mike Lynch (Songs from the Tub [Part 1] - 2021) 24. Poet and the Poor Boy - Trevor Tchir (Sun & Moon - 2021) 25. Let's Go All The Way - Shirley Mae Carr And The Blue Valley Boys (Let's Go All The Way) 26. Give Me 40 Acres - Dick Nolan (Truck Driving Man - 1964) 27. Before the Next Teardrop Falls - Lucille Starr (Lonely Street (Expanded Edition) - 1969) 28. No One Will Ever Know - Bill Long (My Favorite Songs) 29. Match Box - Eastwind (Eastwind - 1974) 30. You Win Again [instrumental] - Jeff Bradshaw & Dave Hamilton (Swingin' Country Dance Toons - 2003) 31. Wonderin' If Willie - Marie Bottrell (The Star - 1980)

BOOTS & SADDLE - September 14, 2021 1. Rock Bottom Population 1 - Robbie Fulks (Country Love Songs - 1996) 2. Not a Dry Eye in the House - Dallas Wayne (I'll Take the Fifth - 2009) 3. Something Borrowed - Brennen Leigh (The Box - 2010)  4. The Honky-Tonk Life I Lead - John Evans. (Brewed In Texas [Compilation] - 2002) 5. Still Water Runs the Deepest - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys (Single - 1948) 6. Margarita, Margarita (feat. Santiago Jimenez, Jr.) - Garrett T. Capps (I Love San Antone - 2021) 7. Give It Time - Sierra Ferrell (Long Time Coming - 2021) 8. Every Night I Have a Dream - Jake Vaadeland (Retro Man - 2021) 9. Iron Mountain - Trevor Tchir (Sun & Moon - 2021) 10. Rolling Stone from Texas - Don Walser (Rolling Stone from Texas - 1994) 11. Song for My Sister - Micah Erenberg (Art Week (the album) - 2020)  12. Leave This World Behind - The Sadies (Internal Sounds - 2013)  13. I Learned It All from You - Jean Shepard (This Is Jean Shepard - 1959)  14. Rubbernecked [instrumental] - Mike T. Kerr (Mother Trucker II: Lookin' for a Back Door - 2021) 15. I'm Ashamed of You - Amber Digby (Music from the Honky Tonks - 2007) 16. Six Years Come September - American Aquarium (Lamentations - 2020) 17. The Keeper of the Keys - Wynn Stewart (Single - 1956) 18. Rock Me Back to Little Rock - Jan Howard (Rock Me Back To Little Rock - 1970) 19. The Moon Is Up (The Stars Are Out) - Rudy Grayzell (Single - 1956) 20. A Chip off the Barroom Floor - Elijah Ocean (Born Blue - 2021) 21. Wind Walker - Gordie Tentrees (Mean Old World - 2021) 22. You Don't Want to Belong to Me - Dennis J. Leise (The World That You Grew Up In Is No More - 2021) 23. Ain't Nobody's Business But My Own (feat. Sweet Sassy Molassey) - Wild Earp & The Free for Alls (Dyin' for Easy Livin' - 2021) 24. If You're Leaving - Nicholas Campbell (Livin' and Other Western Ideas - 2021) 25. It's Been A Good Year - Tammi Savoy and the Chris Casello Combo (Single - 2021) 26. Dallas Alice - Doug Sahm (The Return of Wayne Douglas - 2000) 27. The Hanging Tree - Marty Robbins (Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs - 1959) 28. Your Way, My Way - Jeannie Seely (I'll Love You More - 1968) 29. Country Music Star - Wayne Rusky (Single) 30. Let Me Be the One - Goldie Hill (Single - 1953) 31. You Win Again [instrumental] - Jeff Bradshaw & Dave Hamilton (Swingin' Country Dance Toons - 2003) 32. Ordinary and Plain - Campland (Single - 2021)

Hey Now! what a great second set this week as we explore the rest of the band's performance on September 26, 1972 at teh Stanley Theater in Jersey City, New Jersey.  Right out of the gate we get a wonderful psychedelic ride with a 20 minute 'Playin In The Band'. Phil is all over this. They follow up with the very last performance of 'You Win Again'. 'El Paso' follows but things get sharp again with Half Step and Greatest Story Ever Told (albeit with a Donna wail). 'Tomorrow Is Forever' is the 2nd of 10 played in 72. Truckin' follows and turns into a monster jam with the Other One jam coming in around the 21 minute mark. This leads to the last 'Baby Blue' until 1974. The encore following the 'Sugar Mag', features a short but unique '26 Miles' tuning before 'Johnny B Goode' sends everyone home..     Grateful Dead Stanley Theater Jersey City, NJ 9/26/72 - Tuesday Two     Playing In The Band [21:15] ; You Win Again [3:49] ; El Paso [4:18] ; Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo [7:07] ; Greatest Story Ever Told [5:04] ; Tomorrow Is Forever [5:22] ; Truckin'[20:56] > The Other One Jam [13:14] > It's All Over Now, Baby Blue [7:15] ; Sugar Magnolia [8:36] Encore     26 Miles Tuning [0:24] > Johnny B. Goode [3:41]   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod071621.mp3  hope you are well.. thanks for hanging with us and for your support.   

BOOTS & SADDLE - April 13, 2021 1. April's Fool - Jack Greene (Lord Is That Me - 1970) 2. Souvenir - Scotty Campbell (Damned If I Recall - 1999) 3. Destroy Me - Chef Adams (Singer / Songwriter  - 1969) 4. Fort Benton - Caroline Keys (Mean To Stay - 2017) 5. I'll Never Get Over You - Theo Lawrence (Single - 2021) 6. Life Sentence Blues - Rachel Brooke (Single - 2021) 7. How Soon - Katie Jo (Pawn Shop Queen - 2021) 8. Foolin' - West of Texas (Heartache, Hangovers & Honky Tonks - 2021) 9. Call Yourself My Man - Hannah Juanita (Single - 2021) 10. Let The Train Blow The Whistle - Johnny Cash (American Recordings - 1994) 11. Diesel Smoke Dangerous Curves - Red Simpson (Truck Drivin' Fool - 1967) 12. Papa Was a Steel Headed-Man - Robbie Fulks (Country Love Songs - 1996) 13. Honky Tonk World - Bonnie Sloan (Single - 1956) 14. Agent Elvis [instrumental] - Dale Watson (Dale Watson Presents: The Memphians - 2021) 15. Rose Colored Frames - Mariel Buckley (Driving In The Dark - 2018) 16. In the Corner - Charley Crockett (10 for Slim: Charley Crockett Sings James Hand - 2021) 17. You Don't Have Very Far to Go - Rosanne Cash (Seven Year Ache - 1981) 18. Swinging Doors - Smiley Bates (Country Tears - 1973) 19. N.B to T.O - Al Hooper (N.B to T.O)  20. Anybody Goin' To San Antone - Brent Williams (On The Go - 1970) 21. Heart, Don't Let Me Down - Ray St. Germain (There's No Love Like Our Love - 1995) 22. Old Vienna Beer and Redwine Music - Robbie Brass & Red Wine (Red Wine - 1977) 23. Song I Can't Write - The Golden Roses (Devil's In The Details - 2021) 24. It's Better If You Never Know - Melissa Carper (Daddy's Country Gold - 2021) 25. Handful of Nothing - The Divorcees (Drop of Blood - 2021) 26. Chance in Hell - Bobby Dove (Hopeless Romantic - 2021) 27. No One Way to Live - Little Miss Higgins (We Still Gotta Lotta Livin' To Do - 2020) 28. 90 Seconds of Your Time - Corb Lund (Agricultural Tragic - 2020) 29. A Little Unfair - Ezra Lee (Motor Head Baby - 2015) 30. Shackles and Chains - Johnny Paycheck (The Beginning)  31. You Win Again [instrumental] - Jeff Bradshaw & Dave Hamilton (Swingin' Country Dance Toons - 2003) 32. For the Good Times - Cindi Cain (Single - 1988)

1987: Thomas Gottschalk moderiert erstmals die Fernsehsendung Wetten Dass? und die Bee Gees bringen „You win again“ heraus.

Set 1:BerthaMe And My UncleMr. CharlieYou Win AgainBlack Throated WindChinatown ShuffleLoserMe And Bobby McGeeCumberland BluesPlaying In The BandTennessee JedEl PasoBig Boss ManBeat It On Down The Lined2t02 -

This week brings a *huge* first set Deadpod for you, from the famous run of shows at the Academy of Music in New York City on March 23, 1972. This set runs over 2 hours and contains 18 songs!  The band was gearing up for the upcoming Europe tour and I think this is one of the best shows of that run. Some of the many highlights include a great 'I Know You Rider' , Pigpen's 'Chinatown Shuffle', the third ever 'Looks Like Rain' with Jerry on the pedal steel, Keith does some great work on 'You Win Again'. The 'Jack Straw' is spot on, and 'Me & Bobby McGee' is one of their best.  I'm sure in these two hours you'll find some favorites of your own!    Grateful Dead Academy of Music New York, NY 3/23/72 - Thursday One     China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider ; Black Throated Wind ; Chinatown Shuffle ; Brown Eyed Women ; Beat It On Down The Line ; Cumberland Blues ; Looks Like Rain ; Mr. Charlie ; Tennessee Jed ; El Paso ; You Win Again ; Jack Straw ; Next Time You See Me ; Playing In The Band ; Comes A Time [7:30] ; Me And Bobby McGee [5:53] ; CaseyJones [5:44]    You can listen to this week's Deadpod here:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod031320.mp3   Finally, a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Phil Lesh who turns 80 on Sunday!!   

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rumble" by Link Wray. ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra's autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband's side. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with "Whole Lotta Shakin'" and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis' work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript   We've looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we're going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I'm not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn't see them that way, and I don't want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you're affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on "Johnny B. Goode", and coming back on February the second for "Yakety Yak" by the Coasters. We're hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We'll see from this point on that every few years there's a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions -- and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally... [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with "Whole Lotta Shakin'". He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis' mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn't quite work out that way. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs -- this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who'd appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis' films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn't the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single "Wait and See". There were also a few performances by musicians who weren't strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, "I Don't Like You No More"] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Glad All Over"] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn't written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips' publishing partners as well as being Elvis'. It was to be Carl Perkins' last record for Sun -- Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him -- Jerry Lee's records were credited to "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano". Why did Carl's records never say anything about Carl's guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as "the rocking guitar man", but it was too late -- Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they'd start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins -- Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash's records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like "Big River" that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like "Ballad of a Teenage Queen": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Ballad of a Teenage Queen"] It's quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn't. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to "Blue Suede Shoes" at Sun, and he'd passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but "I thought both of them was junk!" and he'd chosen the one that was slightly less awful -- that's not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down "Great Balls of Fire": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips' main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song's writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We've met Otis Blackwell briefly before -- he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written "Fever" for Little Willie John, "You're the Apple of My Eye" for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis -- "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up". We don't have access to his demo of "Great Balls of Fire", but in the seventies he recorded an album called "These are My Songs", featuring many of the hits he'd written for other people, and it's possible that the version of "Great Balls of Fire" on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, "Great Balls of Fire"] "Great Balls of Fire" seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It's a refinement of the "Whole Lotta Shakin'" formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where "Whole Lotta Shakin'" starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] "Great Balls of Fire" has a much more dynamic opening -- one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins -- it's very reminiscent of the intro to "Blue Suede Shoes": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the "Blue Suede Shoes" manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can't imagine Lewis turning "Glad All Over", fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up "Whole Lotta Shakin'". Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of "Great Balls of Fire" that was suitable for the film, but it wasn't right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut -- paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren't the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis' band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums -- according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. "Great Balls of Fire"? Didn't that sound a bit... Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil's music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was -- he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When "Great Balls of Fire" came out, with a cover of Hank Williams' ballad "You Win Again" on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It's one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come -- everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number "Big Legged Woman": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Big Legged Woman"] But they decided that they didn't want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, "Breathless". This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar -- Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis' career at the expense of everyone else's, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips -- and Jerry Lee's cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name -- it didn't stand for anything -- and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis' band. "Breathless" was very much in the same style as "Great Balls of Fire", if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Breathless"] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he'd been a hit -- Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary -- in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music -- though that was great -- but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry's father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting "You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake." Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry's belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of "Great Balls of Fire", and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that's because of Lewis' admiration for Berry's songwriting -- he's called Berry "the Hank Williams of rock and roll" before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that's about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world -- Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck's side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential -- a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "High School Confidential"] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I've been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn't erase Brown's experience, doesn't excuse Lewis' behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn't minimise child abuse -- which, and let's be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl -- let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure -- then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It's important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we'll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is "and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life". That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn't some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn't see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen -- Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her -- and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one's cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee's extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don't believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn't mean we can't judge them harshly. And it's not as if everyone in Jerry Lee's own culture was completely accepting of this. They'd married in secret, and when Myra's father -- Jerry Lee's cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown -- found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn't. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called "The Flying Saucer": [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called "The Return of Jerry Lee", having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee "answer" them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, "The Return of Jerry Lee"] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota -- especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra's physical attractiveness -- the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis' career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips' brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun's back catalogue -- in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun's vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun's vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun's rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and "Another Place, Another Time" went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Another Place, Another Time"] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances -- his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It's not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies -- he insists that was an accident -- and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra's brother's ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He's eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.  

Steve and the team are joined by Dame Helen Mirren to talk about her role as Catherine the Great in the Sky Atlantic series of the same name, comedian Romesh Ranganathan's book Straight Outta Crawley has been published in paperback and Rowan Lyle & Martin Spooner chat about playing Barry & Robin Gibb in the Bee Gees tribute show, You Win Again which is touring the UK.

As we roll into Thanksgiving week, here is an outstanding first set from a great tour that took place during the Fall of 1971. This is from November 14th, 1971 at Fort Worth Texas. Part of this show was released as a (now out of print) Road Trips, but the entire show is a treasure and features a young band full of energy and fire. They open with a fine 'Bertha' with Keith's piano leading the way.. they follow with a 25-beat 'Beat It On Down the Line', but Billy stops at 24 so they reset with Garcia calling for '3'...it crackles. 'China Cat' follows with some wonderful soaring Garcia leads. the train starts rollin' in the fine transition into 'I Know You Rider' and I can just imagine the dancing! Don't overlook the fine 'El Paso' that follows, it has some beautiful Garcia throughout.. I won't try and describe each of these standards - some were new at the time others not, but this is a great recording of a period when the band was transitioning from its earlier more 'primal' sound to a bit slower tempo, '72 pace.     Grateful Dead Texas Christian University Fort Worth, TX 11/14/71 - Sunday One Bertha [5:54] Beat It On Down The Line [3:00] China Cat Sunflower [5:24] > I Know You Rider [5:18] El Paso [4:34] > Sugaree [6:27] Jack Straw [4:52] Big Railroad Blues [3:20] Me And Bobby McGee [5:31] Loser [6:24] Playing In The Band [5:59] Tennessee Jed [6:47] You Win Again [2:17] Mexicali Blues [3:18] Casey Jones [5:25] One More Saturday Night [4:30]   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod111618.mp3     I hope you all have a very happy and safe Thanksgiving! Be sure and look on Thanksgiving morning for a special Deadpod coming your way a day early next week.   Thank you as always for your support and for listening to the Deadpod!    

This week's Deadpod is the result of a request from a longtime listener/supporter of the show. It comes to us from early in 1972, March 5th, 1972, only the second show of that legendary year, and the last time that Pigpen played with the band in San Francisco. This show was a benefit for the American Indains, and the Dead were the third band on the agenda. It turns out that they were pressed for time a bit by the 2 AM curfew, and so the second set was a bit abbreviated and rushed. I've only presented here the songs that survive in soundboard format, and while there are several patches and glitches here the exuberance and magic of the performance won me over and I think it will you as well. The jamming, especially Garcia of course, comes at you in staccato bursts, in songs like Mexicali Blues and El Paso. The highlight of the show of course, is Pigpen's 'Good Lovin'. It is here, around the 6:40 mark, that some report the first occurance of the legendary 'mind left body' jam. I find the entire performance to be uptempo.. it makes me smile.. I hope you do too.   Grateful Dead Winterland Arena San Francisco, CA 3/5/72 - Sunday One (first 6 songs missing) Tennessee Jed [6:50] Jack Straw [4:52] China Cat Sunflower [#5:48] > I Know You Rider [4:#55] Mexicali Blues [3:32] You Win Again [349] El Paso [#4:18] Casey Jones [#5:57] Two Good Lovin' [16:24] Not Fade Away [3:20] > Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad [7:08] > Not Fade Away [3:10] Encore One More Saturday Night [#4:29]   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod092818.mp3   keep the faith..

Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Playlist 0′00″ It Ain't The Meat by The Swallows on 50s Doo Wop Essentials (Master Classics Records) 3′54″ Daddy Daddy by Ruth Brown on Ruth Brown (Rhino Atlantic) 6′08″ Louisiana by Percy Mayfield on Poet Of The Blues (Reissue) (Specialty Records) 8′05″ Lillie Mae by Smiley Lewis on True Blues, Vol. 3 (Shami Media Group 3) 11′48″ Mr. Highway Man by Howlin' Wolf on 50s Blues (Sun Records - X5 Music Group) 14′11″ Why Don't You Eat Where You Slept Last Night? by Zuzu Bollin on Texas Bluesman (New West Records) 17′08″ Two Little Girls by Jimmy Witherspoon on Jay's Blues (King Records) 20′59″ You Win Again by Hank Williams on The Best Of Hank Williams 20th Century Masters The Millennium Collection Volume 2 (Universal Strategic Marketing) 23′28″ You Know I Love You by B.B. King on Bad Case of Love (Compose Records) 26′36″ My Song by Johnny Ace on The Complete Duke Recordings (Universal Strategic Marketing) 30′28″ Have Mercy Baby by Dominoes,Billy Ward on Jukebox One Hit Wonders (X5 Music Group) 32′34″ All Night Baby by The Robins on I Must Be Dreamin' (El Toro Records Legendary Masters) 35′38″ Back Door Friend by Jimmy Rogers on Chicago Bound (Universal Special Markets) 40′49″ Juke by Little Walter on The Essential Little Walter (Universal Special Markets) 43′24″ Street Walking Woman by T-Bone Walker on The Complete Imperial Recordings: 1950-1954 (Parlophone Catalogue) 46′32″ I Don't Know by Willie Mabon on The Chess Blues-Rock Songbook (Geffen) 50′29″ Let's call it a day by Sonny Thompson on Mellow Blues (Epm) 53′36″ Goin' Home by Fats Domino on Fats Domino Swings (Capitol Records, LLC) 55′11″ You Belong To Me by Jo Stafford on Greatest Hits (Int'l Only) (Capitol Records) 58′54″ Port Of Rico by Illinois Jacquet on Verve: The Sound Of America: The Singles Collection (Universal Music Group) Check out the full archives on the website.

This week we go back to the start of a legendary run that took place in the Spring of 1972, in New York City at the Academy of Music on March 21st. Off and on there are a few sonic problems with the tape - Garcia's vocals are buried in the opening 'Bertha' and there is a hum here and there, but overall well worth a listen. Garcia is on fire throughout and while some of the songs are still being developed the band is clearly evolving toward the Europe 72 sound you are probably very familiar with. Love the 'Playing In The Band' one of the first versions with some really out there jamming after the first verses. 'Looks like Rain' features Garcia on slide guitar and Pigpen is fabulous throughout. 'Cumberland Blues' is simply explosive.       Grateful Dead Academy of Music New York, NY 3/21/72 - Tuesday   One Bertha ; Black Throated Wind ; Sugaree ; Next Time You See Me ; Greatest Story Ever Told ; Loser ; Mr. Charlie ; Looks Like Rain ; Tennessee Jed ; Playing In The Band ; You Win Again ; Cumberland Blues ; Chinatown Shuffle ; El Paso ; Good Lovin' > Casey Jones   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod031618.mp3   Hope you enjoy this week's Deadpod. My thanks for your support!            

This month we take a look at a few of those New Year's Eve performances and play some choice cuts to help you close out your year. We've got the Rock & Roll, Blues, and, my personal favorite genre, Face-Melting Jams. So, polish off the egg nog and break into the bubbly, cos we're gonna party like it's 1969. Please, don't forget to follow the  >@BrokedownPod twitter account for regular news, live tweetstorms of shows as I listen, and other minutiae. We also now have an Instagram account. If you like pictures of things, you can find that here: BrokedownPod Instagram. Also, if you use iTunes, please consider posting a review as it really help get the word out. Set One  China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider (69), Next Time You See Me (69), You Win Again (71), Big Boy Pete (69), Dire Wolf (70), Mister Charlie (71), Box Of Rain (72), Jam > Black Peter (71), Uncle John’s Band (69) Set Two Sugar Magnolia* (72), Truckin’ > The Other One* > Morning Dew* (72), Sunshine Daydream* (72)   *with David Crosby

In this episode, Charis and Fallon discuss episode 111: You Win Again. TV Guide Synopsis - Rayna and Juliette's duet becomes a hit, but certain guests make their celebration party awkward. Meanwhile, Teddy reveals his suspicions about Rayna and Liam; Gunnar must handle problems concerning his family; and Avery lets fame go to his head. Charis and Fallon discuss the Nash Fash and What's happening on the 'gram. Join our Facebook group - letstalknashville.com has all the info!

As we head into December I decided to bring you one of the classic December '71 shows from the Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden, New York City, NY. This week's show comes from 12/7/71 ... While I featured the classic from 12/5 a few years back I think you'll enjoy this one as well. This is an early Keith show, but Pigpen is here as well and does a fine rendition of 'Run Rudolph, Run' to get you in that Holiday spirit :) While none of these songs may go off into extended jams I am certain you'll appreciate the musicianship they show in each and every one..       Grateful Dead Felt Forum - Madison Square Garden New York, NY 12/7/71 - Tuesday   One   Cold Rain And Snow ; Beat It On Down The Line ; Mr. Charlie ; Sugaree ; Jack Straw ; Next Time You See Me ; Tennessee Jed ; El Paso ; Brokedown Palace ; Run Rudolph Run ; You Win Again ; Cumberland Blues ; Casey Jones   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod120916.mp3   Finally I decided to play a wonderful piece from a brand new release that just came out from Holly Bowling. Enjoy her version of 'Unbroken Chain'.. her CD or Album is available from Royal Potato Family records here:   http://royalpotatofamily.com/product/holly-bowling-better-left-unsung/   or from Amazon   Thanks so much for your support of the Deadpod!!!        

A quintessential 1972 Grateful Dead second set is on the docket for this week's Deadpod. This set from July 26th, 1972, at Portland's Paramont Theater clocks in at a little over two hours.. It features a number of wonderful highlights, including one of the last performances of 'You Win Again', and early  'He's Gone', and to top it all off, a 30 minute+ Dark Star. While this Dark Star is clearly the highlight of the set, there are stunning performances throughout - capped off by a smoking hot 'Not Fade Away->Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad->Not Fade Away'.. don't miss it!!    Grateful Dead Paramount Theatre Portland, OR 7/26/72 - Wednesday Set Two   The Promised Land [2;58] (4) ; He's Gone [8:46] ; Me And My Uncle [3:05] ; You Win Again [4:02] ; Greatest Story Ever Told [4:57] ; Ramble On Rose [6:09] ; Dark Star [31:13] (5) > Comes A Time [7:03] ; Sugar Magnolia [7:56] ; Brown Eyed Women [3#:38] ; Beat It On Down The Line [3:06] ; Stella Blue [8:06] ; Not Fade Away [5:15] > Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad [8:20] > Not Fade Away [3:22] Encore One More Saturday Night [5:32]   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod072916.mp3   As summer flies by and we roll into the Days Between, I want to thank the kind folks who have chosen to support the Deadpod. I deeply appreciate it.    'Without Love in the Dream it will never come true'.     

Episode 032 - March 2016 Set 1Cold Rain and Snow (1974-10-20) Beat It on Down the Line[1] (1974-10-19) Sugaree (1977-03-18) Peggy-O (1977-06-07) Me and Bobby McGee[1] (1972-12-12) You Win Again (1972-03-05) It's a Man's Man's Man's World[1] (1970-04-15) Mama Tried-> Mexicali Blues (1978-10-17) Stagger Lee (1978-10-21) Black Throated Wind (1973-11-11) Friend Of The Devil (1978-10-22) El Paso (1972-12-12) Here Comes Sunshine (1974-02-23) China Cat Sunflower-> I Know You Rider (1974-10-20) I Need A Miracle (1978-10-21) [1] Dead Fantasy Debut

Episode 014 - July 2015 Set 1U.S. Blues-> Promised LandWe Can RunLibertyCalifornia EarthquakeFrom The Heart Of MeDesolation RowLazy River RoadOn The Road AgainBorn Cross-EyedEarly Morning RainBlack Throated WindLoserMe and My UncleYou Win AgainThrowing StonesWang Dang DoodleIf The Shoe FitsThe Music Never Stopped

Remezcla de los mejores temas de los Bee Gees en versiones actualizadas. Aunque el Sonido 70' y 80 esta volviendo a ponerse de moda, al final todo vuelve!!! Espero que te guste!!! Los Bee Gees fue un grupo musical de pop rock. Uno de sus álbumes más exitosos fue Saturday Night Fever, banda sonora del film del mismo título. Algunas de sus canciones mas populares son Stayin' Alive (Disco), Night Fever (Disco), Tragedy (rock), More than a woman, How deep is your love, The Woman in you,"You Win Again" entre otras. Formado por el trío de hermanos Barry, Robin y Maurice Gibb en los años 1960, se encuentra entre los más importantes del género, con más de 40 años de actividad musical ininterrumpida. Consiguieron sus primeros éxitos en Australia, y en Inglaterra —su país de origen— lanzaron su primer álbum oficial de forma internacional. En las décadas de los 60' y 70' fueron parte inseparable de la escena musical mundial, en especial con la fiebre disco, de la mano del productor Robert Stigwood. En los años 80' se dedicaron a colaborar con otros artistas y tiempo después volvieron a los estudios. La banda cesó su actividad en 2003 con la muerte del menor de los hermanos Maurice Gibb. Los sobrevivientes Barry y Robin anunciaron entonces que el nombre de Bee Gees ya no sería usado más en presentaciones; sin embargo, el 7 de septiembre de 2009 Robin le reveló a Jonathan Agnew que habló con Barry y decidieron volver a los escenarios. Fue uno de los grupos más exitosos en la historia de la música, vendiendo más de 380 millones de copias entre álbumes y singles

This week we have part 2 of this classic show from the famous Academy of Music run in NYC, from 1972. This contains a great set of classic Dead tunes: You Win Again, Jack Straw, Comes A Time.. and on and on.. it really brings a smile to my face to listen to this classic Good 'Old Grateful Dead - and I hope it does for you too!!Grateful Dead - March 23, 1972Academy of Music - New York, NYYou Win AgainJack StrawNext Time You See MePlaying In The BandComes A TimeMe And Bobby McGeeCasey JonesTuningTruckin'Ramble On RoseYou can listen to this week's Deadpod here:http://media.libsyn.com/media/deadshow/deadpod072409.mp3Be well my friends and thanks for your kind support!!!

One of my wonderful listeners wrote me to request this week's show and seeing as it is from the same great year for Dead music as the recently released Three from the Vault, I thought it would be a great listen for this week's deadpod. While I only have a portion of the show in good quality soundboard, I thought it was certainly worth sharing what I have. This show features a monster first set Dark Star as well as one of the all time great Not Fade Away->Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad->Not Fade Away jams. Grateful Dead Austin Municipal Auditorium Austin, TX 11/15/71 - MondayDark Star (1) [12:14] > El Paso [4:38] > Space [3:29] > Jam [3:59] ; Casey Jones [5:25] ;Ramble On Rose [5:56] ; Mexicali Blues [3:20] ; Brokedown Palace [5:13] ; Me And Bobby McGee [5:32] ; Cumberland Blues [5:18] ; Sugar Magnolia [6:54] ; You Win Again [2:18] ; Not Fade Away [3:57] > China Cat Sunflower Tease [0:37] > Jam [7:42] > Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad [8:06] > Not Fade Away [3:05]You can listen to this week's Deadpod here:http://media.libsyn.com/media/deadshow/deadpod070607.mp3Enjoy and be well.. I always love hearing your comments and suggestions!

Hello Friends! For some reason I always find that the shows from the European 72 tour sound especially good to my ears during the Winter. This week I decided to bring you part of a very nice show from Copenhagen Denmark from April 1972. I think you'll enjoy it - I know I always love having Pigpen in the mix.. Grateful Dead Tivolis Koncertsal København (Copenhagen), Dänemark (Denmark)4/14/72 - Friday Bertha [5:46] ; Mr. Charlie [3:35] ; You Win Again [3:35] ; Black Throated Wind [5:48] ; Chinatown Shuffle [2:34] ; Loser [6:12] ; Me And Bobby McGee [5:#40] ; Cumberland Blues [4:16] ; Playing In The Band [11:16] ; Tennessee Jed [7:13]As always you can listen to the podcast here:http://www.libsyn.com/media/deadshow/deadpod011907.mp3