A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Andrew Hickey presents a history of rock music from 1938 to 1999, looking at five hundred songs that shaped the genre.

Andrew Hickey presents a history of rock music from 1938 to 1999, looking at five hundred songs that shaped the genre.

 

#211

Episode 167: “The Weight” by The Band

Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, [on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/500-songs-bonus-87226584) . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at  [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust)  and  [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to [the GoFundMe for her treatment] (https://gofund.me/445ef72a) . Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won’t allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I’ve had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — [one] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-167a-the-weight-part-1/) , [two,] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-167b-the-weight-part-2/) [three] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-167c-the-weight-part-3/) . I’ve used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: [Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald] (https://amzn.to/3yOz1Na) , which is recommended, as all Wald’s books are. [Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon] (https://amzn.to/2ZovBkl)  is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is  [Revolution in the Air,] (https://amzn.to/3k7ct2a)  by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan,  [Behind the Shades] (https://amzn.to/35tC1mp) . I’ve also used  [Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home] (https://amzn.to/35iNB3A) , which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. [Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan] (https://amzn.to/3bHUnRs)  is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from  [Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim] (https://amzn.to/3s6V577) by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from [The Roaring Silence by David Revill] (https://amzn.to/3Gbszp8) Information on Woodstock comes from  [Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns] (https://amzn.to/47tw5Hr) . For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used  [Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin.] (https://amzn.to/3QGg2jw) And for the Band, I've used  [This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis] (https://amzn.to/3qDaOdE) , T [estimony] (https://amzn.to/44YzNHr) by Robbie Robertson,  [The Band by Craig Harris] (https://amzn.to/457WUiL) and  [Levon by Sandra B Tooze.] (https://amzn.to/3QEhiUn) I've also referred to the documentaries  [No Direction Home] (https://amzn.to/3YCyv2n) and  [Once Were Brothers] (https://amzn.to/3YA4P5V) . The complete Basement Tapes can be found on [this multi-disc box set] (https://amzn.to/3Yx2ngw) , while [this double-CD version] (https://amzn.to/3YAjOg9) has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on [this box set] (https://amzn.to/47pn6al) . There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in [this twofer CD] (https://amzn.to/3DSPCDC) with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He’d come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that’s what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that’s all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor  and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty’s drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I’ve quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D’Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin’ Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin’ Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don’t care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether)  from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for  a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I’m just gonna put ’em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn’t write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It’s funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don’t question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut.  Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he’d already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you’re gonna leave, Fred, I’d like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn’t say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I’m gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that’s how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y’ know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who  had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don’t know what it will be like out there It’s going to be some kind of  carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things  at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it’s just myself as drummer and Robbie…we’re out. We don’t want that. It’s either us, the band, or nothing.’ And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time.  The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you’ll understand what ‘freaks’ are. It’ll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have made a brief trip to New York to see his old friends. There seems to have been a certain amount of overlap in personnel between You Are What You Eat and Dylan's Eat The Document, which sadly never saw an official release (though copies can be found if you look, and much of the footage ended up in a Martin Scorsese documentary on Dylan). Indeed, Dylan invited Tiny Tim to Woodstock to film some additional scenes for a film project which seems to have been an attempt to finish the documentary. Robbie Robertson had already been making trips up there -- Robertson had always been interested in filmmaking, and was one of several people Dylan brought in to try and help him put a shape to the shapeless project -- and when Tiny Tim went up to film, so did Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, who were to act in some of the additional sequences being filmed. Danko, Manuel, and Tim performed some songs together, and stayed together in the Woodstock Motel. Tim was delighted to be reunited with his old friend Dylan, and would later use as a regular onstage anecdote the time during his stay when he had played Dylan a Rudy Vallee song in Dylan's style and a Dylan song in Vallee's: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Mr. Tim Recalls His Visit with Mr. Dylan (Live at Royal Albert Hall)"] Tim was only there for a few days, but Danko and Manuel were there for longer. Danko later remembered “When I first moved up to Woodstock in 1967 I went up there with Richard Manuel and Tiny Tim to work on Bob’s movie Eat The Document. We stayed at the Woodstock Motel for a couple of weeks and, the country boy that I am, I realized that since I left Ontario and my home neighborhood I’d been living in cities for seven years, or however long it had been, and I realized I did not have to be in cities any more.” Danko had something else in mind as well. Of all the Hawks he was the one who was most interested in the business side of things, and he knew it made no economic sense for them to keep staying in a motel in Woodstock for weeks at a time while they were making this film. And if they were going to make their own music, as they'd been saying for months that they needed to, they also needed to find somewhere to rehearse. Why not combine the two and rent a place in Woodstock for the entire band? As it turned out, it wouldn't be for the entire band -- Robertson had got together with the woman who would become his first wife, and he moved in with her a couple of miles away from the rest, though he visited them every single day. But Danko, Manuel, and Hudson rented a large house together, which they nicknamed Big Pink because of the colour of the building. The group started rehearsing together, first at Dylan's home, but soon moving to the basement in Big Pink, where Garth Hudson, who was a fastidious musician with an interest in engineering, set up a tape recorder to record parts of the rehearsals -- only parts, because tape was expensive and they didn't have much of it, and so they'd only record something when they were trying something particular out. It wasn't a professional recording studio, and much of the equipment they were using was borrowed from Peter, Paul, and Mary's PA system, but Hudson knew what he was doing and while it was only recorded to two-track in a fairly poor acoustic space, the results sounded remarkably good. By this time it had already been ten months since they played together. They didn't have a drummer, so most of the time Richard Manuel would play drums, with Robertson occasionally taking over from him. These early sessions seem to have been about Dylan and the Hawks finding more musical common ground, and the Hawks themselves changing their style. Up to this point, they'd been a loud, raucous, bar band. They were *great* at that -- that was why Dylan had hired them -- but they'd never had an incentive to be subtle, even though all of them loved different kinds of subtle music, from Danko's taste for country music to Hudson's love for old Anglican and Lutheran hymns. They all loved old R&B, and Dylan of course was an expert in folk music, a form of music none of the others had had any time for. So at first, the recordings seem to show them just learning other people's songs -- the tapes from the very early sessions in Dylan's home show them doing a lot of Johnny Cash songs in particular, with Dylan leading the band through "Belshazzar", "Big River", and "Folsom Prison Blues": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Folsom Prison Blues"] There were a lot of country and rockabilly songs -- the music that they all shared in common, things like "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" and "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It" -- but Dylan was also trying to educate the rest of the musicians about the folk tradition he came from. He and Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan's style of songwriting while on tour the year before. Robertson -- who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like "Uh Uh Uh" -- thought that Dylan's songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff? He kept holding up Curtis Mayfield songs as a model, like "People Get Ready", which the group also rehearsed in these sessions: [Excerpt: The Hawks, "People Get Ready"] Of course, what Robertson didn't know, being relatively unfamiliar with Dylan's work prior to working with him, was that that song was in a way the grandchild of one of Dylan's own songs -- as we heard in the episode on it, that song was inspired by "A Change is Gonna Come", which was in turn inspired by "Blowin' in the Wind" -- but nonetheless Dylan thought that Robertson had a point. He was getting increasingly disenchanted with the counterculture which he was supposedly the figurehead for, and with psychedelic music. But also, he was aware that you could do a lot even with simple language -- more than his backing band perhaps understood. Because the folk tradition he came from had a very different attitude to language than either the Beat poets he'd been recently imitating or the R&B songwriters that the Hawks had been listening to. He started teaching them the old folk songs he'd played himself: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Young But Daily Growing"] As Robertson said later “He would play songs, songs I had never heard, and after we’d heard it or played it I would say, ‘Did you write that?’ And he would say no, that’s an old song by blah-blah-blah, and frequently he would tell a little story of the song or what was behind the song. And that was interesting, learning some of these old-timey songs.” As he also said "None of the guys in The Band were about folk music. We were not from that side of the tracks. Folk music was from coffee houses, where people sipped cappuccinos. Where we played as The Hawks, nobody was sipping cappuccino, I’ll tell ya. We were playing hardcore bars." But Dylan was teaching the members of the Hawks how to write songs, and how to think about songs. They weren't just playing folk songs -- they were playing Carter Family songs, and "Work With Me Annie", and doo-wop songs like "Silhouettes", and Hank Williams and Hank Snow songs, and "Baby Ain't That Fine" (a Dallas Frazier song that had been recorded by Gene Pitney and Melba  Montgomery on Musicor, the label that had tried to sign the Hawks) -- but they were playing in a folk manner. Rather than set up as if they were on stage, when they played in the basement at Big Pink they would sit in a circle, all facing each other, singing harmonies face to face, everyone able to see what everyone else was doing, making music communally rather than as a collection of individuals. It was a folk style, but these weren't folk musicians, and they weren't playing folk. While the Hawks were all Canadian, they'd been trained by Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm in how to play rock and roll, and that meant that they had picked up the way music was played in the Deep South. Not only that, but they'd played sessions in Nashville with Hawkins, and Robertson had played with A-team musicians on the Blonde on Blonde sessions. The result was that they picked up an instrumental style that sounded like the music that came from what the writer Charles L Hughes refers to as the country-soul triangle of Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville -- a style that comes, ultimately, from white country musicians backing Black soul musicians, and which we've seen coming up time and again from Arthur Alexander to Aretha Franklin to Otis Redding. The Hawks' music doesn't sound anything like the more uptempo music from those musicians, all slashed guitar chords and stabbing horns, but it sounds very, *very* much like the ballads coming out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, which were dominated by gospel piano, organ pads, and delicate picked guitar, records like Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman" or James Carr's "Dark End of the Street": [Excerpt: James Carr, "Dark End of the Street"] When sung by white singers, rather than Black ones, and coupled with the folk-style lyrics that Dylan was introducing to the Hawks, that style became known as Americana. As well as teaching the Hawks these old songs, though, Dylan was also teaching them how to write songs like that. He was furiously productive as a writer in 1967, writing something like a hundred songs, depending on what one counts as a song. Often during the basement recordings, what starts as an old folk song goes off in a new direction as Dylan comes up with new verses, while the rock and roll jams they engaged in produced new songs whose inspirations are very clear, like "See You Later, Alan Ginsberg", or "Open the Door, Homer", whose "open the door, Richard" chorus clearly comes from the Louis Jordan song of the same name. Other songs, like "Clothes Line Saga", are just parodies of contemporary hits (in this case "Ode to Billy Joe") But he also started writing more focused songs. These were often in the simpler lyrical style that Robertson had wanted him to write in, and often showed a resurgent interest in the Bible and Christianity: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Sign on the Cross"] The group and Dylan were doing two to three hours' *focused* performance and rehearsal every day, treating it the same way they'd treat a studio session, and Dylan was often writing material at a typewriter upstairs and then immediately bringing it in for the musicians to run through. Slowly, the sessions started to become more serious. At some point soon Dylan was going to have to record another album -- though as it happened his next album would not involve any of the Hawks or any of the songs he recorded in the basement -- but Albert Grossman was pushing for some songs, independently of recordings. Grossman co-owned Dylan's publishing company, and much of the money they were making was from hit covers of Dylan's songs. Sara gave birth again in July 1967, and Dylan seems not to have wanted to go back into the studio properly straight away, but after a break for the birth, the group seem to have focused on getting some demos of new, commercial, songs, recorded for Grossman to pitch to other artists. A fourteen-song demo tape was put together and pitched to various musicians. To start with, there were other clients of Grossman. Peter, Paul, and Mary got "Too Much of Nothing", which they took into the top forty: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul, and Mary, "Too Much of Nothing"] Ian and Sylvia got three tracks: [Excerpt: Ian and Sylvia, "Tears of Rage"] But the demo was sent out more widely, starting with people who had had hits with Dylan songs before. The Byrds took two songs for their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, one of which, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", was released as a single: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"] And the tape made its way to Britain, where it was initially only heard by a handful of musicians, but soon circulated widely enough that it got writeups in the music press, desperate for any news of Dylan at all. Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll, and the Trinity had a hit with "This Wheel's on Fire": [Excerpt: Brian Auger, Julie, Driscoll, and the Trinity, "This Wheel's on Fire"] The folk-rock group Fairport Convention took "Million-Dollar Bash" for their Unhalfbricking album: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, "Million-Dollar Bash"] And Manfred Mann, who Dylan had called his favourite interpreters of his work, got their final number one with a basement tapes song, "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "The Mighty Quinn"] Indeed, Manfred Mann had been the first people in the UK to hear the tape, and they were so impressed with it that several years later, in 1972, Manfred Mann's guitarist Tom McGuinness, whose band McGuinness Flint had just split up, put together a new band, Coulson Dean McGuinness Flint, to record an entire album of Dylan songs, almost all of them basement tape songs. That album was produced by Manfred Mann – the person, not the group – and featured Mike Hugg from the group on piano: [Excerpt: Coulson Dean McGuinness Flint, "Lo and Behold"] That album was the first time many of those songs had seen an official release. As Billy Bragg later said "My first inkling of the Basement Tapes was an EP I bought by Coulson Dean McGuinness Flint. I was already into Dylan’s music but I didn’t really know anything about the Basement Tapes or where they were found. This is when ‘Jean Genie’ was a hit and ‘Angel’ by Rod Stewart was a hit. I fell for the Coulson Dean McGuinness Flint version of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune.’ I noticed ‘Tiny Montgomery’ was on it as well, but when you looked at the Dylan LPs neither ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ nor ‘Tiny Montgomery’ were found." (For clarity, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" wasn't a basement tapes song, but "Tiny Montgomery" was) The actual recordings didn't see an official release until 1975, when a double-album compilation of some of them (plus some new recordings by the musicians who had been the Hawks) was put out -- though oddly that compilation didn't include many of the more famous songs, on the grounds that people already knew them from the hit versions. That version also had several overdubs recorded in 1975, nearly a decade after the recordings. It wasn't until 2014 that an official release of the full sessions happened. But note that I keep talking about an "official release". Because these were some of the first rock recordings ever to get an unofficial release, when in 1969 a bootleg double-album called Great White Wonder came out, mixing some tracks from those tapes with some older Dylan demos. That's now often called the first ever rock bootleg album, though as with all these things it depends on how you define many of those words. Even before that, though, the tapes were circulating among musicians, and we heard last episode how the tapes inspired Eric Clapton to change his style of music. And of course, his copy of that tape was soon joined by another album: [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Things started to change around October 1967, in multiple ways. That tape started to circulate among musicians. Dylan went off to Nashville for a few days to record his next album, without the Hawks -- which we'll talk about in a future episode, even though it overlaps somewhat with this one -- and Levon Helm was back in the picture. The Hawks were being managed by Albert Grossman, and Grossman had decided that he should make some serious attempts to get them their own record deal. As Dylan had been teaching them songwriting, they'd started to write a lot of songs together, like "Katie's Been Gone", written by Robertson and Manuel: [Excerpt: The Band, "Katie's Been Gone"] Grossman had recorded some demos with the group in September 1967 in New York. The sessions, by all accounts, went horribly, but the recordings were enough to get Capitol Records interested. If they were going to do anything, the group needed a drummer, and they wanted to get their old friend Levon back. They called him up and explained to him that they would be making their own music, not just backing Dylan, and he liked the sound of that, He also liked the sound of something else -- as Danko put it, “I said we’d be getting a couple of hundred thousand dollars we wanted to share. … He said, ‘I’ll be on the next plane.’” Helm returned around the time that Dylan went off to record his album, though the expanded group still rehearsed regularly with Dylan. They also realised that the name they'd been using didn't match the sound they were playing now, and changed it, first to the Honkies, and then when they got some pushback from the record label, the Hawks became The Crackers. Shortly after Helm moved up to Woodstock, the members of the Crackers moved out from Big Pink, as it was now getting too crowded, but before they did, one more album was recorded there -- a five-piece group called the Bengali Bauls were visiting Woodstock, and they came over to Big Pink to jam with the Crackers, and with Charles Lloyd, the former sax player with Cannonball Adderley, who was also visiting. However, it soon became apparent that the Western musicians didn't understand the Bengali music or culture well enough to gel -- one of the Crackers asked one of the musicians, Hare Krishna Das, if he was *the* Hare Krishna -- and eventually the Bengali musicians performed by themselves, and Hudson recorded them on the same equipment he'd used for the basement tapes. The recording was eventually released as At Big Pink: [Excerpt: The Bengali Bauls, "Alone, I Have Caught a Fish"] Around the same time as they moved into separate houses, the group also got to know John Simon, the music supervisor for You Are What You Eat, who had just come on board. Simon (who, coincidentally, shares a name with John Ruskin's doctor) had met Peter Yarrow at the Monterey Pop Festival. Yarrow had been impressed with an album Simon had produced -- Marshall McLuhan's "The Media is the Massage". That title was of course a pun on McLuhan's famous aphorism "the media is the message", and the album combined readings from McLuhan's writing with a collage of bits of music, sound effects, and spoken word: [Excerpt: Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage"] Simon had had a big career already. He'd produced "Red Rubber Ball" by the Cyrkle, which had been a number two hit single: [Excerpt: The Cyrkle, "Red Rubber Ball"] He'd also produced music for the accordion-playing polka musician Frankie Yankovic -- no relation to the more famous accordion-playing occasional polka musician "Weird" Al Yankovic -- and had also done so much work with people in the Crackers' general circle that it seemed inevitable they'd end up working together. He'd produced for their friend Charles Lloyd, produced the first album for Leonard Cohen, who was managed by the group's old friend Mary Martin, and had been asked by Al Kooper to produce Blood, Sweat, and Tears' first album. Yarrow had hired Simon to work on the film -- though this is another case where the timelines reported by various people don't quite match up, because the music that the Hawks and Tiny Tim had done for the film was months before Monterey by most accounts, and Simon seems to have both worked on those recordings *and* only met the former Hawks in October 1967 -- and Yarrow had introduced Simon to Grossman, and Simon rapidly became the producer of choice for Grossman's acts like Gordon Lightfoot, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and of course the Crackers. The album Simon produced for them, titled Music From Big Pink after the house where they'd written most of the tracks, was recorded not quite live, but close to it. Simon explained his methodology as “We tried to get as many of the effects onto the tape as we could, as opposed to adding them afterwards. If we made a commitment, and put the effects on the track, we would be stuck with that and everything else would  conform to that. We would be painting a much fuller picture as we went along.” The album was recorded on four-track tape, and the guitars, bass, piano, drums, and organ were all recorded live onto two tracks as a single performance. The other two tracks were used for overdubs -- one for horns, played by Hudson and Simon, and one for tambourine and vocals. While Robertson would later go on to dominate the songwriting for the group, this album is very much a group effort arising from the Basement Tapes -- even including Dylan, though Dylan didn't perform on the album. He did, though, paint the cover, which significantly features six musicians, not the five in the group, and three of the songs, though not the performances, came from the Basement Tapes. One, the closing track "I Shall Be Released", was written by Dylan alone: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] The other two were collaborations on songs which, as we've already heard, had already been released by other people (or would have been by the time the album came out) -- "This Wheel's on Fire", written by Dylan and Danko, and "Tears of Rage", written by Dylan and Manuel. Indeed on this album, Manuel writes almost as much as Robertson. Other than the three Dylan songs, the album features one cover -- a version of the country classic "Long Black Veil" -- three songs by Manuel, and four by Robertson. There would later be many arguments as to exactly who wrote what on the group's recordings, but whatever one's views on the later controversies, and we'll go into them in a future episode, it's clear that Robertson wasn't stealing any credit from anyone here. But the song generally considered the album's best was definitely Robertson's work -- though it was such an advance from his earlier songs that he later recalled playing the track for Dylan and Dylan asking who it was by, not understanding that it was written by Robertson. The inspiration for the song's first line came directly from Robertson's guitar. Martin, the guitar manufacturer, was based in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and Robertson saw the name inside the guitar's soundhole, and its Biblical resonances appealed to him: [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Nazareth made Robertson think of Nazarin, a film by Luis Buñuel, the great Spanish surrealist filmmaker, and he later explained “People trying to be good in Viridiana and Nazarín, people trying to do their thing. In ‘The Weight’, it’s the same thing. People like Buñuel would make films that had these religious connotations to them, but it wasn’t necessarily a religious meaning. In Buñuel, there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good... In ‘The Weight’ it was this very simple thing. Someone says, ‘Listen, would you do me this favour? When you get there will you say ‘hello’ to somebody or will you give somebody this or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth, that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favour when you’re there.’ This is what it’s all about. So the guy goes and one thing leads to another and it’s like ‘Holy [here he used an expletive], what’s this turned into? I’ve only come here to say ‘hello’ for somebody and I’ve got myself in this incredible predicament.’ It was very Buñuelish to me at the time.” But while the song had that intellectual inspiration, it was also rooted in real people the group had known in Arkansas. Lee, for example, was Lee Paulman, and Helm went through the rest of the names -- “Young Anna Lee was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch.” – though here *I* would note that Dylan's daughter Anna Lea was born not long before the song was written – “Crazy Chester was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips and kinda walked around town to help keep the peace. He was like Hopalong Cassidy and he was a friend of The Hawks. Ronnie would always check with Crazy Chester to make sure there wasn’t any trouble around town, and Chester would reassure him that everything was peaceable and not to worry, because he was on the case. Two big cap guns he wore, plus a toupee! There were also ‘Carmen and the Devil,’ ‘Miss Moses,’ and ‘Fanny,’ a name that just seemed to fit the picture (I believe she looked a lot like Caldonia). We recorded the song maybe four times. We weren’t quite sure that it was going to be on the album, but people really liked it. Rick, Richard, and I switched off on the verses and we all sang the chorus—‘Put the load right on me!’” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] The album was a revelation for musicians as soon as it came out, but of all the songs on it, "The Weight" is the one that had the most immediate impact. It was covered by all sorts of people over the years, many of them people in the Americana genre that the album spawned, like Little Feat or New Riders of the Purple Sage. But early on it was covered by more mainstream artists like Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "The Weight"] And it was also, unsurprisingly, popular with soul artists. It was released as a single by Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations: [Excerpt: Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations, "The Weight"] And by Aretha Franklin, whose version was the biggest hit, making the top twenty: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "The Weight"] But as the album was nearing release, there was one problem left -- what was the group actually going to be called? They were still called the Crackers when they backed Dylan on his one show of 1968, a multi-artist tribute show to Woody Guthrie, who had died recently: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Crackers, "Dear Mrs. Roosevelt"] But Capitol Records decided they were uncomfortable with the band using that name. There are two stories as to how the final name came about. One story, the one later told by the band members, is that people around Woodstock just called them "the Band" because there were no other bands around and they liked it and thought it unpretentious. The other, which I find more believable, is that Capitol refused to put the record out as by the Crackers and just listed the musicians. On the label of the record it's credited to "Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Jaime Robbie Robertson, John Simon Producer", with no band name, and the back of the album gives the same credits in a different order, with "the band" written above them, and people just took that to be the name of the band. Either way, whether by accident or design, the Crackers were now The Band. ... Read more

14 Aug 2023

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14 Aug 2023


#210

Episode 166: “Crossroads” by Cream

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, [on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim.] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/85451945) Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at  [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust)  and  [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is [Brother Robert] (https://amzn.to/44rC7G7) by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- [one] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-166a-crossroads-part-1/) , [two] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-166b-crossroads-part-2/) , [three] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-166c-crossroads-part-3/) . [This article on Mack McCormick] (https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/mack-mccormick-quest-to-find-real-robert-johnson/) gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's [Biography of a Phantom] (https://amzn.to/44rzzI7) ; [Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson] (https://amzn.to/3rdoAnz) , by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; [Searching for Robert Johnson] (https://amzn.to/3JHQQVt) by Peter Guralnick; and [Escaping the Delta] (https://amzn.to/433PRGd) by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from [Before Elvis] (https://amzn.to/3CTvsZM) by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from [Charley Patton] (https://amzn.to/3CYBdWa) by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from [Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm] (https://amzn.to/3PDRpDw) by Dave Thompson. I also used [Ginger Baker: Hellraiser] (https://amzn.to/3NXKTqb) by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker,  [Mr Showbiz] (https://amzn.to/3NUXc6C) by Stephen Dando-Collins, [Motherless Child] (https://amzn.to/3pnBJda) by Paul Scott, and  [Alexis Korner: The Biography] (https://amzn.to/3poO3tH) by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set [Those Were the Days] (https://amzn.to/3ppezTH) , which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the [double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere] (https://amzn.to/44pLoP4) for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, [Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson] (https://amzn.to/3rbJkfk) , compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of  [my backers on Patreon] (http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey) . Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I’m Sorry I Ain’t Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I’m Sorry I Ain’t Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv’nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it’s really good you’re doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don’t really want to leave the band, you know.”’" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I’m much better than he is. Why don’t you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus’s eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don’t remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn’t have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn’t have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn’t know enough, but I felt I couldn’t afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they’d get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences -- Clapton was bringing in old Robert Johnson and Son House songs, while Bruce was thinking of the band as being somewhat akin to Ornette Coleman. Bruce had also started writing original material for the group, starting with a song called "NSU": [Excerpt: Cream, "NSU"] Apparently most people thought that song was about the NSU Quickly Moped, but Bruce was actually writing about non-specific urethritis. As he said later "it was about a member of the band who had this venereal disease. I can't tell you which one... except he played guitar." The group basically took over all the venues that the Graham Bond Organisation had previously played, though while the Graham Bond Organisation had been getting paid £40 between four of them, Cream were getting £45 between three of them. It soon became clear that they were worth far, far, more than that. Clapton had started to change his playing style drastically to fit the other two. As he put it at the time, "My whole musical attitude has changed. I listen to the same sounds and records, but with a different ear. I’m no longer trying to play like anything but a white man. The time is overdue when people should play like they are, and what colour they are." But more important than that, he was trying to play *better* than the other two. As the group's friend, the TV director Tony Palmer, put it "They realised, quite early on, that they didn’t like each other and, to some extent, that helped them become the great group they became. And it was perfectly clear when you watched them, I think, that they’re not wanting to be outplayed by the other two. And that’s what made them really fire off." According to Baker (other sources put this event later), even before they released their first single, Bruce had been trying to persuade Clapton to replace Baker -- though how likely this is given that in every other story about band troubles it's always Baker who's trying to kick someone out, I don't know. They stayed together with a promise that everything about the band would be split equally -- except the songwriting. Baker thought that since both he and Bruce were composers, and since nobody in the band was a lyricist, they should bring in the poet Pete Brown, who the Graham Bond Organisation had sometimes backed doing his beat poetry, to write lyrics for them, and split the songwriting credits and royalties equally four ways. As Baker put it in his autobiography: "I invited him to come and write some songs with us, ‘us’ being the operative word! We were at a studio in Haverstock Hill and, although Pete had never met Jack or Eric before, they went off together and wrote ‘Wrapping Paper’. It was the most awful song and had absolutely nothing to do with what Cream was doing, but it got released." It did indeed get released, as the group's first single -- but while "Wrapping Paper" is not really indicative of what Cream would do later, it's not as bad as its reputation, and it suggests that the idea of them being a dada group influenced by the Bonzo Dog Band might have still been in the back of some of their minds: [Excerpt: Cream, "Wrapping Paper"] Baker said "I was amazed to see that the songwriting was credited to Bruce and Brown – no mention of Eric or me. There was a big row, but I had promised I would never hit Jack again, though I often had to resort to drinking loads of alcohol instead in order to finish the session." Baker did though start writing material on his own -- with Bruce's wife writing the lyrics. Incidentally, I should note here that Pete Brown died in the early stages of me writing this episode. Normally I'd mention that at the end of an episode, when I'm wrapping things up, but because of the way this one is structured there's not really a good place for me to do so. Also because of the way this episode is structured , there's not really as much space given to the importance his lyrics had to Cream's success, so I'm going to acknowledge that here too. "Wrapping Paper" was meant to be released at the same time as the group did their first big nationwide tour. That tour was a typical package tour of the time, and Cream were third on the bill. At the bottom were bands called MI-5 and The Fruit-Eating Bears (not the same Fruit-Eating Bears who were a punk band in the seventies who recorded "Door in My Face" -- those Fruit-Eating Bears took the original, even less-known, group's name), Then was Oscar, then Max Wall, an old music-hall comedian born in 1908, then the Magic Lanterns, a band that at various times featured Albert Hammond, Godley and Creme of 10CC, and a bass player called Oz Osbourne whose playing in the band caused a lot of confusion for future music historians who thought he was Ozzy Osbourne. Above Cream were the Merseys -- the band formerly known as the Merseybeats -- who'd just had a big hit with "Sorrow": [Excerpt: The Merseys, "Sorrow"] And topping the bill were The Who, whose "I'm a Boy" was being released on Reaction simultaneously with "Wrapping Paper" and Oscar's latest single: [Excerpt: The Who, "I'm a Boy"] But everything went wrong. First there was a problem at the pressing plant which meant that ten thousand copies of "Wrapping Paper" had to be thrown out and the release rescheduled for a month later. Then the Who got an offer to do a ten-day US tour, and cancelled the entire UK tour -- only to then discover that a problem with their work permits meant they couldn't play the US tour anyway. Instead, Cream quickly booked a lot of gigs in smaller venues while they waited for the revised release date of their first single. And on October the first, at a gig at the London Polytechnic, Chas Chandler asked if a new guitarist he was managing could sit in. As always, Ginger Baker didn't want to, but Clapton and Bruce thought it might be fun. After all, Clapton was "God", right? He could outplay anyone. We don't have recordings of that night, but we do have recordings of that guitarist playing the song he played that night on other occasions: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Killing Floor"] There was a new God in town. Every guitarist in London was astonished and upset at the arrival of Hendrix -- Jeff Beck said "Suddenly, you couldn’t do anything remotely flash or clever, because people would just say you were ripping Hendrix off." There had been a rivalry between the London guitarists. Up to that point there were basically six electric guitarists in London who mattered as far as innovation on the instrument went -- Clapton, Beck, Jimmy Page, Peter Green, Pete Townshend, and Dave Davies. As soon as Hendrix turned up, there was only one. Clapton didn't take it well, *at all*.  He started trying to imitate Hendrix's guitar style in rehearsals, much to Bruce and Baker's disgust. Within a few months he'd grown his hair out into a curly perm inspired by Hendrix's Afro -- he would tell everyone who listened that he was actually copying Bob Dylan's hairstyle, saying "I liked Dylan’s hair I went and had my hair curled. Then Jimi came on with the curly hair and his band did it to complete the image, and everybody else did it because they dug Jimi and other people did it cos they dug me, I guess. It became quite a trend in England to have curly hair." Except of course that Hendrix had his Afro *before* Clapton. According to Bruce "When Jimi Hendrix came on the scene, Eric said 'One of us has to have a hairdo like that.' I said, 'OK, so long as it isn’t me,' so Eric went and got a perm." There's a *fascinating* interview from 1967, which I can't quote here because Clapton liberally uses racial slurs and also swears a lot, but you can find online if you search for the phrase "And Jimi came over and exploited that to the limit". In that, Clapton makes roughly three overlapping claims. The first is the rather patronising one that Hendrix was "a beautiful guitar player for his age" (Hendrix was three years older than Clapton). The second is the claim that Hendrix's showmanship was in direct opposition to his musicianship, that when Hendrix did all his chitlin' circuit tricks he'd look at the audience reaction and only really respected people who were listening rather than those who were impressed by pyrotechnics -- that one may well have been true, but given some of what I'm going to talk about later, it also reads to me very much as if Clapton was projecting his own feelings about his own audience onto Hendrix. And finally, Clapton claimed that the main reason everyone was impressed by Hendrix is that in Britain everyone believed that Black men had large penises. Meanwhile, Cream were in the middle of recording their debut album, Fresh Cream, and "Wrapping Paper" had come out to excruciatingly bad reviews. Jack Bruce remembered performing the single on Ready, Steady, Go! and his old bandmates Manfred Mann also being on the show. He said "You could see them giving us looks, as if to say, 'They’ve blown it.'" "Wrapping Paper" only reached number thirty-four on the charts, but the second single did much better: [Excerpt: The Cream, "I Feel Free"] "I Feel Free" was another song by Brown and Bruce, with Bruce on lead vocals, and it did much better in the charts, reaching number eleven. It was left off the album, as was "Wrapping Paper", and so Fresh Cream was a mixture of five originals, including Baker's extended drum solo "Toad", and five blues covers -- two of which, including a Robert Johnson one, had group members adding themselves to the credits as arrangers to get some of the songwriting money. Stigwood seemed to be losing interest in Cream even before they'd really started. In January 1967 he entered into the agreement with Brian Epstein that we talked about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", and started managing NEMS artists. He signed the minor Merseybeat star Billy J. Kramer to Reaction and had him record a single for the label: [Excerpt: Billy J Kramer, "Town of Tuxley Toymaker"] That was written by three of the members of a new band that Stigwood had signed to NEMS -- but not to his own record label, which he eventually wound down as his new signing took up more of his attention: [Excerpt: The Bee Gees, "New York Mining Disaster 1941"] The Bee Gees would of course go on to have massive success and be Stigwood's biggest clients, but at the time Cream resented them for taking Stigwood's focus away from them. Ahmet Ertegun was also getting a bit annoyed by Stigwood's loss of focus. Atlantic were distributing Cream's records in the US, and were about to release the first album over there, and he wanted Cream to play US dates in order to promote the record, but Stigwood just didn't seem that bothered. Eventually, though, they did get a series of US dates organised -- nine days performing five times a day for five minutes a time on a Murray the K package show in New York with Simon and Garfunkel, Mitch Ryder, Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson, Phil Ochs, and a disparate bunch of other acts. Cream were actually only on there because Mitch Ryder really didn't want to do it. Ryder had told his agent to just keep making ridiculous demands until Murray the K said no, but Murray the K had been desperate to get him. Ryder had demanded a ridiculous fee, Murray had said yes. Ryder had demanded that his dressing room be repainted in blue. Murray had said yes. Finally Ryder had demanded that the Who, who had never played in the US before, also be on the bill, and Murray had said yes to that as well. So Ryder's agent had called Robert Stigwood, who was handling the Who's bookings, and told him the situation -- Mitch Ryder really didn't want to do it, so Stigwood should make demands for the Who that would mean they wouldn't play, so then Ryder wouldn't have to. So Stigwood demanded $5000 for the Who -- a ridiculous sum. Murray agreed. So Stigwood added on that the Who would only do it if the Cream were also on the bill, and they'd cost another $2,500. Murray agreed to that. And so both Cream and the Who ended up making their American debuts in front of a load of bemused teenage kids who were there to see pop stars. As John Entwistle described it "we’d done all the silly tours and mad packages, where you go out and find you’re supporting a dancing bear and a juggler. But Cream had never been in that environment – the Bluesbreakers, Graham Bond, the Yardbirds, they were club bands, playing to audiences who knew what they were about, and suddenly they were dropped into this Christmas Pantomime environment, with a couple of thousand thirteen-year-olds eating sweets and reading comics. It really was rather ridiculous." As it turned out as well, the teenagers were unimpressed enough by the lineup that Murray didn't make anything like the money he'd expected, and none of the acts ended up getting paid at all, except the Who, whose manager Chris Stamp had insisted on per diems because they didn't have enough money to eat. After that run of gigs, though, Cream were booked into Atlantic's studios for a session with Ahmet Ertegum producing them. That only produced one track, but a month later they flew back to the US to record more there, this time with the legendary Tom Dowd engineering and Ertegun's choice of producer, Felix Pappalardi, who had recently produced the debut album by the Youngbloods: [Excerpt: The Youngbloods, "Get Together"] Pappalardi almost immediately proved his worth to the band. The group had been playing a version of an old blues standard, "Hey Lawdy Mama", but after the first day's sessions Pappalardi had taken a copy of the instrumental track back home, and with his wife Gail Collins had written a new lyric and melody line to the track. The result, "Strange Brew", became the group's next single, and another UK top twenty hit: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] Bruce was never quite happy with the changes though, saying "There’s a bum note in there, and it annoys me every time I hear it. They grafted these lyrics on top of the backing track, and it had a different chord change. If you listen to the song, it sounds like I’m playing the wrong bass line. That’s because I’m playing a different tune! I cringe every time I hear it" There were other problems as well. By this time Cream had realised that they needed to do different things in the studio and live -- they could show off their playing on stage, but they needed to have songs that would stand up to repeated listens in the studio, and were working on their songcraft.  Baker said "There were two bands. A lot of the studio stuff we hardly ever played live." Ertegun, though, thought he'd signed a blues band and thought the music they were working on was "psychedelic hogwash" (other sources credit that comment to Jerry Wexler rather than Ertegun, but neither man was happy with the material). On top of that, all he'd really known about the band when he'd signed them was that Clapton was the former guitarist with the Yardbirds and John Mayall. He was the star of the group, so why was the bass player doing most of the singing? The album, eventually titled Disraeli Gears, was many things, but it wasn't a blues album. It had songs like "Tales of Brave Ulysses" which featured a wah-wah pedal, mostly because Clapton had heard that Hendrix had just bought one; SWLABR" which Bruce later said was inspired by the Monkees; a version of the old music-hall song "Your Baby's Gone Down the Plug-Hole", retitled "Mother's Lament"; and the song that Ertegun and Wexler detested most of all, "Sunshine of Your Love": [Excerpt: Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love"] That had started out as a riff that Bruce had been playing on a double-bass, which Brown had found difficult to set lyrics to, until they got to the end of an all-night writing session and, staring out the window, Brown wrote the line "It's getting near dawn and lights close their tired eyes". Clapton later added the chorus music, and the song had been in the group's set for a while before they took it into the studio, where Tom Dowd made the crucial suggestion that Ginger Baker play the downbeat rather than the backbeat. This fit well with Baker's jazz-influenced style -- it was the kind of thing that a lot of swing bands would do -- but Ertegun still hated the track. It was only when Otis Redding and Booker T. Jones heard it and thought it was great that Ertegun relented and allowed it to be released at all. Released as the second single from the album, several months after the album's release, it became the group's first and biggest US hit, reaching number five more than a year after it was recorded: [Excerpt: Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love"] But it took a long time for that hit to happen, and in summer 1967 there was serious consideration given to splitting up the band. And Jack Bruce even had another offer. Peter Green had quit John Mayall's Bluesbreakers after Mayall had fired his friend, Mayall's latest drummer Mick Fleetwood, and he was trying to put together his own supergroup in the manner of Cream, with the best players and singers on the scene. He got in Aynsley Dunbar on drums, Brian Auger on keyboards (though Auger can't be heard on the recordings that have surfaced, but Green said he was there), Bruce on bass and piano, and the Jeff Beck Group's singer on vocals to form Crazy Blue: [Excerpt: Crazy Blue, "Stone Crazy"] Unfortunately at this point everyone had so many entanglements and contracts that the record never came out, and Green had to get a new lineup for his supergroup, who debuted only a few days after that session. Rod Stewart and the rest had all lost their chance to be in the band that became Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. But soon after that, Cream made their first appearance at the Fillmore, and suddenly everything changed. In the UK they'd been used to playing relatively short club sets, and their only US appearances previously had had them playing only one song a show. But at the Fillmore they were expected to play for hours, and so they had to stretch out. As Bruce said "When we hit the Fillmore, we started to play those long improvisations . . . because we didn’t know hardly any songs! It was partly a repertoire, and partly a product of the times, because all the audiences were stoned out of their collective bonces." The group went down a storm at the Fillmore, and what had been a one-week residency at one venue ended up becoming a major US tour, with the band being booked for long residencies in other major cities as a result of the Fillmore audience. When the tour hit New York, Clapton guested with Aretha Franklin on the track "Good to Me as I Am to You" on her Lady Soul album: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I Am to You"] and also guested on the Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For The Money, though only speaking, not playing guitar: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Are You Hung Up?"] While Clapton was on that album, Jimi Hendrix, who wasn't, was on the cover, a parody of the Sgt Pepper cover. For much of the rest of the year and early into 1968, Cream led a strange double life. In Britain they were a pop group -- on the hip end of pop, the art school end, but definitely in the light entertainment industry. They played the Saville Theatre with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Marine Ballroom at the end of Morecambe Pier, and the Silver Blades Ice Rink in Streatham. They also made a guest appearance on Twice A Fortnight, a comedy show directed by Tony Palmer, a friend of Clapton's who later went on to be one of the most important rock music documentary makers of all time, and starring Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. That Twice A Fortnight appearance actually ended with Baker being rushed to hospital, with what was at first believed to be an ulcer -- he had all the symptoms -- but which turned out actually to be exhaustion. But Baker was only in hospital for a week before it was back on the treadmill, and this time back to the US, where rather than being pop they were playing to a rock audience who wanted their extended solos and jamming. This disparity is reflected in their next album, Wheels of Fire, which they worked on through most of 1967 and early 1968. This was a double-album, and disc one was mostly made up of relatively short songs recorded in the studio by "the Cream Quartet" -- the three members of the group plus Pappalardi. As Clapton later said "The strange thing about Cream was that every time we went into the studios to record, we formed another group, adding violins or another guitar  or something." These tracks were layered, orchestrated, pop songs that made use of Bruce and Pappalardi's multi-instrumental abilities and the eight-track equipment that Atlantic had (at a time when the best studios in the UK were still on four-track).  Bruce added cello, calliope, and recorder, Pappalardi viola, tonette, and trumpet, and Baker played a variety of tuned percussion as well as his drumkit. This disc was made up almost entirely of originals -- four by Bruce and Brown, and three by Baker and the group's friend Mike Taylor -- plus two blues covers suggested by Clapton, who was still not writing material himself. Disc two, on the other hand, featured the core trio just playing their normal instruments, live in San Francisco. It was labelled as "Live at the Fillmore", but in fact three of the four tracks were recorded at the Winterland Ballroom. Side two features two extended improvisations -- a seven-minute version of "Train Time", the song Bruce had written for the Graham Bond Organisation, and a sixteen-minute version of Baker's drum solo "Toad". Side one, meanwhile, spotlighted Clapton on two blues tracks, a seventeen-minute version of  Willie Dixon's "Spoonful", which they'd already recorded in a much shorter studio version on Fresh Cream, and a relatively concise, four-minute, version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads": [Excerpt: Cream, "Crossroads"] While that didn't give the group the excuse for ultra-extended soloing the way some of the other tracks they recorded did, it did become Clapton's signature song, and possibly his most definitive guitar performance -- so much so that there's an often-told story about the great Irish blues guitarist Rory Gallagher being told he played "Crossroads" better than Clapton and replying "but Eric wrote it!" Crossroads also became the title track to Clapton's career-spanning 1988 box set, and is still arguably the best example of him as a pure guitarist on record: [Excerpt: Cream, "Crossroads"] Those recordings, according to Bruce, were "a fair representation of the band on an average night, but not on one of the nights when we really took off". The rest of the band agreed -- their best shows were never recorded. And there were a *lot* of shows. Those San Francisco shows were recorded on a long tour to promote Disraeli Gears, and they played more than seventy shows in four months. But the shows were getting worse and worse. It was apparent that the audience was there to see the great musicians they'd heard about, but not actually to listen to the music. At one show they were drowned out by screaming feedback, and the audience loved it. Another show, the vocal mics didn't work. The audience didn't mind. Another show, Clapton's guitar wasn't in the mix. The audience didn't care. The group hated performing for people who weren't listening, and started to play badly as a result -- if the audience didn't care, why would they? They were on a grinding treadmill, and getting on each other's nerves. Bruce and Baker were arguing about everything from politics (Baker was right-wing and Bruce was a leftist) to the PA systems. All of them were suffering from exhaustion, especially Baker. Bruce said later "I’m sure that a lot of people came to see Cream to see if Ginger would die. Whereas they’d go to see other bands because they thought the singer was sexy, they’d come and see us and shout through the window, 'You gonna die tonight, Ginger?'" And there was another issue, too. Clapton was starting to think that maybe the whole direction the group were going in was wrong. In late 1967, a tape had started to circulate in British music circles, of some new songs by Bob Dylan, who hadn't released any music since a motorcycle accident the previous year: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Band, "The Mighty Quinn"] Originally, the only copy was in the hands of Manfred Mann, who'd been sent it in the hope that they might have a hit with some of the songs, as they had with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", and "Just Like a Woman". Dylan had said in 1965 that of all the people who'd covered his songs, the best was Manfred Mann, and they did indeed record "The Mighty Quinn" and have a number one with it. But slowly more copies started to circulate, and more musicians started covering songs from it. The recording was *full* of great songs: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Band, "This Wheel's on Fire"] Not only that, Clapton soon got an advance copy of the first album by Dylan's backing band on those tapes, a band who just called themselves The Band, and that contained remakes of some of those Dylan songs but also new originals like "The Weight": [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] This music, which we'll be hearing more about next episode, had nothing to do with seventeen-minute drum solos or psychedelia. This, Clapton knew, was the music he actually wanted to be making. Maybe it was the music he *would* have been making if they'd got Steve Winwood in the band like he'd wanted at the start. He'd play the record, and the tape of Dylan's new songs, over and over on the tour,  wishing he was doing that instead. Matters came to a head when Bruce suggested to Baker that the group needed their own PA system rather than using the awful venue ones. Baker, who was the band member most interested in their financial well-being, told him they couldn't afford one, and Bruce was horrified. What were they even doing this for if they were working themselves to death, having massive hit records, and still couldn't afford basic equipment? Bruce said he was going home, and made his way to the airport, where two of the band's roadies found him and basically forced him to go back and play that night's gig. But they cancelled the next ten days' worth of shows. That was in April 1968. But after those ten days, the group were back on the road, slogging their way through the rest of the US tour until June. Their next single, "Anyone For Tennis", released while they were still working on the Wheels of Fire album, barely scraped the top forty in the UK and didn't even make the hot one hundred in the US. To my ears, it shows the influence of their friends the Bonzo Dog Band again, with the recorder part sounding not dissimilar to the Bonzos' recent hit "I'm the Urban Spaceman": [Excerpt: Cream, "Anyone For Tennis"] But the fundamental problem was, as Noel Redding said, that "The things that killed Cream were the same that killed Jimi. If one person had booed while Jack was tuning his bass, or Eric hit a bum note, then they’d have known that people still cared about what they played. Instead, they were allowed to get away with everything, until finally it didn’t matter what they did. And the moment they realised that, it was the end. " The killer blow came when someone else expressed that for the first time in print. Jon Landau wrote a devastating review of the group in Rolling Stone that said in part "the greatest pitfall that stands before them is that an over-accepting audience in the United States will lull them into a complacency in which they increase their virtuosity at the expense of their own involvement. It would not be difficult for a group of this caliber to start making it all sound like scales." According to Clapton, he literally fainted when he read that review. They put the finishing touches on Wheels Of Fire, and it was released to a mixed reception.  "White Room", a Bruce and Brown song that was the single from the album, became a minor hit in the UK but a top ten hit in the US: [Excerpt: Cream, "White Room"] But most people seemed to think it was an album of two halves, and only liked one of the halves -- to the extent that in Britain, Polydor, their new label, released it as two single discs as well as a double album, so people wouldn't have to buy the one they didn't like. Rolling Stone loved the live disc, saying "This is the kind of thing that people who have seen Cream perform walk away raving about, and it’s good to, at last, have it on a record", but they absolutely savaged the studio disc, saying "Cream is good at a number of things; unfortunately songwriting and recording are not among them." The album was released in July 1968, and went to number one in the US album charts. "Sunshine of Your Love" reentered the charts and belatedly became a massive hit, and Cream were finally having the massive commercial success they'd expected from the start. But on the thirteenth of July, they announced they were splitting. They were going to do a final US tour at the end of the year, and release a contractual obligation album, and that was it. That album, Goodbye, came out in 1969, and had three studio tracks, one written by each member, and three live tracks. The studio tracks included "Badge", a song Clapton had written with his good friend George Harrison, and which became the group's last single, making the top twenty in the UK but only number sixty in the US: [Excerpt: Cream, "Badge"] While the live tracks included Bruce and Brown's "Politician" and two old blues songs, Skip James' "I'm So Glad", and "Sittin' on Top of the World".  Those songs were also included in the group's final live show (other than a brief 2005 reunion) at the Royal Albert Hall, which was filmed by Tony Palmer for a documentary: [Excerpt: Cream, "Sittin' on Top of the World (live Albert Hall)"] That's where we'll be leaving Cream for now, but the members of the group will all turn up in future episodes, and we'll continue their stories then. But another story also continued -- the story of Robert Johnson. Because the King of the Delta Blues Singers album had sparked a concerted search for information about Johnson among the community of white blues scholars and musicians, and people like Al Wilson of Canned Heat, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Paul Oliver, Peter Guralnick, Steve LaVere, and Mack McCormick started investigating Johnson's life and writing articles and books on him. This investigation, at least initially, took a lot of time, and involved very few clues -- one way that McCormick tracked down information was writing down every single reference to a place name in any of Johnson's songs and then travelling to all those places, knocking on doors and asking people if they remembered a blues singer called Robert Johnson who'd been there thirty or so years earlier. This was time-consuming and slow going, and the information we have now took literally decades of work, but because of that work we now have, in the public domain, more reliable information about Johnson than pretty much any other Delta blues singer of his generation. But it took a while to separate the wheat from the chaff. Johnson was a man who, like many of us, was different around different people -- just as for any of us our persona on social media is different from how we are when talking with our closest friends or romantic partners, and that again is different from how we are at work or how we are when talking to our grandparents. And so at first the information seemed to make Johnson more unknowable, rather than more known, as utterly contradictory information came through different sources. This was combined with the inherent unreliability of the information -- and again this unreliability has many different causes. There were people who simply remembered things badly, there were people who exaggerated their own role in the story for their own reputation -- "I taught him everything he knew!" -- people who didn't want to speak to a strange white person they'd never met before, people who wanted to string these rather gullible young white men along and see what nonsense they could get them to believe, people who decided that they should just say whatever the young white kids giving them money wanted to hear whether it was true or not, people who told the truth but used idioms that weren't familiar to people of a radically different background, and every other way in which facts can be confused. So for example, Son House talked to some researchers about how he'd known Robert Johnson when Johnson was just a kid, and he'd tried to play the guitar and been terrible, but then he'd gone away, come back, and been astonishingly good. This was mixed in the researchers' minds -- not in anything House actually said, though what House said was inaccurate in itself -- with a story that was told by relatives of another bluesman named Johnson -- Tommy Johnson -- which said that he'd sold his soul to the Devil. Add in a few references to crossroads and the Devil in Johnson's songs, and it soon became a legend, one known by everyone who knows of Johnson at all, that he'd been a terrible guitar player until he'd gone to a crossroads at midnight. There a strange black figure had retuned his guitar, giving him the power to play better than any man alive, in exchange for his soul. The more prosaic truth, that when House first met Johnson Johnson was an early-career professional in his late teens, who was a decent player but completely outshone by the much more experienced House, so Johnson went off and spent several months taking lessons from a more accomplished player and practising constantly and got better, is rather less well-known. So, let's take an abbreviated look at the actual life of Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues singers: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues"] Robert Johnson would not even have been born were it not for white men trying to steal from Black men. One of the facts about the segregation-era South that is not as widely known among white people as perhaps it should be is the extent to which lynching was an *economic* tool of exploitation. It was not, as films usually portray, the poorest Black men who were lynched for the most part. Rather it was those who had managed to get something for themselves -- a plot of land, a small business -- that a rich white man wanted. The normal thing was that the white man would make some kind of accusation against the Black man -- usually that the Black man had been trying to have sex with a white woman. This would anger the other white people, they would brutally murder the Black man, and the white man would be able to get the Black man's possessions after he died, buying them from the state for a fraction of what they were worth. So in 1906 when Joseph Marchetti accosted Charles Dodds, a farmer who owned a small piece of land, in the street and accused him of talking to a white woman  -- the woman in question was actually mixed-race, as was Dodds himself, and there were rumours that Marchetti had an interest in her -- and slashed at Dodds' face with a knife, Dodds knew what was coming. He quickly ran home, explained the situation to his wife, and hid himself in a bramble thicket so thick that it would appear that nobody could get in there. He waited in the brambles for almost two weeks until the lynch mob finally gave up looking for him, and then made his escape -- dressed in women's clothes, in case they were still looking for him. Dodds moved to Memphis and changed his name to Spencer. He and his wife still loved each other, but they couldn't be together, and Spencer remarried twice -- his second wife died after they had two children, and he married again and had two more. He and his wife Julia had had five children, and in 1911, five years after they split up Julia had a sixth with her new partner, Noah Johnson. As a single mother, Julia had sent several of her older children to live with their father and his new wife, because they were doing better financially, and when her relationship with Johnson got bad she turned to her ex-husband for help for herself, their youngest child, and her child by another man. Spencer took his ex-wife's son in, and Julia stayed at least for a while with him (and longer with her older daughter Carrie). Robert took on the name Robert Spencer, and as he grew up Spencer taught him the rudiments of music -- Spencer played guitar and fiddle, and was a big fan of country music, especially Fiddlin' John Carson and Uncle Dave Macon, and that would have been the music he taught his stepson to play: [Excerpt: Uncle Dave Macon, "Death of John Henry"] Robert's older half-brother, Charles Spencer Jr, known as Son, also played music, both guitar and piano, and  there's a photo of him in a suit, wearing a hat, playing a guitar with his wife by his side which looks *spookily* like the most famous photo of his brother. Son also taught Robert some of what he knew on the guitar, and introduced him to a lot of music -- Son was a big fan of country music, like his father, but also liked ragtime and jazz, especially Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong. While he was being brought up in Memphis, Robert also went to school, which set him apart from a lot of the other Delta blues singers, many of whom were illiterate, or who had been taught at most to write their names.  Robert's stepfather was a skilled tradesman, and that seems to have been his plan for his son. Robert lived with his stepfather and his children until 1919, when his mother remarried and came to take her eight-year-old son back to live on a plantation in Arkansas, before moving again to Robinsonville, Mississippi. At this point, and until he was a teenager, Robert still had no idea that the man he knew as his father wasn't his biological father, and still called himself Robert Spencer. And he seemed to want to be more like his father and family in Memphis than the field hands he was now living among. He hated having to work the fields, and would complain about how much he missed Memphis with its music and the big-city life. He also became a voracious reader, and would often carry a notebook in which he'd jot ideas. But his Memphis family weren't completely out of his life -- he would visit them whenever he could, often staying for long periods, and he became determined that he was going to be a musician, not a farmhand. His older sister Carrie moved back to the Delta to be with her mother and brother, and when his mother's new husband wouldn't buy him a guitar, first Robert built himself a diddley bow -- a rudimentary string instrument -- and then he and Carrie built a cigar-box guitar, before Carrie helped him save up enough to buy a real one. He had a boost in his musical education when Willie Brown moved to Robinsonville: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] Young Robert started learning from Brown, and sneaking out to watch him perform. Robert's mother's husband profoundly disapproved of him trying to make a living as a musician, but by the time he was seventeen he was playing in juke joints, playing whatever music people wanted to hear -- he'd play blues, folk songs, ragtime, polkas, and he particularly enjoyed the music of Jimmie Rodgers, the first big country music star: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rodgers, "Waiting for a Train"] It also seems to be around this time that he discovered who his biological father was, and started referring to himself as Robert Johnson as well as Robert Spencer -- and this seems at least in part to have been as a way of making himself more like two of his other musical idols, Tommy Johnson, the blues singer we've mentioned a couple of times already, and Lonnie Johnson, who straddled the line between blues, pop, and jazz, and influenced everyone from Elvis Presley (who recorded his "Tomorrow Night") and Lonnie Donegan, who named himself after him, to Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, and who recorded guest guitar with Louis Armstrong in the late twenties: [Excerpt: Lonnie Johnson and Louis Armstrong, "Hotter Than That"] Robert would often refer to himself as "one of the Johnson boys", hoping that people would associate him with the more famous musicians. He was a decent but not great guitarist and singer, making a living but not standing out -- this is the period Son House talked about later, where Johnson tried to challenge House as to who was the better guitarist but was wildly outplayed and seemed incompetent by House's standards. But then just before he turned eighteen, he married a fourteen-year-old girl he was in love with, and settled down and started mostly doing field hand work to support his new wife. She got pregnant and went off to stay with family to have the baby. When it was about due, Robert hitch-hiked up to be there for the birth, but took some time out to play in a few juke-joints along the way and have a little fun, as a teenager would do. He got there to find his wife and baby had died in childbirth, and her family were blaming his playing "the Devil's music" for him not having been there, and maybe for her death itself. He was utterly devastated, and this seems to have changed his personality totally. He moved back in with his mother and her husband, but he was getting drunk and into fights with the older man, and regularly disappeared for days and weeks at a time. But he stayed around the plantations because there were so many musicians there to learn from. Willie Brown had introduced him to a variety of great musicians who Brown played with, including Charlie Patton: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die"] And Son House: [Excerpt: Son House, "Preaching the Blues"] Johnson was at this point *obsessed* with music -- after the death of his wife and child, he had nothing else in his life and he was absolutely driven. But he was also driven to find his own birth father, and so he made his way to the small town where he'd been born, to search for Noah Johnson. He didn't find him, but he *did* find an older man, Ike Zimmerman, who took him in for the best part of a year, and spent that year teaching him to play guitar better. The two used to go out to a nearby graveyard every night to play guitar together, because it was a quiet place where you wouldn't disturb anyone. It's this year, and the massive improvement in Johnson's technique that resulted, plus Johnson's changed personality as a result of the tragedy he'd suffered, that lent some tiny plausibility to the  posthumous rumours that he'd sold his soul to the Devil. Around this time Johnson got a girl -- a friend of Zimmerman's daughter -- pregnant. She had the baby but refused to marry him because he was living an immoral vagabond life. Instead he married another, older, woman, and moved in with her in Clarksdale, but the marriage soon ended as Johnson became an itinerant musician, and his second wife died in 1933, less than two years after they married, apparently without him knowing or caring. He also never seems to have seen his son Claud -- indeed Johnson's family often claimed (and his surviving stepsister still does) that Claud's claim to be Johnson's son was fictitious, because they never heard mention of him until the 1990s. The first evidence we have of Johnson's music on record is not actually a recording by him, but by his friend Johnnie Temple: [Excerpt: Johnnie Temple, "Lead Pencil Blues"] The boogie bass pattern on that record is something that Temple would always later say had been taught him by Johnson. For the most part, though, Johnson was very secretive about his playing. He loved to play for audiences, but if he ever saw another musician watching him too closely he'd turn around and hide his fingers, so nobody could learn his tricks. one of the few musicians he ever taught anything to was Robert Jr. Lockwood, the son of one of Johnson's many girlfriends, who Johnson regarded as his stepson and helped build his first guitar: [Excerpt: Robert Jr Lockwood, "Steady Rollin' Man"] Lockwood would go on to play with Sonny Boy Williamson II, before having a career of his own. In 1936, Johnson auditioned for Vocalion Records, and went to San Antonio, where they had a makeshift studio in two rented rooms, to record for them over Thanksgiving. They were recording in San Antonio because there was a large Mexican population, and so it was a good place to find Mexican musicians. Over the few days in which Johnson's first set of recording sessions took place, they recorded many other musicians -- the way labels making music for minority populations would operate in those days was that they would book a room somewhere and get as many local musicians as they could in the area to record in extended sessions that would give them material to release for six months or a year. This led to a myth that grew up -- that Johnson recorded while facing a corner to get a better sound. In fact, Johnson recorded perfectly normally, facing a microphone in the middle of one room while the engineers worked the disc-cutter in the other. The only time he faced a corner was when the engineers invited in some of the Mexican musicians to hear their new discovery -- Johnson didn't want to show them his playing. As always, the record company weren't interested in Johnson's performances of Gene Autry or Jimmie Rodgers songs -- they wanted original material, not the covers of pop hits that made up the bulk of Johnson's performances. So he obliged. In these initial sessions, over the course of a few days, Johnson recorded sixteen songs, two takes of each, including songs like "Cross Road Blues", "Ramblin' on My Mind", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom", "Sweet Home Chicago" and his one hit, "Terraplane Blues", all of which became blues standards after they were rediscovered, as well as more idiosyncratic songs like "They're Red Hot", inspired by the local cuisine: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "They're Red Hot"] These songs are noteworthy because Johnson did two takes of each, and the songs were more or less identical each time. This was very, very unusual for Delta blues performers. Normally, Delta blues singers would alter their songs every time -- they were part of a folk tradition, and they used floating verses and improvised depending on how they felt at the time. Johnson, on the other hand, was slightly younger and more modern than the previous Delta musicians. He'd grown up in a world where music came on records and the radio, and a song was the same every time you listened to it. He could also read and write -- unlike most of his contemporaries Johnson was fully literate and a voracious reader, and would write down his lyrics. Johnson's songs were still very heavily inspired by other musicians' work. Compare for example Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Sweet Home Chicago"] With Kokomo Arnold's "Old Original Kokomo Blues": [Excerpt: Kokomo Arnold, "Old Original Kokomo Blues"] But in general, Johnson's songs have more of a coherent, thought-out feel than those of people like Charlie Patton, Skip James, or Son House. Similarly, his "Come on In My Kitchen", while lyrically distinct, clearly owes a lot to "Sitting on Top of the World", the song first recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Come on In My Kitchen"] After those recordings, Johnson started to travel even more widely than he had before, often accompanied by a friend, another musician named Johnny Shines. Shines, like Lockwood, learned from Johnson, and the two were travelling companions off and on for two years. Shines was particularly impressed by Johnson's ability to play contrapuntal lines on the guitar. At the time, most songsters would perform with a second guitarist -- the one on vocals would play rhythm parts, while the other would play lead. Johnson, though, had learned piano and had particularly long fingers, as well as a sharp musical mind and dedication. He was playing the kind of parts on guitar that a piano player would play -- playing a melodic bass line and picking out chordal melodies at the same time. Johnson would often strike out on his own though, because one of the things people remembered about him -- along with that he was a womaniser, a reader, and that he had an eidetic memory for music and could play any song after hearing it once -- was that he was extremely quiet, didn't like to get emotionally close to other people, and preferred his own company. So when Johnson made his second trip to Texas to record, this time to Dallas in June 1937, Shines went part of the way with him, but he ended up making the last leg of the journey alone. That time, rather than recording Mexican artists, the record label were mostly recording Western Swing artists, including a session by the Light Crust Dough Boys, the band that Bob Wills had formed which we talked about back in episode three, though Wills had left by the time they recorded this session: [Excerpt: The Light Crust Doughboys, "Sitting on Top of the World"] The songs that Johnson recorded at this session would again include several songs that became blues classics, including "Me and the Devil Blues" and "Love in Vain": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Love in Vain"] But by this time, blues listeners were more interested in full-band city blues than solo acoustic performers, and none of these recordings did very well. Six months later, Columbia Records bought Vocalion, and shut down the budget subsidiaries on which Johnson's records had most of their sales. Johnson was never invited back to record again. For a big chunk of what turned out to be the last year of his life, Johnson and Shines travelled further than Johnson had ever been before. A cousin of Shines' had killed a man in self-defence, and had been advised that the best thing he could do would be to leave the US altogether, so Johnson, Shines, and Shines' cousin made a trip to Canada, by their usual methods of hitch-hiking, taking trains, and paying their way by performance. They travelled through St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, before hitting Canada, where they performed on a nationally-broadcast gospel radio show. Then Johnson and Shines headed back South to New York. In Harlem, Johnson met another musician, who invited him to play his electric guitar, but after trying it, Johnson said he "couldn't make it sing like he wanted" and preferred his acoustic. Given the location and the time period, and the small number of people playing electric guitar in late 1937 and early 1938, it seems fairly likely that this other musician, whose name Shines didn't get, was Charlie Christian, who we talked about in the very first episode, and it's rather sad to think that if he had only known it, John Hammond, who knew Christian, could have met Johnson that night, and Johnson's subsequent life could have been very different, and possibly much longer. Because on August the 16th 1938, Robert Johnson died of what was probably poisoning, probably poisoned by the jealous partner of a woman he'd been interested in: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Love in Vain"] I say he was "probably" poisoned by a jealous partner, because in 2019 the most detailed account of that poisoning so far was published, in Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's biography of Johnson, which is an exemplary piece of work and the most detailed book yet on the subject. And then *last month* it came out that that account was false, because it was based on reports by Mack McCormick. McCormick was one of the most dedicated of all white blues scholars, and he made more contributions to the general public's knowledge of Robert Johnson than almost anyone else. In the 1970s he tracked down many of Johnson's surviving friends and relatives, and interviewed them for what he planned to be the definitive biography of Johnson, Biography of a Phantom. McCormick got Johnson's half-sister Carrie Thompson, the woman who'd helped him build his first guitar, and who before the discovery of Claud Johnson was presumed to be his heir, to do some interviews with him, and to sign a document saying that he had the right to use those interviews for his book. He also "borrowed" her family photos, including photos of Johnson which had never been published. Then another white blues scholar, Steve LaVere, came along and did the same thing. LaVere also "offered" to help Thompson claim the copyrights in her brother's work, which turned out, according to Thompson's surviving half-sister Annye, to mean assigning LaVere most of her rights. But LaVere was at least interested in doing something with Johnson's music. There'd been a second album rounding up the tracks that hadn't been on King of the Delta Blues Singers, but LaVere wanted to do more -- working with John Hammond he tried to put together a box set containing every recording that Johnson had made, including all the outtakes. It would have liner notes by LaVere, and feature a photo Thompson had lent him: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Love in Vain"] That box set was meant to come out in 1975. It came out in 1990, and the reason was Mack McCormick. McCormick had a reputation as being possibly the best blues scholar in the world, but he was also someone with serious problems. He was furious that LaVere was pushing in to what he considered "his" territory, and started threatening Columbia records, firstly using the real documents that Thompson had signed, later using other, more expansive, documents he forged, to claim he had the rights to Johnson's life story and the photos they were going to use. He also started to claim that he'd discovered extra heirs of Johnson's, who needed to be included in any legal settlement. McCormick held up the release -- and any royalties going to Thompson -- until 1990, by which point Thompson herself was dead. And legal repercussions continued on until the year 2000, two white men, neither of whom had ever met Robert Johnson or even known about him until long after his death, fighting over who got to own Johnson's sister's family photos, and which of them owned the "rights" to Johnson's life. While Thompson had lent the two men several photos, this legal wrangling meant that none saw publication until 1986, after Thompson's death and more than a decade after she'd first loaned her photos out. Until then, the wider world had no idea what Robert Johnson looked like. since then, two more photos have been published, and there are rumours of a fourth in McCormick's collection. When the box set did come out in 1990 it sold a million copies and won a Grammy. But Thompson had died seven years earlier, and her last years were spent distraught, as she was caught in a legal battle between two white men who she regarded as both being thieves and con artists out to exploit her dead brother. McCormick even started to claim that the Robert Johnson we know about wasn't the real Robert Johnson -- that he'd discovered another Robert Johnson who was the one who made the records -- just to throw LaVere off. LaVere and McCormick both died in 2015, about a month apart, and McCormick's biography, which he'd been working on since the early 1970s, was left unfinished. It was finally published last month, by the Smithsonian Institute, after a *major* effort of going through McCormick's archives. But what was published wasn't the complete book. Part of this was at the request of Johnson's surviving stepsister Annye Anderson. As the editors say in the afterword to the book "Mrs. Anderson requested that the Smithsonian transfer McCormick’s interviews of her sisters Carrie Thompson and Bessie Hines to the control of her family as well. For Anderson, what McCormick and LaVere took from her sisters—not simply through the financial losses accrued through legal costs, but also the years of stress, anxiety, sadness, nightmares, and trauma—delegitimizes any signed agreement between them and McCormick. In respect for her wishes, we expunged the stories her sisters provided to McCormick from this publication and have restricted public access to them." But also the editors discovered, and revealed in conjunction with the book's release, that masses of what McCormick had been touting for years as his discoveries -- including his story of how Johnson was murdered -- were simply false, pure fabrications he'd made up because of his paranoid belief that other historians were stealing his work. The preeminent historian of Robert Johnson, the man who'd dedicated more than forty years to finding every detail of his life, had poisoned the well of history so thoroughly we may never fully know exactly what parts of the Robert Johnson story we have now are true. That book, as it's available now, is incomplete but very valuable as a historical document, and edited with as much sensitivity as is possible. It's one of three books published in the last four years that have between them remade our understanding of Robert Johnson. One of the others is Conforth and Wardlow's book, which I'll also link in the notes. But there's one final one that *needs* mentioning here: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues"] Annye Anderson, Johnson's stepsister, is still alive and in her nineties. In 2020, she wrote a book, Brother Robert, telling her side of the story -- both all her recollections of her big brother's life, and the story of how white men who wrote blues music history destroyed her beloved sister's life in order to profit from her dead brother, while his family got no money but unending trauma. It's a heart-rending book. And it's especially so when I consider my own position. I am a white man writing music history. I will literally profit from this episode -- I make my living doing this podcast. I believe what I'm doing with this podcast is, on balance, a good thing. But I'm sure that McCormick and LaVere could have said the same. Towards the end of Anderson's book she says "I understand that Steve LaVere has gone on, and Mack McCormick, too. But there are others and always will be: white men who don’t know us and think they own us. Steve LaVere may be resting in a golden casket that Brother Robert bought him." I think it is incumbent on me -- I think it's *absolutely* necessary, given the story I've just told, to end this episode with a commercial of sorts. If you've been interested at all in anything I've said about Robert Johnson, then go out and buy a copy of Brother Robert by Annye Andreson, the last living person with a strong familial connection to Johnson, and read *her* words and *her* story. I said at the beginning that white men invented the blues. And they did. The *music* was created by Black people, but everything we know about the genre and its history has been shaped by the tastes, the prejudices, and the misconceptions of white men like Arthur Laibley, John Hammond, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Steve LaVere, Mack McCormick... and now me. You've heard what a white man has to say about this, now go and read what a Black woman who was actually there says, and pay her to do so. It won't fix a historical injustice, but it's a start. [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Love in Vain" into theme music.] ... Read more

02 Jul 2023

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02 Jul 2023


#209

Episode 165: “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Star” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, [on "Codine" by the Charlatans] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/83262633) . Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, andGrayfoldedruns to two hours. I referred to alot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, [Dennis McNally's biography of the band] (https://amzn.to/3MI3sOt) and [This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead] (https://amzn.to/3MmlCUr) by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included [McNally's Jerry on Jerry,] (https://amzn.to/3pVdR0c) a collection of interviews with Garcia; [Deal,] (https://amzn.to/3WjCIXw) Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; [The Grateful Dead FAQ] (https://amzn.to/3Osuvyu) by Tony Sclafani; [So Many Roads] (https://amzn.to/45eNse3) by David Browne; [Deadology] (https://amzn.to/42XPPQP) by Howard F. Weiner; [Fare Thee Well] (https://amzn.to/3IpGsRy) by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and [Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads] (https://amzn.to/3MJcbju) by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's [The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test] (https://amzn.to/3MJcbju) is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as [the novel itself] (https://amzn.to/41SOBoH) , which everyone should read, I also read [this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation] (https://amzn.to/43bMqxt) , and [The Writer's Crusade,] (https://amzn.to/3pYfMRP) a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's [More Than Human] (https://amzn.to/3Mox1Da) . For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's [Astounding] (https://amzn.to/3MKarGo) . [1,000 True Fans] (https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/) can be read online, as can [the essay on the Californian ideology] (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Barbrook/publication/249004663_The_Californian_Ideology/links/5725c1bf08ae262228adc341/The-Californian-Ideology.pdf) , and John Perry Barlow's ["Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"] (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence) . The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set [The Golden Road] (https://amzn.to/3MG8s6c) , which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. [Live/Dead] (https://amzn.to/3MG8s6c) contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has [more live recordings of the group ] (https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead) than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from [John Oswald's Bandcamp] (https://plunderphonic.bandcamp.com/album/grayfolded) Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of [my backers on Patreon] (http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey) . Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings] Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying"I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can’t tear down, you know, after you’re gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don’t want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. TheFederal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the firstkind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singervoices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs whenI was in junior high school and high school and around there. That wasone of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybodysang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn’t knowanybody that played. I mean, I didn’t know anybody that played theguitar. Nobody. They weren’t around. There were no guitar teachers.You couldn’t take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know?When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tunedwrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about ayear. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met aguy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and itwas like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gaveme the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more importantto me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I waslate" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn’t have is theharmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That’s what it’smissing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said“I don’t know if you’ve spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of theStudio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site...We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager,Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t good enough a musicianthen to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really,’cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, youknow. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in thewrong key and didn’t even [fuckin’] know it. I couldn’t hear thatlow, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stompyour foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instantarrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of getyour friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer.I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn’t matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons fromTroy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said“Jerry, listen, it’s seven-thirty on New Year’s Eve, and I don’t think you’re going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer MariaD’Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn’t have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I’m gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn’t believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of thing. And under him Lesh was slowly starting to innovate in his bass playing. Lesh was also thinking in terms of Coltrane, but also of the way classical and baroque composers would use bass lines contrapuntally. Of all the band Lesh had the least knowledge of what the norms of popular music forms like rock and roll and blues were, and so his use of the bass inadvertently paralleled the moves being made by a lot of other bass players around this time, now that recording techniques were improving and allowing much better definition of bass sounds on record. Up to about 1965 the bass on rock and roll records was almost always playing very simple lines -- at its most complicated it'd be something like a boogie walking bassline, but more often it would be the root and maybe fifth of the chord, simple whole notes dead on the beat, often locked in with the bass drum. Lesh was one of the first bass players to start playing after people like James Jamerson, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson started coming up with more through-composed parts for rock music, and that became his natural idiom. What Lesh was doing was not what one might think of as conventional rhythm section work at all, and he would often syncopate his lines, only rarely coming in on the one of a bar as a normal bass player would, but often coming in half a beat later. The group started to develop a conversational approach to performance, with the instrumentalists, especially Lesh and Garcia, entering into a dialogue with each other, all doing their own thing. They were particularly influenced by "Cleo's Back" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, a Motown instrumental, and it's fascinating to listen to that record in this context. "Cleo's Back" is clearly an attempt to replicate Stax records like "Green Onions", but the Walker record has each of the musicians doing his own thing, rather than playing in tight lockstep. They're all paying attention to the groove, but they're riffing on it, coming in and out when they have something to say, playing off each other as if they all think they're the star soloist but still somehow working as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Junior Walker & the All-Stars, "Cleo's Back"] By the time the Warlocks had finished their stint at the In Room, the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene had exploded, almost without the group realising it, and record companies were on the lookout. San Francisco was clearly the next big thing to exploit, and Autumn Records was right there. After Sly Stone had had hits with the Beau Brummels and minor success with the Mojo Men, they were on a bit of a high and were auditioning bands left and right. The recording of the Charlatans we heard earlier was from a session they did for Autumn that didn't get released, and Sly Stone was just about to start work with the Great Society, but Stone was apparently not present when the Warlocks did their audition for the label in November 1965: [Excerpt: The Warlocks, "Can't Come Down"] But for that audition, the group actually performed under another name, The Emergency Crew, because Phil Lesh had been looking through records in a shop and found one by another group called the Warlocks. McNally in his biography suggests that this is likely the Warlocks who included two-thirds of ZZ Top, but as far as I can tell that band didn't release a record until a few months after this. Nor of course is it the Velvet Underground, who never released a record under that name. There were, it turns out, a lot of bands who decided in the mid-sixties to call themselves The Warlocks -- I've found evidence of at least ten, many of whom released singles. My guess is that the record that Lesh had found was this one, an attempt by a band from Massachusetts to start a dance craze, released on Decca in June 1965. Lesh remembered the record he'd seen as being on Columbia, but otherwise this fits: [Excerpt: The Warlocks, "Temper Tantrum"] Oddly, the B-side to that track was a cover of James Brown's "I'll Go Crazy", which was a song that was also in the set of the Bay Area Warlocks. The group got together in Phil Lesh's house and started throwing out names. When nobody liked any of anyone else's suggestions, they started thumbing through reference books -- dictionaries, books of quotations, and so on -- and eventually Garcia found what he and Lesh thought the perfect name, though Bob Weir wasn't so keen. The Grateful Dead is a motif from many folk stories throughout the world. To quote from Gordon Hall Gerould's book on the subject: "A man finds a corpse lying unburied, and out of pure philanthropy procures interment for it at great personal inconvenience. Later he is met by the ghost of the dead man, who in many cases promises him help on condition of receiving, in return, half of whatever he gets. The hero obtains a wife (or some other reward), and, when called upon, is ready to fulfil his bargain as to sharing his possessions." Gerould identifies variants of this story all over the world, and sees it crop up as an element in many, many, stories. It exists in endless variations with no single canonical version, as so many folk stories and songs do. None of the band knew much of this at the time, but Lesh in particular was so enthusiastic about the name that the matter was settled. The Warlocks were now the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: “Grayfolded”] In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, there's a religion made up by a calypso singer named Bokonon, which includes a concept called a karass. To quote from the book "We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams,teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they aredoing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon" A karass doesn't necessarily know it's a karass -- it's a collection of people whose lives are intertwined in ways they will never fully understand. Later in the book he goes on to define another term: "A wampeter is the pivot of a karass. No karass iswithout a wampeter, Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel iswithout a hub.Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, anidea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, themembers of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos ofa spiral nebula. The orbits of the members of a karass abouttheir common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally. It issouls and not bodies that revolve." In Vonnegut's twice-fictional religion, there are always two wampeters for every karass, one waxing and one waning. And there's no doubt that one of the wampeters around which the karass that encompassed the Grateful Dead at this time was revolving was Neal Cassady: [Excerpt: Bob Weir "Cassidy"] Cassady is difficult to sum up, especially at a remove of nearly sixty years. He was a vital link between two different versions of the counterculture -- the Beats of the fifties and the hippies of the sixties -- and everyone who knew him talks about him as having been a great artist and a vital inspiration to them. He was regarded as a peer by Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Jerry Garcia. But while Kesey and Kerouac's art was their novels, Ginsberg's was his poetry, and Garcia's was his guitar playing -- all things that one can point to and analyse and that exist as works of art, according to Garcia "Neal was a guy who was like an artist without an art. He was his art, you know?" He meant that very literally. He said "If you’re doing something and eventually you’re doing it well enough to where there’s a flow to it, then you know when the flow is there and you know when it ain’t. And it’s that same thing. But like, most people do it the way I’ve done it—the way most conventional artists deal with it at that level is to take up a discipline, one specific thing, scope in on it, concentrate your energy on it, like an alchemist, and work on it and work on it, and that becomes the way of telling whether you’re on or not, and then all your energy goes into it. Neal’s way of doing that was to eliminate the tool, you know, even though he probably wasn’t conscious of it initially and used to envy that discipline. Eventually he became that whole thing—all of his surfaces, if you imagine human beings as having many surfaces, all of his surfaces were on that edge of on-ness and off-ness, and being conscious of whether you’re on or off. That whole thing of balancing on the end of a stepladder, you know, the kind of stuff that Neal could do. I mean, when he was on, he could really, because he worked at it, man. He spent a lot of the time doing it. Everybody else thought it was crazy weirdness, but he was working on it." Cassady had been a petty criminal for a great part of his youth, and had been arrested a number of times for car theft, shoplifting, and possession of stolen goods. But he was also mentored by a renowned educator, Justin Brierly, who saw potential in him. Through one of Brierly's other students, after getting out of prison when he was nineteen he met Jack Kerouac, and the two travelled across the country on several occasions -- with Cassady becoming the model for Dean Moriarty, the main character in Kerouac's On The Road. Cassady asked Kerouac to teach him how to write, though he never finished a completed work in his lifetime, but according to many sources while Kerouac was teaching Cassady, Cassady was also teaching Kerouac, and the prose style which made Kerouac famous was in large part an imitation of Cassady's style. In 1962, Cassady read Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and identified so strongly with the protagonist, Randle McMurphy, and his fight against a system that considers him insane and eventually breaks him, that he tracked down Kesey and the two became friends. By this time Kesey was a strong advocate for the use of LSD -- not in controlled, experimental, safe conditions like those advocated by Timothy Leary at this point, but for general, uninhibited, recreational use. When in 1964 Kesey needed to travel to New York in connection with the publication of his second novel, he and Cassady and a group of other people, who dubbed themselves the Merry Pranksters, decided to make it a ritual event -- they were going to retrace the East-West migration that had characterised white people's journey in America, and do it backwards. They were going to go on the road, and bring West Coast weirdness to the heartlands and East Coast. They got a bus, and painted it in psychedelic colours -- and note that this is in June 1964, before even A Hard Day's Night had come out, to give some perspective on where the general culture was at -- and where the destination should be they simply wrote "Furthur" (spelled with a u instead of an e, apparently as a mistake, but taken as serendipity), and went out on the road. They attempted to make a film of the journey, and they filmed extensive material. So extensive, indeed, that the task of going through it thoroughly became too great for the unassisted Kesey, and a film didn't come out until 2011. But the Merry Pranksters' journey and attempted film did, as the Tralfamadorians among you will know, become the inspiration for another film that was released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Magical Mystery Tour"] After this, Kesey's home became something of a commune with various of the Pranksters often in attendance. In 1965 a young journalist named Hunter S. Thompson, working on a book about the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, decided that it might be interesting to bring them along to meet the Pranksters, and a party was thrown for the Angels at Kesey's house, with Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass also attending. This went well enough that there started to be *weekly* parties organised by the Pranksters, and just after the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead, in November 1965, several of them attended one of these parties, where they took acid and had a great time with people like Kesey and Ginsberg. Shortly after that, the Pranksters decided to do something a little bigger -- they were going to turn their parties into full-blown Happenings, in the way we talked about last episode, and the Grateful Dead were going to be involved, providing music. Part of the reasoning for this was that the film that had been made of the road trip was clearly not yet ready, but they could show bits of it in these Happenings as essentially guerilla marketing, establishing an underground reputation for when it was finally released. These Happenings were to be called Acid Tests, and the main way they were distinct from the other happenings we've talked about was that everyone involved would be on acid. Or at least, almost everyone -- a small number never indulged, notably Pig Pen, whose drug of choice was always alcohol, not anything psychedelic. At a typical one of these acid tests, the Grateful Dead would play their music, which from the few surviving recordings of them in 1966 was a mixture of fairly standard R&B: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "I'm a Hog For You Baby (acid test)"] And rather unformed psychedelic jamming: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Caution (Do Not Step on Tracks) (acid test)"] Film of the Pranksters' road trip would be shown, some of the Pranksters would make their own music (though they couldn't play instruments), Kesey would write messages on slides which would be projected while the band were playing, and Neal Cassady would juggle hammers. After the first of the Acid Tests involving the Dead, they quickly found themselves with a team -- co-managers Rock Scully, who they met at the Acid Test, and Danny Rifkin, and sound man Owsley Stanley, who became interested in doing the band's sound after an acid trip in which he claimed he could see the patterns the sound was making and knew how to improve them. Stanley was the first private individual in the world, outside industry and academia, to figure out how to synthesise his own LSD, and he used the money he made from this to help support the group in their career, buying equipment. He would also record all the group's shows (and others he engineered) to check his own work back, and he kept almost all of these recordings, starting a practice that would lead to the Grateful Dead being the most exhaustively documented live act of the rock era. Within two months of the first Acid Test the group found themselves playing to six thousand people at the Trips Festival, and they soon built up enough of a following that they actually decamped with the Pranksters to LA, spending two months there holding acid tests while working on original material and trying to get a little privacy as they worked out how to deal with their new followers. They returned to San Francisco after a couple of months, thoroughly disillusioned with LA, and in July they released a single on the tiny San Francisco-based indie label Scorpio Records: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Don't Ease Me In" (use single mix from YouTube as it has reverb)] "people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.” That's from Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut.The narrator in that novel is the son of Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful and rather bad science fiction writer who appears in several of Vonnegut's novels as an inspirational figure who writes mostly for himself and doesn't really realise that he has any fans, let alone that some of his fans regard him as some sort of guru with great wisdom. There are two main models for Trout -- one is Vonnegut's friend Theodore Sturgeon, and the other is Vonnegut himself. While the Dead had been working on original material, they apparently chose not to record any -- while both tracks on the single were credited to Garcia as songwriter on the label, they were actually traditional jug band songs that had been in their repertoire while they were still Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. The single was only released in very limited quantities, but at least they had now actually made a record, even if the only place to buy a copy was the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street. The Grateful Dead by this point were just one of several bands in the Haight-Ashbury area, and not necessarily the most successful -- that would be jefferson Airplane, who were actually releasing records, or maybe the Great Society. Or Quicksilver Messenger Service. Or the Charlatans. Or Big Brother and the Holding Company. All these bands were regularly playing sets around a local circuit, with two venues in particular standing out -- the Avalon Ballroom, which was run by Chet Helms and the Family Dog commune, and the Fillmore, run by Bill Graham. The Avalon was a friendlier venue, and everyone liked Helms more, and it had a better light show, but Graham was a better businessman, the Fillmore had a better sound system -- bought from Owsley during one of his periodic fallings-out with the Dead -- and Graham was also more interested in putting on a wider variety of acts. Graham would listen to the musicians who played his venue, and would bring in outside acts that they suggested, and often juxtapose wildly different performers like the avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and the Yardbirds. The reputation that Graham got was of someone who would rip off the artists who were performing for him, but was so good at business that they'd still end up better off than playing for anyone else. By late 1966 the group were essentially living in two communes -- Garcia, Weir, Pig Pen, their managers, and assorted girlfriends and roadies in a house on Ashbury, and Lesh and Kreutzmann and their partners a couple of blocks away (they'd originally lived with the others, but Lesh had soon bolted after having to share a room with Garcia, who snored very loudly). That wasn't the only bodily function that was causing problems for the group. Weir had by this point given up on LSD -- joining Pig Pen, who'd never used it -- but while Pig Pen was drinking a bottle of whisky a day, Weir had given up in order to become healthier, and had taken up a vegetarian diet which led to a severe flatulence problem. There were other issues starting to develop between Garcia and Weir as well. By this point a group of hippie anarchists called the Diggers had taken up residence in the area, and they were giving away free food, scrounged or stolen from local shops and cooked, as a combination of political act and performance art piece -- anyone getting their free food had to step through a frame, because inspired by John Cage they thought that the act of putting a frame round something made it art. The Diggers also insisted that music should be free, and that it belonged to the people who shouldn't have to pay to get it. Garcia had some sympathy for this attitude, and the Dead would often play free shows, but he was also pragmatic enough to realise that if the Dead didn't get paid for their work he'd have to get an actual job, which would be horrifying. The way Garcia squared this was to insist that the group needed to get good enough to be *worth* paying, and this led to him pressuring Weir, who was the youngest of the band members and the least facile on his instrument. Weir decided he needed to figure out a way for a rhythm player to function in a band with a soloist who was inspired by John Coltrane, and eventually hit on the idea of, rather than looking to rhythm guitarists like Steve Cropper, as most musicians in his position would, listening to McCoy Tyner, the piano player in Coltrane's quartet, and copying his style: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] "To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune. Here’s how the math works. You need to meet two criteria. First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan. That is easier to do in some arts and businesses than others, but it is a good creative challenge in every area because it is always easier and better to give your existing customers more, than it is to find new fans. Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percent of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate. If you keep the full $100 of each true fan, then you need only 1,000 of them to earn $100,000 per year. That’s a living for most folks." That's from an essay called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, who along with Stewart Brand, one of the people who organised the Trips Festival, set up the early online community The WELL. Kelly later founded Wired magazine. The essay appears inTools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferris. In late 1966 the Dead put out their first T-shirt, designed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse who did the group's early posters, which had an image of Pig Pen on it. They also started to move away from their association with Kesey and the acid tests. The final break came when Kesey negotiated a plea bargain for some legal trouble, which involved him committing to doing a final acid test style show, but with a "don't do acid any more, kids" type message. Kesey announced that the Dead would be playing this, without asking them, and on a night when they were booked to play elsewhere. They still considered doing it until one of the Pranksters told Danny Rifkin that the plan for the event was to play one last big prank and dose the entire audience with LSD. Unlike many in the Dead's circle, Rifkin detested the idea of dosing people without their consent, and he was also worried that if the performance went ahead, Bill Graham, who was meant to be promoting it, would lose his promoter's license. The group pulled out, and Kesey ended up doing a much smaller event. By this point the Dead were a powerful live band, though very far from the style that they would become known for in later years. Listening to live recordings from the summer of 1966, they're a conventional garage band, not a million miles away from other bands from the area like the Standells or the Count Five, though with a more imaginative guitarist than those bands: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Cream Puff War (live in Vancouver)"] And it was that powerful live band that Joe Smith of Warner Brothers Records came to see, after being informed that the San Francisco scene was ripe with potentially successful bands that they could pick up for bargain prices. Over the autumn, Warners negotiated a deal with the group for a ten thousand dollar advance, and assurances that they would be given a certain amount of special treatment. Rather than being put through their customary marketing machine, the label would treat them the way they treated country artists, giving them special marketing for their niche genre. Smith was very eager to get the Dead signed -- other than the Everly Brothers, who were making great records but no longer having hits, Warners had few rock acts, and was mostly known for the artists on its Reprise subsidiary -- a label that had been started by Frank Sinatra and still mostly had artists of Sinatra's generation (plus the mildly successful teenpop band Dino, Desi, and Billy, two of whom were the sons of Sinatra's celebrity friends). They were trying desperately to build up a rock roster, and San Francisco was the obvious place to turn, since LA had already been picked clean -- as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" they also bought up Autumn Records around this time and got Lenny Waronker, Van Dyke Parks and their circle to work with that label's group of San Francisco artists. Smith said later of signing the Dead“That was one of the two or three most important signings in allthose years. It changed the nature and opinion of therecord company. We were out in front. It was important to indicate wewere more than Dean Martin and Sinatra—that we were hip.” For this reason they made another important concession, which would have a profound impact on the way the group's sound evolved. The standard record contract at this time paid performers per song, and that made sense for a time when most songs were about two or three minutes long -- you'd need at least ten songs to make up an album, and so bands were being incentivised to produce as many of those two or three minute pop songs as possible. But the Grateful Dead liked to stretch out and play long solos, and Rock Scully had heard that there was another way to structure these contracts. He'd worked at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and there he'd heard that jazz musicians were paid by the minute of recording, not by the song, which was how they could afford to do those long exploratory improvisational tracks that could last an entire side of an album. Scully insisted on this being the case for the Grateful Dead's contract too, and Smith agreed. By the time of the group's first sessions for Warners, Garcia at least had some studio experience. As we heard in the episode on Jefferson Airplane, Garcia had been involved in the recording of their album Surrealistic Pillow, at least according to most participants, though the record's producer always said he wasn't involved. Certainly some tracks sound very much like they have Garcia playing on them: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Today"] In January 1967, the group made their first album. Garcia later said of it "At that time we had no real record consciousness. We were just going to go down to L.A. and make a record. We were completely naïve about it. We had a producer we had chosen because he’d been the engineer on a couple of Rolling Stones records that we liked the sound of; that was as much as we were into record-making." Dave Hassinger had definitely engineered a lot of Rolling Stones records -- he'd been the group's main US engineer for the run of hit singles and albums they'd had in the previous couple of years -- but Garcia also knew him from working with Jefferson Airplane, as he'd engineered their album. Hassinger was a super-competent engineer who had worked on everything from the TAMI Show to the Chipmunks' album of Beatles covers, and he and Garcia had got on well. But Hassinger had only recently moved into production rather than engineering, and the rules of the studio they were working in meant that he had to use the studio's staff engineer rather than do the job himself as he wanted, and as Hassinger himself said the band didn't want to hear what a conventional producer had to say -- they just went in and bashed out versions of their live set of the time, though as always they found themselves unable to let loose and improvise in the studio without the feedback of the audience. The first single, "The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)", failed to chart: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)"] That track was actually recorded in San Francisco later, after the record company said they needed a single. Other than that, the album, which was just titled The Grateful Dead, only took four days to record, including the time spent mixing, and for the most part it sounds like any other pop album of the period -- Bob Weir sounds spookily like Peter Tork at points. Despite Pig Pen being the band's frontman and most popular member, he only gets one lead vocal, on the blues standard "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl", with the rest of the leads being shared between Garcia and Weir, but his keyboard is all over the album. At this point, the group weren't writing much of their own material, and other than the group composition "The Golden Road", the only original is Garcia's "Cream Puff War", with everything else being standard folk-club material like Bonnie Dobson's apocalyptic ballad "Morning Dew": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Morning Dew"] or jug band material they'd been playing when they were still the Uptown Jug Champions, like "Viola Lee Blues", originally written by Noah Lewis and performed by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, which at just over ten minutes long was the only truly extended track on the album: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Viola Lee Blues"] Garcia said at the time "I think our album is honest. It sounds just like us. It even has mistakes on it. But it also has a certain amount of excitement on it. It sounds like we felt good when we were making it. We made it in a short period—four days—and it’s the material we’d been doing onstage for quite a long time. It sounds like one of our good sets." Phil Lesh, not really getting the hang of this promotion business, said in an interview at the time "I think it’s a turd." The album wasn't a success, and only reached number sixty-nine on the album charts. But the group's reputation as a live act was steadily improving. A couple of weeks before the studio dates they'd performed at the Human Be-In, a massive outdoor show in San Francisco with speeches from people like Timothy Leary and the political activist Jerry Rubin, food distributed for free by the Diggers (paid for by Owsley, who was also distributing the acid), security provided by the Hell's Angels, and performances by Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Twenty thousand people turned up for that event, and they were all astonished to find that there were *that many* people in what they all thought of up to that point as a rather small scene. The gathering of that many people in one place to hear the new psychedelic music got the biggest national and international media exposure the San Francisco scene had ever had, and soon everything that wanted to be cool and hip had the suffix "-in", in imitation of the Be-In -- there were love-ins, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In on TV, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono having bed-ins. Soon San Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury area, was once again being overrun by the kind of tourists who ten years earlier had come looking for beatniks, only this time they were looking for hippies, or trying to become hippies, as the Mothers of Invention would satirise the next year: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] The Human Be-In was also one of the precursors to the Monterey Pop Festival, which of course, as we talked about in episode 151, was only possible because the Grateful Dead persuaded the other San Francisco bands to play, and where of course the Dead played what they considered an incredibly sub-par show sandwiched between the Who and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom blew them off the stage. The Dead's performance was so bad that none of it was used in the film. The Dead did, though, come out ahead from the show -- apparently they stole the PA system. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] There is of course a reason that the Californian ideology became centred in California and developed in the way it did, and that reason is of course infrastructure. Many people who were influential on the Californian ideology, like the postmodernist science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, would argue that if you plotted a timeline of the most innovative people in human history, that timeline would slowly move west and slightly north, accelerating over the centuries, as the most radical thinkers followed the Sun, so in the last few centuries the greatest innovations had come from Greece, then Italy, then France, then England, then New York, and then finally the West Coast of the USA. According to Wilson and his friends like Timothy Leary, now that wave had finally reached the Pacific there was only one place left to go, and so humanity would fulfil its manifest destiny and head up into the stars. Other, less teleologically-minded, thinkers have suggested that the growth of that ideology had more to do with the fact that the Bay Area had... well, a bay. Which meant that it was a natural area for naval bases, and thus for much of the twentieth century a hub of military activity more generally. And this meant that when the US Government wanted to fund research into military technology -- like rockets, or like the computer systems that would be needed to guide missiles, or like a communications network that would allow those computers to communicate, the Bay Area's institutions of higher learning were the best places to turn to, and so places like Berkeley and Stanford got vast military research grants, and so became the cutting-edge institutions for those topics. And so Berkeley, for example, counts among its alumni Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, Gordon Moore, the semiconductor researcher who co-founded Intel and coined "Moore's Law", and Eric Schmidt, a software engineer who went on to become the CEO of Google; while Stanford produced seventeen of the forty-four winners of the Turing Award for computer science to date, and was also the place where in order "to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making" as the director of theDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency put it, they developed what was then called ARPANET but later became known as the Internet -- the first ever ARPANET message, the word "login", was sent from CalTech to Stanford, though problems meant that only the first two letters arrived. So many advances in computer science came out of the military-funded institutions in the Bay Area that soon corporations started building their own facilities there to hire all the bright young graduates, and Silicon Valley was built, starting with Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre, where basically every personal computing technology of the nineties was invented in the seventies. And so young men (and it was, sadly, almost all men, sexism in science and technology being what it is) flocked to the Bay Area to work with this cutting-edge technology. Many of these people were the kind of staggeringly bright, vaguely idealistic people who had been inspired by science fiction stories to build technology for a better, utopian, future. They wanted to go where the best tech was, to have the best toys to play with, but they often didn't like the idea of being funded by the defence industry, because these were young men at a time when the US was prosecuting an unpopular war in which their friends were being called up to fight. But they didn't *dislike* that idea enough not to take the money and play with the toys, especially when what they were doing wasn't *exactly* weapons research. I mean, yes, they were being funded by the Department of Defence, but they weren't building *bombs*. They were making computers talk to each other. And so, rationalisation being what it is, they leapt on any ideas that would let them do defence-department-funded work while still having a clear conscience. And one of those ideas was one that was very current among the hippies of the Bay Area, people like Stewart Brand. The idea was that all large institutions were just jokes, figments of the imagination that didn't really exist, that they're what Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle talks about as "a false _karass_... a seeming team that wasmeaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done...what Bokonon calls a _granfalloon_... examples of_granfalloons_ are the Communist party, the Daughters of theAmerican Revolution, the General Electric Company, theInternational Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime,anywhere. As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him: If you wish to study a _granfalloon_, Just remove the skin of a toy balloon. " So the Department of Defence and the government weren't real. What was real was individuals, taking individual actions -- and those individual actions would somehow coalesce into a collective higher purpose without organisation. Individuals all doing their own thing, together and leaderless, the same way the Grateful Dead all improvised their own parts and the sound gelled. That idea appealed a *lot* to these bright young men. And this gentle hippie idea of freedom also fit in with the rugged individualist heroic idea of freedom that they'd read about in all their old science fiction magazines, a hypercapitalist pioneering libertarian idea promulgated by editors like John W. Campbell. And it didn't hurt, of course, that those ideas of individual freedom also meant that you didn't have to feel guilty about becoming very, very rich... [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] There were several other changes to the world of the Dead in 1967, too. In March, on a trip to play in New York, Bob Weir reconnected with his old friend John Perry Barlow, who would become a major figure in the band's lives over the next few years. And there was a new band member too. The story of how Mickey Hart came to join the Grateful Dead has never quite made sense. The way Hart always tells the story, he was at the Fillmore watching Count Basie and hanging out with Basie's drummer, Sonny Payne, who was one of *the* great jazz drummers of all time: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Ol' Man River"] And Count Basie definitely did play the Fillmore in August 1967, as support to Chuck Berry on one of the wonderfully eclectic bills that Bill Graham put together. But Sonny Payne wasn't in Basie's band in 1967 -- he'd stopped working with Basie the previous year, and Basie's main drummer in 1967 was Ed Shaughnessey, before Harold Jones took over for a five-year stint. Possibly this was a situation like David Bowie and Lou Reed. Either way, Hart met Bill Kreutzmann at the gig, and the two hit it off immediately -- and that wasn't the only thing they hit. They spent much of the rest of the night going around the streets of San Francisco drumming on bins, cars, lampposts and so on together. A little while later, Hart came to see Kreutzmann's band, and was impressed. Soon he was in the band as their second drummer. This actually opened up a lot of possibilities for the group. Lesh didn't play like a conventional bass player, which meant that the group didn't have as firmly rhythmic a sound as other bands. Hart moved in with Kreutzmann and Lesh and Hart and Kreutzmann soon started spending hours playing together, learning each other's idiosyncracies. They even tried hypnotising each other so that they could be more in tune with each other, which led to some people in the band's circle wondering if Hart had hypnotised Kreutzmann into letting him join the band. (They also tried hypnotising Pig Pen, but it just made him walk into a door). Shortly after Hart joined the band, the group decided they had to get away from Haight-Ashbury. What had seemed like an idyllic community soon became, in the words of George Harrison who had visited the area that summer, "like the Bowery". There were drug dealers getting murdered, teenage girls getting raped, and the group themselves got busted for dope possession. On October the sixth, the Diggers held a funeral for the hippie movement. The Summer of Love was over. Most of the band moved to Marin County -- Pig Pen stayed behind at first, though he followed later -- and it's at this point that the band became the Grateful Dead as they are in the popular imaginary, the experimental psychedelic act. Robert Hunter had been in Mexico for a while, but he'd been in touch with Garcia, and had sent Garcia some poems, which Garcia had set to music -- Garcia had never liked writing lyrics. Hunter had now returned to San Francisco, and was made a non-performing member of the band, with the job of writing lyrics for the band's music. The first song he wrote with the band, rather than at a distance, became the non-album single "Dark Star". Hunter heard the band rehearsing what was then an instrumental and came up with the first verse straight away: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Hunter would later acknowledge that he was inspired by the start of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -- "Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question" When "Dark Star" came out as a single, it wasn't a success, and was only a two-and-a-half-minute song. It wasn't even included on the album which they were recording at the time, Anthem of the Sun, though that did feature Hunter's first contribution to the band, a lyric called "Alligator" which was used on one of the two tracks for the "Pig Pen side" of the album: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Alligator"] Anthem of the Sun was the first Grateful Dead album to consist entirely of original material -- material published by the band's own publishing company, Ice-Nine, which was named after a substance in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. Ice-Nine, in the novel, is an allotrope of water that's solid at room temperature, and that makes any other water touching it become solid. One crystal of Ice-Nine dropped in an ocean would eventually freeze the entire ocean. Vonnegut always claimed the inspiration for this idea came from the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, but it was also an idea that John Campbell, the science fiction editor who worked with Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard, had been suggesting to authors since the 1940s (though Campbell may also have got it from Langmuir). That album had a much more difficult genesis than their first album. They started sessions with Hassinger in LA, but soon moved to better studios in New York. And then to other studios in New York... when they started the sessions, they had two main songs they wanted to work on, "Alligator", and one they hadn't titled yet and just called "The Other One", which eventually became a suite entitled "That's it for the Other One". Along with the new members Hart and Hunter, there was another addition to the group at this point -- Lesh brought in his old friend Tom Constanten, who at the time was in the military, working as a computer programmer on an Air Force base in Las Vegas, and secretly using their IBM machines to create electronic music, but who would take leaves of absence to join the group in the studio and help them create new sonic textures, with John Cage-inspired prepared pianos and electronic noises. (Constanten was famously a Scientologist, but he had his religion listed with the Air Force as Buddhist. Whenever he needed time off he'd make up a Buddhist holiday and get a pass). [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "That's it for the Other One"] Hassinger soon got exasperated with the band's endless tinkering -- according to one story the final straw came when Bob Weir wanted to record some silence from the desert so they could get the sound of "thick air" to add to the recordings, though the story is told in different ways that make Weir's request seem more or less reasonable depending on who is telling the story and when -- and the group and their sound engineer Dan Healy began working on their own, recording an assortment of exotic instruments and sounds like a gyroscope spinning on a piano soundboard. But the group still weren't happy with the sounds they were getting in the studio, and eventually Lesh hit on an idea -- they'd take the recordings of their live performances of these songs and create collages, mixing live and studio performance together, sometimes layering multiple performances from different shows on top of each other. It would be like Charles Ives, whose work often involved the orchestra playing two different songs at the same time. Lesh, Garcia, and Healy spent a huge amount of time in the studio, with Healy, who understood the equipment intimately, helping translate the ideas of Lesh and Garcia, who took charge of this editing process and kept asking things like "can we make a sound purple?" The resulting album, with two tracks sung by Pig Pen, one by Weir, and two duets between Garcia and Weir, is probably the most experimental record the Dead ever made, and the polar opposite of their first album. It's the one time in their career that the Dead really used the studio to its full potential, and it's all the more surprising that they did that by using so much live material: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "That's it for the Other One"] Those lyrics about "cowboy Neal" were written by Bob Weir on the fourth of February 1968, while the band were on tour. When he got back to San Francisco, he learned that that same day Neal Cassady had died. The night before he'd gone walking down a railway track trying to get from one town to another. He'd only been wearing a T-shirt and jeans, it was raining and he'd taken barbituates. He collapsed and was found comatose, and died of exposure. He was only forty-one. So it goes. Anthem of the Sun was not a particular success, either critically or commercially, and is the kind of album that can only be appreciated with a little distance from its release. The album is very much of a part with other contemporaneous albums whose reputation have grown over the ensuing decades. Its experiments with tape and musique concrete put it somewhere in the same ballpark as the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile, which a few years later Garcia would cite as his favourite album of all time, but which at the time was dismissed as stoned nonsense that was trying too hard: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She's Going Bald"] While its collaging and mixture of folk and psychedelia is very much the same kind of thing that the Incredible String Band were doing on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "A Very Cellular Song"] By this time, many of the groups were getting sick of working with Bill Graham, and the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and some of the other groups decided to open their own venue, run as a collective. As Bob Weir later said "We were young and strong and high on ourselves. At that point, Bill Graham wasn’t the huge mogul that he became, and we thought, “There’s room in this town for us, too!” We were also acutely aware that Bill was stealing from us, and he made no bones about it, but he also made no bones about the fact that we’d never catch him. That said, we probably did better working for him than we would’ve done working for someone who wasn’t stealing from us, because he always managed to sell more tickets. He managed to get more people into the building and he knew how to get around the fire marshals and all that kind of stuff. So he was a crook, but he was a great one." The Carousel Ballroom, however, only lasted a few months before they realised that musicians and business are not a good mixture. The ballroom closed, and soon reopened under a new name -- Bill Graham had set up a Fillmore East in New York, and now he closed down his original Fillmore -- largely because it was in a Black neighbourhood and the hippies were no more immune to racism than anyone else -- and rebranded the former Carousel as the Fillmore West. At the group's first gig at the newly-renamed Fillmore West they spiked Bill Graham, giving him acid without his consent. This was sadly a common practice for the band -- and they didn't just do it to their human friends, but to animals, with Hart occasionally giving acid to a horse he owned. Graham, who didn't use the drug, knew this was a practice of theirs, so refused to eat or drink anything they had been near, and got his wife to put his own food and a thermos into a paper bag which was then sealed with wax, and would be the only food he'd touch while he was there, so he knew it was untouched. But he thought he'd be safe with a can of 7-Up, because after all, it was a sealed can, he opened it himself and drank it down with none of them being able to touch it. Except that they'd used a hypodermic needle to inject LSD into all the 7-Up cans backstage, and then warned each other not to drink them if they didn't want to be dosed. They were *that* desperate to make sure that everyone around them used the same drugs as them, and *that* unconcerned about basic notions of consent. Remarkably, Graham continued to work with them for the rest of his life. (That story, like many with the Dead, is told as happening in different ways at different times. I've placed it here because the other main version of the story places it at a time when Mickey Hart wasn't in the band, and he remembers it happening and Graham remembered him being there.) The Carousel closed at the end of June 1968, the album came out in July 1968, and in August 1968 the group fired Bob Weir and Pig Pen. Or at least they tried to. Lesh, and to a lesser extent the other three, had grown increasingly impatient with the two of them. Garcia was the leader, and he was a virtuoso guitarist by this point. The drummers were working together to investigate polyrhythms and were innovating on their instruments. Lesh was generally regarded as one of the most innovative bass players in the business. But Weir, the youngest and most naive of the band members, was not yet able to translate his McCoy Tyner ideas into playing, and Hart described him as playing "little waterfalls" rather than proper rhythm guitar. And Pig Pen, meanwhile, had never been into this psychedelic thing in the first place. He wanted to be a bluesman, and simply had no interest in doing extended spacey jams influenced by John Cage and Charles Ives and Edgard Varese and John Coltrane. But somehow, even after sacking the two members who the rest regarded as deadweight, they just... stayed in the band. Garcia in particular was too nonconfrontational to actually properly sack someone -- or indeed to make any kind of decision at all. Everyone else thought of him as the leader, the guru, the person in charge. He thought of himself as just one of the band, and went to great lengths to avoid the responsibility everyone else was putting on him. So the Grateful Dead carried on as a six-piece, but played fewer gigs, and instead Mickey Hart and the Heartbeats -- Garcia, Lesh, Hart, and Kreutzmann -- played their own separate gigs, with the idea that they would become the main band and the Grateful Dead would wither away. That didn't happen, though. Lesh liked to compare the Grateful Dead to the characters in More Than Human by Sturgeon, how when they were working together -- bleshing in Sturgeon's term -- they were like a single organism rather than separate individuals. As Owsley later put it, "you can't fire your left hand just because it doesn't write as nicely as your right". And without Weir and Pig Pen, that feeling simply wasn't there. So they came up with another solution. By this point, Tom Constaten had left the Air Force, and so he was available to join the group. The decision to add Constanten to the band was made by Lesh and Garcia, without consulting the other members, and not everyone was happy about it -- they felt that Constanten was far too intellectual a player and was never really comfortable jamming, and some of them didn't like his abstinence from drugs (because they're banned by Scientology). Constanten also found playing in a live band difficult because of the levels of amplification. But it meant that Pig Pen could play congas and harmonica and be more of a frontman for much of the show and not have to be the sole keyboard player, and that in turn gave Weir a chance to develop his style more now there was another avant-garde player on stage with Lesh and Garcia: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "That's It For the Other One, San Francisco February 1969"] And Weir did eventually find his style, and as the band's instrumental jams grew more complex, he went from being dead weight to being hugely important to the group's sound. Whereas in most rock bands the bass player would provide a steady harmonic root to keep the rest of the band in place, Lesh didn't play that way, and so both Garcia and Lesh were usually playing improvisational melody lines, twisting round each other and going in different directions. But any two notes played at the same time imply a chord, and the two were often implying all sorts of complex harmonics. Weir's job during an improvisation came to be to listen to what Lesh and Garcia were doing, figure out what chord they were implying, and play that chord -- *and* to figure out where both of them were going in their different directions, figure out what chords they were *going* to be implying, and figure out a smooth route between them that sounded musical and anticipated their decisions. While Weir and Pig Pen were mostly out of the band, the group recorded their third album, provisionally titled Earthquake Country, and even though Constanten was involved, and on stage they were going steadily more experimental, in the studio the band were being influenced by the same return to roots music the Tralfamadorians among you will remember from other episodes, acts like The Band. It was essentially a Garcia solo album in all but name, with all the songs having Garcia singing lead, and all but one being Garcia/Hunter songs (the other, opener "St. Stephen", was by Garcia, Hunter, and Lesh). It was in many ways a return to the kind of music that Garcia had been doing before psychedelia, a nice simple album that would keep the record company happy after the massive cost overruns and general headaches caused in recording Anthem of the Sun. And then they discovered that a sixteen-track machine existed, and scrapped the entire album and rerecorded it using the new technology, this time with Pig Pen and Weir involved (though not very heavily, and some sources say Pig Pen's not on the album at all), giving the rootsy Americana songs a little more of the oddness the band had live: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead. "Mountains of the Moon (original mix)"] This made the album once again go massively over budget, and also ended up a little like a falling between two stools, and in 1971 Garcia and Lesh went back into the studio to remix the album, making it sound slightly more like a conventional country-rock album, though nothing could make a track like "What's Become of the Baby?" sound conventional: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "What's Become of the Baby? (remix)"] The album, named Aoxomoxoa, was a failure both commercially and by the band's own standards, and is neither an album that has become beloved by the group's fans as some of the later ones have, nor a record that stands out as an interesting time capsule like Anthem of the Sun does. It has some songs that became well loved as part of the group's live sets, but it's the group in transitional mode. And then almost straight away came an album that did not go over budget at all, and that almost every Grateful Dead fan holds up as the peak of their vinyl career. After having used sixteen-track recording in the studio for the first time, they now decided to take a sixteen-track recorder into their regular gigs at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West, and record what is generally cited as the first live recording using sixteen tracks. It's also often claimed to be the first live double album, but as far as I'm aware the first popular music live double-album was actually the 1950 release of Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall shows, the ones we talked about in episode one. Live/Dead mostly came about because Aoxomoxoa was so expensive that the group needed to record two cheap albums if they and Warner Brothers ever wanted to make a profit on their deal. Cutting a live double-album essentially gave them three records for the price of one. And Live/Dead was essentially two records for the price of one. Sides three and four were a blues album -- though note that I say sides three and four, not disc two. In a very Tralfamadorian move, the record's order was shuffled about -- like many double albums at the time, it was set up for record-changers that could stack multiple discs, so sides one and three were on one disc and sides two and four were on the other. Side four was dominated by a ten-minute version of Reverend Gary Davis' blues classic "Death Don't Have No Mercy", along with an eight-minute experimental piece just titled "Feedback" and the old Bahamian hymn "I Bid You Goodnight", which the group probably learned from the Incredible String Band's recording. Side three was where Pig Pen got to shine for the only time on the album -- for much of it he's relegated to playing congas, in a band with two other percussionists. But side three is a single track -- a fifteen-minute hyperextended version of Bobby Bland's "Turn On Your Lovelight", presumably inspired by the similarly extended versions that Van Morrison's group Them used to do. It sounds utterly unlike the Grateful Dead as they're normally thought of, but it makes a lot more sense of their repeated statements that they were always more inspired by the Rolling Stones than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] Side two was a medley of two songs -- an extended version of "St. Stephen" from Aoxomoxoa, and a song with lyrics by Hunter and, unusually, music by Lesh, who only very rarely contributed songs to the band. That song was called "The Eleven", because of its time signature, which is usually given as 11/8. This sounds more complex than it is, as it's basically just three bars of three and one bar of two, repeated -- "one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-twoone-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-twoone-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one-two": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "The Eleven" (from about 5:40, record so it synchs with the rhythm at the end there)] Robert Christagu called that medley "the finest rock improvisation ever recorded". Though the band were less impressed with "The Eleven" generally. Garcia said of it "you’re trapped in this very fast-moving little chord pattern which is tough to play gracefully through, except for the most obvious [shit], which is what I did on “The Eleven.” When we went in to the E minor, then it started to get weird. We used to do these revolving patterns against each other where we would play 11 against 33. So one part of the band was playing a big thing that revolved in 33 beats, or 66 beats, and the other part of the band would be tying that into the 11 figure. That’s what made those things sound like “Whoa—what the hell is going on?” It was thrilling, but we used to rehearse a lot to get that effect. It sounded like chaos, but it was in reality hard rehearsal." Lesh, its composer, was similarly in two minds, saying it "was really designed to be a rhythm trip. It wasn’t designed to be a song. That more or less came later, as a way to give it more justification, or something, to work in a rock ’n’ roll set. We could’ve used it just as a transition, which is what it was, really. It was really too restrictive, and the vocal part—the song part—was dumb." But the opening track is the one that arguably defined the band in the minds of many listeners. The single version of "Dark Star", which had sunk without a trace the previous year, was an upbeat two-and-a-half-minute pop song. The version on Live/Dead was twenty-three minutes, and took up the whole of side one: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Live/Dead version)"] In the months since the single's release, "Dark Star" had changed utterly. As Tom Constanten later said "“Dark Star” is a tremendously adaptable piece—I can’t think offhand of any other piece that is so comfortable to just ease into and work out for a while and leads to as many interesting places, and then you just ease out of it. It’s simple enough to be malleable but complex enough to be interesting. It isn’t like some of the jams … let’s say, one that has just one or two chords that alternate. You get into this sort of generic jam, which might be nice for shifting gears or moving to another piece, but it doesn’t engender as many ideas of its own. It doesn’t suggest as many as the changes of “Dark Star” do. Certain motifs were integrated over time, almost like an aural tradition. I viewed the piece not so much as something written out, but as a galaxy that would be entered at any of several places. That appealed to me from my aleatoric sixties days—John Cage and all. And naturally, in the sense that every performance would be unique, with one-of-a-kind moments that were completely spontaneous. We were just exploring the map—the dimensional, capillarious intestine of … cosmic goop" It was now, and would remain until 1974, the centrepiece of the group's live set, though the group didn't play it, or any song, every night. But it was a regular, and for much of that time, it and "Turn On Your Lovelight" would be the two poles around which the set was based -- "Dark Star" would be the track which would allow Garcia, in particular, to wander into new realms on the guitar, while "Turn On Your Lovelight" would be the closer, a chance for Pig Pen to shine but also to leave the audience on a high with a straightforward, uptempo, upbeat, danceable song. Of course, at this point, much of the Dead's set was built around improvisation anyway, and increasingly the group didn't have a planned-out setlist, or endings and beginnings of songs. Instead, the whole performance would be a continuous piece of music, with the group flowing from one song to another as the mood took them, ending songs by going into freeflowing jams which someone would usually then transition into the start of another song, with the rest of the group following him. Live/Dead was not a commercial success, only reaching number sixty-five on the album charts, but for the first time it gave people who hadn't seen the group live some idea of what they'd been missing. But soon after it came out, the group would have changed again: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, Grayfolded] There were a number of disappointments for the group in the months after Live/Dead was recorded. As the Tralfamadorians among you will remember from episode 192, just as they had at Monterey the group turned in a well-below-par performance at Woodstock, not helped by Bob Weir getting literally blown across the stage by an electric shock caused by a badly-grounded mic.The Dead's performance was so bad that none of it was used in the film. The group had also taken on Mickey Hart's father, Lenny, to help them with the business side of management. The Harts had been semi-estranged, and Lenny Hart had become an evangelical preacher, but Mickey knew that his father had a good head for money. What he didn't know, yet, was that Lenny Hart's good head for money was mostly a good head for getting money for Lenny Hart. Without the band's knowledge, Lenny had renegotiated their contract with Warner Brothers, and had claimed a seventy-five-thousand dollar advance, which he had kept for himself. They wouldn't find out about this for a while, and meanwhile things were happening like sheriffs coming on stage at the start of one show to repossess Pig Pen's organ because the band owed money they hadn't repaid. Then the group tried to organise a free concert in London, with Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who you will also remember from episode 192, which would have been the Grateful Dead's first show outside North America, but when Rock Scully flew over to the UK to organise the show, he was busted for possession of LSD -- which he later claimed had been planted by Lenny Hart to get him out of the way while Hart organised the Warner's deal. That show didn't get organised, but the Rolling Stones' team were involved in helping bail Scully out, and that created a tie between the two organisations. A tie which meant that when the Rolling Stones wanted to organise a free concert on the West Coast at the end of their US tour in late 1969, the Grateful Dead's management were involved in helping set it up, and Alembic, the company that Owsley had started to produce equipment primarily for the group, was put in charge of sorting out the sound. The Dead also helped the Stones liaise with the Hells Angels who provided security for the event. The Tralfamadorians among you will remember from episode 176 what happened at Altamont. So it goes. And then in New Orleans, the band -- apart from Pig Pen and Constanten, neither of whom used illegal substances -- and several of the crew were busted for drug possession. They eventually had the charges dropped after Joe Smith at Warner Brothers made a large campaign contribution to the re-election campaign of DA Jim Garrison, but this caused a lot of inconvenience for the group -- not least that it was not Owsley's first arrest, and it made it difficult for him to travel with the group for a while, causing one of his periodic steps away from the group. Someone else who was stepping away from the group was Tom Constanten. He'd only been a member of the group for a little under two years, but he'd found playing in a live situation more difficult than he'd thought. He was fundamentally a studio musician, whose best work was planned, not improvised, and he often couldn't hear himself on stage because of the relatively primitive amplification of the time, even despite Owsley's best efforts. He'd also felt a little like a pawn in the band -- he'd been brought in by Garcia and Lesh without much consultation with the others, and he was viewed in particular as "Phil's man", and so criticising him, the new boy, was a good way for other band members to weaken Lesh within the group's power structure. He was also regarded as a bit holier-than-thou for his promotion of Scientology. While Garcia, Hunter, and Weir had all dabbled in it at one time or another, and Garcia, Lesh, Weir, and Constanten had even played benefit concerts for Scientology in a country band they had as a side project, Constanten was the only one who stuck with it, and that made him something of an outsider. The decision for Constanten to leave the group was apparently mutual and amicable, and came in New Orleans at the time of the bust. Constanten's first major work after leaving the Dead was to provide orchestrations on a track on the Incredible String Band's new Scientology-themed concept album, U: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "The Queen of Love"] Constanten went on to work with many influential and experimental musicians, hold down some academic posts in music composition, and, in recent years, play with Jefferson Starship and sit in with a large number of Grateful Dead tribute bands. He is also the only one of the five keyboard players to have officially become full members of the Grateful Dead not to have died a horribly premature death. I mention this here because this is another of the many difficulties I have had putting this episode together, and another reason I have to let my own personality intrude in this episode and actually talk in it about the writing process. Normally when something happens over and over again to a band or artist, it becomes part of the structure of an episode or even a series of episodes. I can turn it into a neat pattern or a running joke. Oh look, here's another Ink Spots intro that sounds the same. Oh look, another band has turned Rod Stewart down. Every instinct in my body as a writer tells me to do the same with the Grateful Dead's keyboard players. Every instinct as a human being tells me that to make light of the tragic deaths of four men who still have loved ones who are alive and might hear this episode would be abhorrent and monstrous. I have had to put in considerable effort with the structuring of this episode so that that does *not* become a running joke. But still, it is something that will repeat several times in the remainder of the episode. But Tom Constanten is alive, and we can be thankful for that. The time Constanten was in the band is considered by many fans to be the group's most interesting period as a live act (though there are partisans for various other points in their career), and it is certainly the most experimental period in the studio, and the change from the latter is part of the reason he left. When he had joined the group, psychedelia had been at its height, and every band wanted to push the limits of what could be done in the studio. But rather quickly after that, the tide had changed musically. As the Tralfamadorians among you will know from episodes 167 through 178 inclusive, and from many other episodes after that point, rock music from early 1968 entered a period, largely inspired by a band called The Band who we'll be talking about soon, in which musicians were no longer asking Alice when she's ten feet tall or picturing themselves on a boat on a river, but rather singing about steamboats and trains and a pastoral past. There was a convergence of hippie psychedelia with the blues roots of many of the newer British artists, and with the country and folk roots of many American rock stars.This was paralleling a new movement in country music which had its roots in the Bakersfield Sound of people like Buck Owens, and which would later become known as Outlaw Country, but at the time was being talked of as Progressive Country. The result was that you'd have albums like the Everly Brothers' Roots, which saw them covering the early San Francisco band the Beau Brummels and new songwriters like Randy Newman, but also country records by Glen Campbell, George Jones, Jimmie Rodgers and Merle Haggard, and giving it all a psychedelic sweetness: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Sing Me Back Home"] The Grateful Dead were as swept up in this movement as anyone, and at one point Garcia was even talking about the group as now being a Bakersfield Sound group -- though this seems to have been more overenthusiastic hyperbole than anything else. The Bakersfield Sound is hard to pin down, but pretty much everyone is agreed that the sound of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos is the epitome of the sound, and their tight, precise, disciplined playing, spiky Telecaster attack with few or no effects, and preference for highly-rehearsed simple clean lines, often played in unison, couldn't be further from the Dead's loose, individualistic, playing style, preference for Gibsons, and use of as many effects as they could: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail"] It's hard to find examples of two guitar duos that are further apart than Buck Owens and Don Rich on the one hand and Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on the other. That said, Garcia was sincere in his love for this music, and he'd even taken up playing the pedal steel guitar, and had formed a country band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, which at various times would also include Hart, Lesh, and very occasionally Weir, and where Garcia played pedal steel rather than electric guitar. They included many covers of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard songs in their early sets, though San Francisco's looser playing style didn't really fit the material: [Excerpt: New Riders of the Purple Sage, "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail"] Hart would soon leave the New Riders and be replaced by Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane, and Garcia would also depart after their first album, but the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who continue performing to this day, would continue to be associated with the Grateful Dead over the coming years, often acting as a support act for them. The Grateful Dead's stage show would still continue to involve long, improvised, jams, and those would be the things that the audience would most want to hear, but on record it was a different proposition. Garcia in particular had always loved country and folk music, and it couldn't have escaped anyone's attention that the studio experimentation on the last couple of albums had sent the group vastly over budget, while their friends in other bands were selling millions with albums that took a fraction of the time to record. As Bob Weir said "From a record company standpoint and the way the media’s set up these days, it’s easier to sell songs than it is to sell improvisational long pieces. That’s one of the restrictions of the art of making a record encompasses the music, how long the piece is going to be, how appealing and how accessible it is to the audience. By accessible I mean easily understood. As opposed to John Coltrane, who played some dynamite music—I mean some really fantastic music—but he was never any superstar. And he had not much of an audience, because not many people could understand what he was playing. It bugs you if you are playing music the best you can play it and not many people are listening. And just because you’re a performer, a performer wants people to listen. Generally, you might consider changing your material or finding a new sort of material that more people will be interested in listening to and at the same time you will be interested in playing it. That’s kind of where we settled down, at least with Workingman’s Dead." The new stripped-down lineup of the Grateful Dead went into the studio with a new attitude -- they were going to cut an album like they had with their first record. Get it done in three weeks, keep it simple, make it about the songs. They could always be extended into jams on stage. They went into the studios with their sound engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor-Jackson, who acted as co-producers with the group. They cut simple demos of all the songs they had, and then the songs were put into a proper sequence, as the group had learned from Sgt Pepper that the flow of an album from one song to another mattered. They then went off and listened to the demo album, and rehearsed all the songs with the flow and feel of the finished album in mind. The resulting album, Workingman's Dead, is considered by many fans to be their first truly great studio album, and it's one of the few that has a substantial number of defenders despite it sounding nothing like the extended jams they were known for on stage. It's a collection of relatively concise songs -- only one of them going over five minutes, and none going over six -- like "Dire Wolf", a song about fate and predestination, and how everything is predetermined, inspired partly by a viewing of the Basil Rathbone version of The Hound of the Baskervilles on TV, though little of that inspiration shows up in the finished song: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dire Wolf"] The influence of the Bakersfield sound on that track is very noticeable, but Tralfamadorians will also notice that the records we looked at in episodes 172 and 192 were hugely influential on the group's sound at this point. In particular, the Dead's newfound attention to their harmony vocals, on this album and the next one, was a conscious attempt to copy their friends Crosby, Stills, and Nash. As Weir put it "we’ve been hanging out with David Crosby and Stephen Stills, particularly, and listening to them sing together, and just blown out by the fact that they really can sing together; and we began to realize that we had been neglecting our own vocal presentation for instrumental presentation. And so we started working on our vocal arrangements, and choral arrangements. As it turned out, the next record we did had a lot of that on it. And it represented a marked change from the way we had sounded in the past, though none of us had really given it any thought." The other most notable song on the album, "Casey Jones", also indirectly has a cinematic inspiration. The film Easy Rider had been a huge hit in the counterculture, especially among the elements of it that overlapped with the Hell's Angels and other biker groups -- Robert Hunter, for example, had gone to see the film rather than go to Altamont, as he'd had a bad feeling about the concert which proved to be accurate. That film had had a number of huge effects -- it basically started the New Hollywood that would define cinema in the seventies, it made Jack Nicholson a star -- but Dennis Hopper summed up the biggest when he said“The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me.There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider it was everywhere.” Cocaine had gone from being an unpopular, unfashionable drug to almost overnight being *the* drug of choice for people who wanted to think themselves hip. And since "cocaine" rhymes with "train", it was inevitable that when Garcia and Hunter decided to update the legend of Casey Jones, that would get added to the legend: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Casey Jones"] The group later disclaimed the idea that it was in some way promoting cocaine use, with Garcia in particular saying "It’s clearly an anti-coke song. The words aren’t light, good-time words—it’s just the feeling of it. We were manipulating a couple of things consciously when we put that song together. First of all, there’s a whole tradition of cocaine songs, there’s a tradition of train songs, and there’s a tradition of Casey Jones songs. And we’ve been doing a thing, ever since Aoxomoxoa, of building on a tradition that’s already there. Like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.” But the group were using cocaine a lot at this point, and initially it seemed to be a positive influence on the group, giving them additional energy in the studio. It was only later that it would start to cause real problems for them. The new album was extremely popular with the record company. Joe Smith of Warners, when he heard it, hugged co-producer Bob Matthews and said "I can hear the vocals!" and allegedly ran into the corridors and grabbed people, ecstatically shouting "We've got a single! We've got a single!" The single in question, "Uncle John's Band" was edited into a single mix that Garcia later called "an atrocity", with gaps left in the vocals where words like "goddam" were used in the unexpurgated version.Apologies for the poor sound quality of this. As far as I'm able to discover, that single edit has never been released on CD or as a download, and so I've had to use a vinyl rip from a YouTube channel called "scratchy 45s": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead "Uncle John's Band (single mix)"] But it did give the group their first entry onto the Hot One Hundred, making number sixty-nine on the charts. And the album itself did even better, making number twenty-seven on the album charts. After a string of flops, this new version of the Grateful Dead looked like they might be on to a winner. And they needed one. The group were also busily rearranging their management team. Rock Scully would still be involved, but from this point on he was an advisor paid by the record label rather than being on the band's payroll himself. But the big change, and the one that meant they needed money, was that Lenny Hart had been revealed to have been stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the band. He disappeared with their money, and there was some talk of sending Hell's Angels after him to get the money back, but Garcia, who despite his passivity and unwillingness to take a formal leadership role was always informally accepted as their leader, decided that his karma would probably get him so they didn't need to take any action. In early 1970, the group played the Fillmore supported by Miles Davis, who had just released his Bitches' Brew album, which was the most influential album on the new genre of jazz-rock: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Great Expectations"] The group were all amazed by Davis, and his performance renewed their interest in improvisation, though they were still for the moment even more interested in writing the kind of songs that would earn them enough money that they could make back the money Lenny Hart had stolen. They went on a big multi-artist tour across Canada with Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy and others, all travelling by train, but the shows were disrupted by protestors who insisted that they should all be playing for free, not for money, and who were storming one of the venues, with thousands of people trying to get in for free. Garcia eventually managed to calm the protests by organising a free show in a park, with some of the acts including the Dead playing both shows, but he -- understandably -- resented this. He said of the protests "I think the musician’s first responsibility is to play music as well as he can, and that’s the most important thing. And any responsibility to anyone else is just journalistic fiction, or political fiction. Because that [bullshit] about “the people’s music,” man—where’s that at, what’s that supposed to mean? It wasn’t any “people” who sat with me while I learned to play the guitar. I mean, who paid the dues? I mean, if “the people” think that way, they can [fucking] make their own music. And besides, when somebody says “people,” to me it means everybody. It means cops, the guys who drive the limousine, the [fucker] who runs the elevator. Everybody." Much of the tour was spent with Janis Joplin trying to persuade the Grateful Dead, who other than Pig Pen were not big drinkers, to get drunk with her. She succeeded, but they got their revenge by spiking her and her band on the last day of the tour with acid. According to at least one book, the vector for the acid was Janis' birthday cake, which was shared with a number of members of the Calgary Police Department. Some of the bands on the tour actually decided it would be a plan to hijack the train and drive it down to San Francisco after the tour, but luckily rather than "driving that train high on cocaine" they realised that the power had been switched off when they got to their destination, so they had no way to get it to move. While the group were still playing big, multi-act, events like this though, they had also started a new style of touring, one that was designed to maximise money and also give them the time to play all the music they wanted. Where up to this point the norm for a Grateful Dead show had been for them to go on as part of a bill with two or three other acts, now they started touring as "An Evening With the Grateful Dead". The show would start with a performance by the "acoustic Dead", performing largely their new song-oriented material: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "I Know You Rider (Harpur College Binghamton)"] That would follow with a performance by the New Riders of the Purple Sage, featuring Garcia and Hart, and then to finish off an electric set -- or sometimes a show broken into two sets -- featuring as wide a variety of songs as they could fit in, from their long jams like "The Other One": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "The Other One(Harpur College Binghamton)"] To covers of James Brown songs: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "It's a Man's World(Harpur College Binghamton)"] These shows would last for five hours, and would require no other bands, just the Dead and the people in their immediate circle. This made them both more artistically fulfilling and, crucially, more fiscally rewarding, than playing on a package with other bands. And these shows went along with another innovation, one that came from Rock Scully, and which eventually changed everything for the Dead, who at this point were an act with no hit singles and only one moderately-successful album, in a world where record sales and radio play were all. The Tralfamadorians among you have obviously heard other episodes in which I talk about the rise of FM radio, but in brief, frequency modulation, or FM, was an alternative way of transmitting radio to amplitude modulation, or AM, which had been the norm up until the late sixties and would remain important for a long time to come. Because of the bands allocated to the different types of radio in most countries, AM radio could be broadcast for thousands of miles, while FM radio could only be heard dozens of miles away at most, and so AM dominated among the big commercial broadcasters, while FM was at this point mostly only used by small community radio stations, college stations and the like. But those stations were more likely to play obscure music than the big stations were, and they could also take advantage of one big difference that FM radio had -- there was a consistent standard for broadcasting stereo in FM, while at the time AM radio could only be broadcast in mono. This made those small community stations perfect for a new format, Album Oriented Radio, which went on to define what in America is now known as "classic rock". Those stations didn't have to worry about pleasing massive audiences, so they could play stereo album tracks rather than just singles, which were only released in mono. And they also started broadcasting concerts. Indeed, one show at the Winterland Arena on October the fourth 1970 became the first ever *quadrophonic* broadcast, as two different FM stations, KQED and KSAN, both broadcast different simultaneous stereo mixes that you could play together (though here you're only going to hear it in mono of course): [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Till the Morning Comes (Live at Winterland Arena on 1970-10-04)"] And this -- broadcasting of live shows -- became the Grateful Dead's salvation. Because as Sam Cutler, their road manager, who joined them from the Rolling Stones after Altamont, said "There was a way in which FM radio could be used to reach markets that hadn’t been touched. So, for example, in Pennsylvania, you wanted to do a gig at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, which holds 18,000 people. The promoter would say, “We’d love to put you on at the Spectrum, but you aren’t even going to sell eight hundred tickets.” So how do we get this exposed to enough people that they can sell out the Spectrum? One of the keys to that was FM radio and college radio stations. We took Pennsylvania as a market area, and worked on playing at different colleges where there were 15,000 to 20,000 resident people, and used the FM radio station in that market to reach more people. You play in the state universities of Pennsylvania in order that when you play in a Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, people actually come to you. They’re drawn to you, and they know about you. Then you broadcast live for free. That just snowballed. The band, in those four years, went from not selling very many tickets to being very successful." These radio broadcasts meant that over a period of a couple of years, the Grateful Dead went from playing to a few hundred people at most, anywhere but San Francisco, New York, and a couple of other major cities, to playing to huge crowds of thousands. And those broadcasts also started to be taped, and people started making copies of the tapes for their friends... By 1971 this success was already causing problems of its own, with Garcia saying "The Grateful Dead has become incredibly popular and we can’t play a small hall anymore without having 3,000 people outside wanting to get in. Our classic situation the last six months has been people breaking down the doors and just coming in. We have to play 7,000 to 10,000 seats to be able to get people in at a reasonable price. Just to do it. It’s weird. Here’s what we’re wondering: Do we really want to do that? When it comes down to it, we’re just heads. We’re not interested in creating a lot of [fucking] trouble and being superstars and all that [shit]. We’re just playing, getting off, out to have a good time and giving it all a chance to happen. And all of a sudden there are all these problems making it more difficult to do, and it’s getting to be where it’s not fun. We have to play shows like some military campaigns just to make sure the equipment guys don’t have to be fighting thousands of people to save the [shit]." But back in 1970 it's a plan to save the band financially at all. Although at that point the hope of commercial success in recordings was also still alive. Indeed, right after the release of Workingman's Dead, the group went into the studio to record another album, one that would generally be considered the closest thing they came to a studio masterpiece: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Ripple"] American Beauty was an album that was haunted by parental loss. There was the loss of Mickey Hart's father from the group's management, of course, an estrangement that hurt him deeply. But in August 1970 Garcia's mother was in a car crash, and died in hospital of her injuries a month later, and at the same time Lesh's father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So it goes. But rather than wallow, the band made their most optimistic album, and the most collaborative studio album they'd made to that point. They threw themselves into their work to distract themselves from their problems, and gathered as many of their friends around them as they could. Friends of theirs like Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Neil Young, and Carlos Santana were all recording in the same studio complex around that time, and Lesh described it as "jammer heaven". Those musicians weren't included in the sessions themselves -- though various members of the New Riders and other, less famous, friends of the band contributed additional instruments -- but they were around, and added to a family feeling for the sessions. And while the previous two albums had been made up almost entirely of songs by Garcia and Hunter, the other band members contributed songs to American Beauty. The album opened with a song whose music Lesh wrote for his dying father, with lyrics by Hunter, and which featured Lesh's first lead vocal and guest appearances by a couple of members of the New Riders of the Purple Sage: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"] In 1995 that became the last song the Grateful Dead ever played live. The album also featured another song that would become a live favourite, "Sugar Magnolia", written by Weir and Hunter: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Sugar Magnolia"] And what turned out to be Pig Pen's only solo songwriting credit on a Grateful Dead album, "Operator": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Operator"] Almost all the rest of the album was made up of Garcia and Hunter collaborations (with John Dawson of the New Riders collaborating with them on "Friend of the Devil"). But the song that was chosen as the single -- and once again released in a single edit, though this time that single has been included on official CD releases -- is the song that for the next eighteen years at least would be their most well-known song, and that had music that evolved out of a jam between Garcia, Weir, and Lesh. The lyrics to "Truckin'" were written by Hunter after he went out on tour with the band for the first time and got to experience what life on the road was like: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Truckin' (single edit)"] From this point on, Hunter would be a regular backstage presence, as he was considered a non-performing member of the band. Indeed the backstage areas of Dead shows were growing somewhat crowded, as the band's crew became larger, and as more and more people got admitted to the Grateful Dead "family". "Truckin'" was another minor hit like "Casey Jones" had been, reaching number sixty-four, and the album also made the top thirty. The group weren't having massive hit records, but they were doing much better than they had been. Over the next few months, in between gigs, the band members, particularly Garcia and Hart, spent a lot of time in Wally Heider's studio, where they had recorded American Beauty, with the friends who had created that "jammer heaven". Garcia, Hart, and Kreutzmann all added parts to tracks on Blows Against the Empire, the science fiction concept album by members of Jefferson Airplane that became the first Jefferson Starship album, and which also featured David Crosby and Graham Nash: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen the Stars Tonite"] Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart also guested on several tracks on David Crosby's album If I Could Only Remember My Name, which also featured Neil Young, Nash, several of Jefferson Airplane, and Joni Mitchell: [Excerpt: David Crosby, "What Are Their Names?"] And Garcia and Lesh guested on Graham Nash's Songs For Beginners, which also featured Crosby, Young, and John Barbata, the former Turtles drummer who had just been working with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and would soon join Jefferson Airplane: [Excerpt: Graham Nash,"I Used to Be a King"] This music was all, as you can hear, very much in the same area as the two Grateful Dead albums of 1970, all acoustic guitar and pedal steel and vocal harmonies. But live, the group were still spending at least as much of their time playing long pieces like "Dark Star" as they were the more commercial songs: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (live at Port Chester, NY)"] That performance of "Dark Star",which many fans of the group consider the best ever, is a historic one. That would be the last time that Pig Pen and Mickey Hart would both play on the same stage together. February the eighteenth 1971 was the last performance by the lineup of the Grateful Dead that had made their most successful records. Mickey Hart had taken his father's betrayal of the group very, very badly. While almost all the group were having drug problems at this time -- everyone except Pig Pen was using cocaine, and Pig Pen's alcohol dependency had by this point become even worse than the other members' more illicit habits -- Hart was spiralling. According to Kreutzmann's autobiography, Hart had developed a serious heroin habit at this point, and according to everyone he was depressed and feeling guilty over the way his father had betrayed the people he thought of as his brothers. Things came to a head on the eighteenth of February. Hart was simply too much of a mess, mentally, to play. Luckily for the group, they had a hypnotist on hand -- they were playing a short residency, and as part of that run of shows they were taking part in an ESP experiment where the audience tried to send images to a sleeping experimental recipient elsewhere. The hypnotist managed to get Hart into a state to play that show, and then he was driven back to his mother's house, where he was medicated and slept for three days. The group continued with Kreutzmann as their only drummer. But there was another change that happened that week, during the same run of shows. Bob Weir had been writing more music, and had of course been collaborating with the band's resident lyricist, Hunter. But Hunter thought that Weir was showing disrespect for his lyrics -- though Weir argued no more so than Garcia did. Backstage they got into a fight over the way the band were now playing "Sugar Magnolia", which had started out as a gentle country song but by this point had evolved into a fast rocker, and Weir would sometimes improvise new words: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Sugar Magnolia (live at Port Chester, NY)"] "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." That's from A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John Perry Barlow, from 1996. Backstage after the show was Weir's old friend John Perry Barlow, who by this time was a part-time writer who'd taken an advance for a novel he had no intention of writing and had used it to travel the world before becoming a cocaine dealer -- the capacity in which he was backstage. He was just about to travel to his family's ranch in Wyoming, because his father was ill and would die the next year. So it goes. Barlow would spend the next twenty years running the family business and living out his cowboy fantasies -- fantasies that would also appear in a lot of the writing he would do over that time period. He would also get very involved in Republican politics, including helping run Dick Cheney's first Senatorial campaign. Much of Barlow's writing would end up being scripts for films that were never made, but for which Barlow was nonetheless paid, but the work he would become best known for -- at least up until his promotion in the nineties into the position of leading propagandist for Internet anarchocapitalism and the Californian ideology -- was started backstage in February 1971. Hunter and Weir were having an argument about Weir's attitude to Hunter's lyrics, and Hunter turned to Barlow and after determining that Barlow had written poetry in college and thus could presumably write lyrics, said"Take him, he's yours." From that point on there were two main songwriting teams for the Grateful Dead -- Hunter and Garcia and Barlow and Weir. 1971 continued to be a year of changes and loss. Over the spring, both of Weir's parents died -- each on the other's birthday. So it goes. And while Bill Graham would continue to be the promoter who booked many of the Dead's most prominent gigs, the move in the rock world from bands playing theatres to amphitheatres and stadiums meant that his venues were no longer economical for him to operate, and so the Fillmores East and West, the two venues that had been most welcoming for the Dead, announced their closure. The bands who played the Fillmore East in its last weeks tended to bring on special guests to make the event special -- the Mothers of Invention brought John Lennon and Yoko Ono on, for example -- and the Grateful Dead were no exception, bringing another famous Californian band out to play a few of their own hits, and to jam on songs that both bands often included in their respective sets, like "Riot in Cell Block #9", "Johnny B Goode", and Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead, "Okie From Muskogee"] As the Tralfamadorians among us heard in episode 177, the Beach Boys were at a low ebb in their fortunes at this time, and the endorsement of the Grateful Dead helped them gain the appreciation of a hip college audience, which was a major part in the revival of their fortunes in the seventies. By contrast, at the group's last performance at the Fillmore West, which was being filmed for Bill Graham's documentary The Last Days of the Fillmore, was so bad that they asked that none of it be used in the film, though Graham eventually persuaded them to let him use performances of "Casey Jones" and "Johnny B Goode": [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Johnny B. Goode (Last Days of the Fillmore)"] Garcia was asked about that show the next year and said "We struggled to avoid getting into the movie because it was like really a notably bad night for us and the tapes were a drag, and everybody was out of tune and everything, and we were - it was that thing of not having played for a couple of weeks, you know, three or four weeks we'd been in the studio...But finally Graham just hassled us and hassled us and we finally went for it. We doctored 'em up a bit." That said, while the band were notably out of tune at points during the show, it wasn't a completely meritless one -- indeed, a little over an hour of that show (not including the two songs used in the Fillmore film, recently got a release as a bonus disc on the fiftieth anniversary deluxe edition of the band's next album. That album was a double-disc live album recorded mostly at the group's Fillmore East shows over the spring, and consisting, other than an extended version of "The Other One", largely of cover versions of blues, rockabilly, and country songs: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Me and Bobby McGee (Skull and Roses)"] While that was billed as a live album, it actually had quite a few overdubs. Pig Pen's playing had been increasingly erratic, and he had become severely ill, suffering from delirium tremens. He'd started to cut down on the drinking, but he'd still ended up in the hospital in September, where he was treated for a perforated ulcer and hepatitis. Given Pig Pen's condition, organ parts were overdubbed on three of the songs by Garcia's friend and occasional performance partner Merl Saunders. The album caused a major problem between the group and their record label. Not because it was a second double-live album -- that made sense, especially given there was no overlap in the repertoire on the two albums. No, the problem was the group's chosen title -- Skull[fuck]. Warner Brothers were adamant that you couldn't release an album with a title like Skull[fuck]. You simply couldn't use the word [fuck], or any of the other seven words you can't say on television or in a podcast with a clean rating, in a title and expect it to be stocked on shelves. The group were equally adamant that it couldn't be called anything else. Eventually Warners asked for a meeting about this. The group agreed, but said that as they were a democracy the meeting had to involve *everyone* in their organisation. All fifty-five of them. Eventually the meeting hammered out a compromise -- the album would go out without a title, just labelled "Grateful Dead", which was taken as its title -- all the true Deadheads continued referring to it by its original name, f-word intact, while almost everyone else ended up referring to it as "Skull and Roses" after the cover image, to stop it being confused with their eponymous studio album from a few years earlier. In return for this concession, Warners agreed to give it a huge marketing budget, and it became their first album to go gold: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Big Railroad Blues"] As 1971 came to an end, the group had a further change in lineup. Donna Jean Godchaux had been a member of a vocal group called Southern Comfort, who had become the go-to session backing singers at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, and we actually heard her singing in the episode before last: [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] She had also recorded backing vocals in several other studios in the South, including, as the Tralfamadorians among you will remember, on Elvis' number one hit "Suspicious Minds": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"] (Incidentally, and as a sign of the kind of reason this episode took so very long to do, every source on the Grateful Dead I've read uses phrasing like "she’d been part of a female vocal group in her teens and worked as a session singer in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where she performed on such records as Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.”" -- "Suspicious Minds" was famously recorded at American Sound Studios in Memphis, not in Muscle Shoals, with some extra work by Felton Jarvis in Las Vegas afterwards. This meant I had to take time out to find a source for Godchaux being on the record that *didn't* trace back to a source on the Grateful Dead. But she's credited under her maiden name in Ernst Jorgenson's book on Elvis' sessions, so anyone else who has that problem in future can relax). She had given up on session work and moved to California, where she met her husband, Keith Godchaux. Keith was a resentful lounge pianist who was playing muzak he didn't like, but who desperately wanted to be playing modal jazz and bebop. However, after Donna Jean saw the Grateful Dead live, both of them became interested in the group, even though neither had any background in the Dead's kind of music. One day, a friend of theirs suggested they put on a Grateful Dead album, and Keith said he'd rather be playing the music than listening to it. That gave Donna-Jean an idea. She took Keith to one of the small duo gigs that Garcia played when the Dead weren't playing -- Garcia would pretty much constantly perform live every chance he could get. This one was a performance with the jazz keyboard player Howard Wales, with whom Garcia had recently recorded the duo album Hooteroll: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales, "Uncle Martin's"] She grabbed Garcia between sets and told him "this is your new keyboard player". What she didn't know, of course, was that Pig Pen was in the hospital and increasingly in no state to play even when he wasn't. Indeed, they'd actually tried auditioning Howard Wales, but come to the conclusion that while they liked his playing, they brought the worst out of each other -- the group egging Wales on to be too experimental, and him doing likewise for the group. Garcia got Keith in to audition, first just for him, and then bringing in first Kreutzmann and then the whole band. Keith Godchaux was now the Grateful Dead's main keyboard player, though Pig Pen would still perform whenever he was well enough, and to the extent he could. Keith's playing was considered revelatory at this time -- he's been compared to the legendary Nashville session player Floyd Cramer for his playing on the country tunes, and called "a cross between Chick Corea and Little Richard" for his more experimental playing. Within a few months, Donna Jean would also join on backing and occasional lead vocals, becoming the only woman ever to be a member of the group. The new expanded lineup of the group got ready to head out on the road for their first tour of Europe, but before they did, there were some solo albums to get released: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Deal"] The band's contract with Warners allowed them to make solo albums, and Jerry Garcia's first true solo album, simply titled Garcia, had a simple motivation behind it -- he wanted to buy a house, and if he turned in an album relatively cheaply, the advance would be enough for a downpayment on one. As he said later, there was a reason that the first track on the album was called "Deal" while the last was "The Wheel" -- the album was him wheeling and dealing for a house. So in the summer it had been decided that Garcia and Weir would both do solo albums. Garcia's solo album was actually recorded in July 1971, before Pig Pen's illness worsened. Garcia was a perfectionist in the studio and wanted to make an album where he had total control -- somewhat in the same spirit as Roy Wood's Boulders, although Garcia couldn't play drums or write lyrics, so there were a whole six people in the studio some of the time -- Garcia himself, playing everything except drums; the Dead's sound engineers Bob and Betty; Ramrod the guitar tech who everyone regarded as at least as much a part of the Dead's spirit as any band member -- sort of the Dead's equivalent of Mal Evans or Neil Aspinall, and who was given the job of co-producing the album, in part to give him an extra payday; Kreutzmann on drums; and Robert Hunter to write the lyrics. The album was recorded at Wally Heider's studio, where the Dead and most of their friends regularly recorded, the "jam heaven" we talked about earlier, so to discourage the kind of party atmosphere that led to fun times but expensive records, they put up a sign saying "Anita Bryant Session" -- Bryant was a moderately-successful middle-of-the-road singer who had been heavily involved in campaigns to prosecute the Doors for indecency, and is now best known for being a raging homophobic bigot whose campaigns against gay people in the seventies featured exactly the same kind of language and accusations her ideological fellows are currently weaponising against trans people today. Nobody wants to spend time around anyone like that, and so the sessions were safe from interruption. The album was later more or less dismissed by Garcia, and it was disliked by the record label because even on the new album-oriented stations it was unlikely that the commercial tracks would get played -- there were plenty of commercial sounding tracks, like "The Wheel": [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "The Wheel"] But interspersed with those songs on the album were things like "Spidergawd": [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Spidergawd"] And the album was mastered without much gap between the tracks, meaning that DJs cueing up a singalong that wasn't a million miles away from the stuff the Eagles would soon be having hits with might inadvertently get a blast of Varese-alike musique concrete. Bob Weir's solo album, recorded around February 1972, had a very different story. While Garcia was so musically fecund that he could just turn out new songs in the studio, Weir had to be encouraged by Garcia to write at all, but by all accounts Garcia, who hated the responsibility that came with leadership and refused to take it even though everyone around him insisted that he was the leader of the group, wanted to encourage the band to have another focus other than just him. Weir's first solo album, Ace, came together in something of a rush. He had studio time set aside for the album, but had almost no songs, and drove up to Barlow's ranch for a frenetic writing session that led to a collection of songs that ended up almost all becoming staples of the Grateful Dead's repertoire: [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "Cassidy"] Weir and Barlow found writing together much more congenial than Weir and Hunter had. Often the process was far more collaborative than the simple music/lyrics split that Weir had had with Hunter -- Weir would bring Barlow just a chord sequence with no melody line, Barlow would come up with lyrics and sing them over the chord sequence, coming up with a melody line as he did so, and then Weir would rework Barlow's melody line into something different, while also changing the lyrics around and adding new ones. The album did include two songs that Weir had already written with Hunter and erstwhile Dead drummer Mickey Hart, "Greatest Story Ever Told" and "Playing in the Band" : [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "Playing in the Band"] That had actually already appeared in live form on the Skull and Roses album, and Hart also did a version of that song on his own first solo album, released towards the end of 1972. There's also one song credited to Weir on his own, "One More Saturday Night", though apparently that started as a collaboration with Hunter before Weir rewrote it to get rid of Hunter's contributions. But the rest of the album is Weir and Barlow, and mostly shows the particular ideas of freedom that Barlow brought to the group -- he was equally influenced by the idea of cowboys and the Old West and the modern-day Easy Rider style bikers who would head out on the highway, looking for adventure and whatever came their way. People who lived free of government interference and age of consent laws, where men could be men and live as Americans should: [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "Mexicali Blues"] While Ace was released as a Bob Weir album, it is in fact a Grateful Dead album, and the single "One More Saturday Night" was released as by "The Grateful Dead with Bobby Ace". Weir initially started recording the album without the rest of the band other than Kreutzmann -- Dave Torbert, the bass player for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, contributed to the opening song -- but soon Rock Scully persuaded him that the easiest way to make the album would just be to persuade his bandmates to record it with him. Other than Pig Pen, who wasn't well enough to join them, all the other members of the Dead at the time -- Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and the Godschauxes -- contributed to the album, and other than Torbert's bass on"Greatest Story Ever Told" and some string and horn parts, all the parts on the album are played and sung by Grateful Dead members. It's just as much a Grateful Dead album as any of the group's previous studio albums, and contains as many of the songs that they became known for as any of the others: [Excerpt: Bob Weir, "One More Saturday Night"] The comic strip Dilbert, by Scott Adams, became in the 1990s a touchstone for a whole generation of tech workers, especially in the Bay Area, as the titular character, named by one of Adams' colleagues at Pacific Bell, the San Francisco-based telephone company that at that time was moving into computer networking and was a hotbed of the San Francisco hacker culture, came to symbolise the struggles of the software engineers who were being kept down and in their place by the pointy-haired boss, who didn't understand as much as the engineers he was in charge of. The message of the comic at that time was that the people in charge should step aside and let the people who knew what they were talking about -- the people who really knew computers -- do their thing. In more recent years, the comic started to present the boss as a more and more sympathetic figure, and more of the jokes became about attacking what Adams would refer to as "wokeness", such as consideration for people of colour, trans people, and so on. Eventually this year the strip was cancelled -- in the actual, not metaphorical, sense -- as Adams was videoed making explicitly white-separatist remarks. [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Dead's trip to Europe in 1972 saw Pig Pen returning to the group. He was still very, very ill, and could no longer drink alcohol at all -- and obviously he had not been taking recreational drugs anyway. He was very withdrawn, but apparently his gentle character shone through even more on that trip than normally. Pig Pen was pretty much universally considered the nicest person in the band, even though he was the scariest-looking of the band. While the others mostly looked like cuddly hippies but could be utterly cold-minded when they needed to be for the good of the band, Pig Pen was regarded by everyone who spoke about him in later decades as being practically a saint. That's not really the case for the people he was hanging around with though. On the European tour, Pig Pen chose to spend most of the time with the crew rather than his bandmates, and the Grateful Dead were getting a reputation as having a crew you didn't want to mess with. The group's sound and lighting system were getting much more complex and much more physically difficult to get in place, and they were attracting the kind of crew who had to be good at quickly and efficiently dealing with physical problems. The crew also had to deal with all the other problems that the rock stars didn't want to know about, and thus essentially became enforcers. There are lots of stories in this period of crew members cutting the microphone cords of people in the audience taping the shows, and of Sam Cutler threatening promoters with guns to make them pay up (though Cutler always denied those stories and said he'd never owned a gun). They were temperamentally very different from the band members -- the iron fist around which the velvet glove of the band were wrapped -- and so a certain amount of natural separation happened. On the European tour there were two buses, and while there was no formal rule as to who sat where, and people could travel on whichever they wished, one bus had almost all the band, other than Pig Pen, and a couple of the crew, while the other mostly had the crew, plus Pig Pen. As is the way of things, the two buses developed two ostensible characters, and the people on them got nicknames. The people on the band bus were "Bozos", partly because they sometimes wore clown masks to freak out the people of Europe as they drove past, and partly after I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, a comedy science fiction album by the Firesign Theater parodying futurism, religious creation myths, artificial intelligence, and the idea of government by machines: [Excerpt: The Firesign Theater, "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus"] The people on the other bus, by contrast, were Bolos. And over the course of the trip, Robert Hunter worked out a complex fake religion in the tradition of other comedy religions like Bokononism or Discordianism which were popular in the part of the counterculture that overlapped with science fiction fandom. This religion, whose patron saint was St. Dilbert, saw Bozos and Bolos as two necessary opposing forces like yin and yang. Hunter named the religion Hypnocracy, as a parody of Technocracy, a movement that had reached its height of popularity in the 1930s but still clings on to life to this day, and to which a friend of Garcia belonged. Technocracy was a huge influence on Golden Age science fiction, particularly on writers who came up through John W Campbell's editing of Astounding magazine, like Theodore Sturgeon, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert A. Heinlein, and held a lot of beliefs, but primarily that society should be organised scientifically, with scientists and technicians and engineers in charge, not politicians. This idea didn't tend to appeal to actual scientists, who could see the flaws in the argument, but did appeal to cranks who thought of themselves as scientists, and for a while had quite a widespread following in North America. The leader of the Technocracy movement in Canada, for example, was oneJoshua Haldeman, a former rodeo performer turned chiropractor who later went on to campaign against Coca-Cola, before moving his family to apartheid South Africa because he thought Canada was morally degenerate. His thinking appears to have had an influence on his grandson, Elon Musk, a follower of the Californian Ideology who tweeted in 2019 that he was“accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy.” Obviously ridiculous people like this deserved mockery, and soon Hypnocracy became the philosophy of the people on the tour -- at least those on the Bozo bus. The European tour was regarded by everyone involved as one of the great experiences of their lives, and the group were playing better than ever before. Many fans consider their performance of "Dark Star" in Dusseldorf to be one of their finest ever: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Dusseldorf 1972)"] While others point to the performance from London on the same tour: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Wembley, April 1972) "] By this point "Dark Star" had become a massive event, something audiences looked forward to. You didn't get it every show, but when you did you knew you were going to get something special. It was considered something rather apart from the group's other material. Lesh once said "Dark Star is always playing somewhere. All we do is tap into it." The group were all, other than Pig Pen, playing at their best, and band members have all especially pointed out how well Kreutzmann was playing at the time. Hart's departure had freed Kreutzmann up -- when you have two drummers, each drummer has to stay in sync with the other, and can't make the tiny adjustments to tempo and feel that a single drummer has the freedom to do. Lesh later said "Billy played like a young god. I mean, he was everywhere on the drums, and just kickin’ our butts every which way, which is what drummers live to do, you know." Donna Jean agreed, saying "Billy was so there with what the Grateful Dead’s music was all about; he was always postured to play anything. He never set down a 2 and 4 that you couldn’t get away from; Billy’s left and right arm were always postured at any millisecond to take that rhythm anywhere that it needed to go. That’s the beauty of Billy Kreutzmann’s playing. He played like a dancer." Of course, a massive touring operation like the Grateful Dead's was expensive to bring across to Europe, and the only sensible way they could do it was to release yet another live album -- this time a triple one. Although Europe '72 is, while often considered the pinnacle of the group's work, not exactly live. The group were pleased with their instrumental playing, but not with their vocals, and so most of the vocals on the album were rerecorded in the studio back in the US -- but not done the conventional way, with the band members using headphones and singing into the mic. Instead, to make sure that the vocal tracks sounded as they would have live, with instrumental bleed-through to make them fit the ambience, the group's entire stage setup was replicated in the studio, with the amps positioned as they would normally be and the mics spaced exactly as they would be in a live performance. The instruments were played back through the same amps they'd used on stage, and the group redid their parts, including a couple of vocals from Pig Pen: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "It Hurts Me Too"] Those would be his last contributions to a Grateful Dead record. He played only one show with the group after the European tour, in June, and then he stayed at home, trying to get well. As Bob Weir would later explain "Pig Pen had been slowing down and gradually getting sicker, and his musical output was tapering, so by the time he had to stay off the road, he hadn’t been contributing that much so it didn’t have that major an impact. Coincidentally, I started to hit my stride around the same time, and with Pig Pen sick, there was a need for me to do more." While he was at home, he was working on some songs for a possible solo album, or maybe to contribute to the next Dead album. But as it turned out, they would never see release. Pig Pen died, alone, at home, of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption, on the eighth of March 1973. So it goes. He was twenty-seven. And this leads me to another thing I need to say. There is an utterly pernicious concept called the twenty-seven club, based around the fact that several musicians died at that age. We've already seen one of these, Jesse Belvin, but we're sadly going to see a number more of them between now and episode two hundred, including one next episode. Various conspiracies and attempts at adding mystical significance have become attached to this idea -- an idea which has no basis in truth. Musicians, even famous ones, are no more likely to die aged twenty-seven than at any other age. But there *is* some suggestion that some of the later ones, especially those who died by suicide or overdose, were motivated in part by the romanticising of these deaths. So I want to say clearly, this is the *only* time I will ever mention the "27 Club". Like the Grateful Dead's keyboard players dying, this is not a fun pattern that one can play enjoyable games with, this is talented, often troubled, young people, scarcely more than children, dying in horrible ways. I will have no part, however small, in adding to the belief that great art requires self-destruction or that one should die young and leave a beautiful corpse. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "It Hurts Me Too"] Pig Pen's death was, in many ways, the end of the Grateful Dead as they had been to that point. But there were other changes afoot. The group had decided to set up their own record label, Grateful Dead Records. Initially this was planned to be something that would allow the group to be totally independent and be distributed entirely through channels other than the mainstream record industry. As Garcia said "It’s dumb to complain about all that record company [bullshit]. I mean, if you’re enough of an [asshole] to stick it up where they can shoot at it, you can’t complain for getting shot. It was our blunder and we’ve been living with our mistake all these years. Now, hopefully we’re free to make our own mistakes." As it turned out, their own mistakes would be just as bad as any that Warners had made, and Grateful Dead Records would shut down in 1976. It would later be revived in the nineties as an archive label. But it did mean that the band were in total control of their next few studio albums, with no oversight, which led to unfortunate missteps like Weir and Barlow's "Money Money", a song which complains about women being gold-diggers, but also about feminism: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Money Money"] In truth, the group's studio albums were increasingly becoming afterthoughts -- as Garcia said in 1973 "There are a lot of people on our payroll, and we can’t really count that much on record royalties to take care of business. The live shows we do are the main source of income for the band, and we’ve been playing an awful lot to pay off our overhead." Part of the reason for starting Grateful Dead Records had been to try to increase their share of the revenue from the records, but as it turned out they wanted neither to be in the record business nor to be in the studio. The group recorded six studio albums between 1973 and 1981, and of course as with every band of their size some of them have their ardent defenders, but even among that relatively small portion of Grateful Dead fans who defend their studio work, most agree that their great period in the studio ended with American Beauty. But the band was becoming very successful on tour, and developing a devoted fanbase. They were helped in this by the packaging of the Skull and Roses album, which included a message saying "Dead freaks unite. Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.” Within a couple of years, the group had a mailing list of forty thousand people, who got sent "Dead Head Newsletters" (which popularised the term "Deadhead") which of course contained information about tour dates and new releases, but which also included the kind of stuff that bands would now have on their social media pages, the kind of thing that builds what is now called a parasocial relationship. Hunter was particularly involved in this, creating cartoons and anecdotes about Hypnocracy and the teachings of St. Dilbert, many of which involve him giving "hot foots", a kind of practical joke that involves setting the victim's shoes on fire when they're not looking. Many of these stories also said a lot about the band's attitude to authority and to the kind of people who looked to them for authority, as in one that reads "St. Dilbert was walking in the market one day when up staggered a Bozo to ask his opinion on whether the king, Who had been caught with his hand in exchequer, ought to abdicate, be deposed, have his hand cut off, or be given a medal. With very little pondering, the Dilbert is said to have replied: "You Bozos slay me. You pick a king who best represents the sum of your individual lameness to rule you, and then complain because he has a big red nose." While considering this reply, the Bozo smelled smoke, and looking down realized that the Dilbert had, once again, placed a lighted match between his toes." [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Even though they were only a middling success on record, the group were becoming ridiculously successful, to the extent that in 1973, on a bill with the Band and the Allman Brothers Band in Watkins Glen, they played to an audience which for decades held the Guinness record for the largest attendance at a festival ever, and according to some was the largest gathering of humans in American history to that point. The highways around the area had to be closed because of the traffic, with people making it on foot. A hundred and fifty thousand people had bought tickets, but most got in free. Estimates put the crowd size at somewhere near six hundred thousand, which if true and given the age of the people attending would mean that roughly one in every three people in their late teens and early twenties from the area stretching from Boston to New York were there. The crowd for that event was so big that new technologies had to be introduced in the sound systems -- delay lines that allowed speakers to be placed further apart to account for the speed of sound. And this kind of thing was the problem. The group were touring to try to make money, but to play to huge crowds you needed more equipment, and if you wanted crowds of this size to hear you properly, you needed equipment that had never been developed before. Eventually Owsley and sound engineer Dan Healey came up with a system they called the Wall of Sound which would give perfect sound in any venue. That is, in any venue it could fit in. It consisted of 641 speakers, and needed five trucks to get it to a venue. Many venues couldn't take its weight. It also took two days to set up. Which meant that they needed *two* walls of sound, and two whole crews -- one to go ahead to set up the next show while the Dead were playing one the other crew had set up. This is a period when the shows were generally considered exceptional, but the band were supposed to be doing this to earn a living, but they found that as the audience grew, the costs associated with playing to an audience that size grew. And it just wasn't fun any more, not least because half the band were dealing with serious cocaine problems by this point. So in October 1974 the group decided to just stop. They played a final concert at the Winterland, which was filmed for a film that Garcia later edited, and declared they were going on hiatus. Much to Kreutzmann's chagrin, Mickey Hart turned up and was invited to rejoin them for this last show: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Eyes of the World (live at the Winterland)"] By this time there were creative and personal splits in the band and the crew, everything from the drugs they preferred (some of the Dead were by this point trying to be clean-living while others were taking everything they could, and several people involved were annoyed by the insistence of the crew at the last show that nobody could go on stage without taking acid first) to what kind of music they should be making. They sacked a big chunk of the crew, dismantled the Wall of Sound, and spent eighteen months off tour, only playing a small number of one-off shows. But they found that they didn't know what to do if they weren't touring, and ended up getting back together, with Hart in the band once more, as he would be for the rest of its career, and touring again, starting off by playing smaller venues with a smaller crew. But something was missing. Some of the shows were as good as they'd ever been -- a 1977 show at Cornell University is often cited as their best show ever: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dancing in the Street"] And there were other shows, like a performance at the pyramids in Egypt, which were fondly remembered for reasons other than the musical. But something about the spirit of the shows was generally lacking, which can probably be summed up best by saying that between 1976 and 1984 they only played "Dark Star" five times. When asked about it, Garcia would say that he felt that the group had said everything they could say with that song, but that they felt obliged to try it every so often just in case. The sets tended to be far more structured, with rigidly defined areas of improvisation, rather than the loose, smooth, movement between ideas of the earlier performances. Part of the problem was that several of the band had developed heroin addictions -- Garcia would struggle with his until the day he died -- and part of it was that after the hiatus, Keith Godchaux's playing no longer seemed to fit with the band the way it had. By mutual agreement, Keith and Donna left the band in February 1979, and formed their own band, but tragically Keith died in a car accident in July 1980. So it goes. Keith's replacement was Brent Mydland, who had played in Bob Weir's side band Bobby and the Midnites, and he was considered a better fit, and that change led to the band being somewhat reinvigorated: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] In early 1976 Bob Weir had said "If it turns out that to avoid problems we have to play the big indoor places again, we just won’t do it. We won’t go out on the road. We’ll just stay home and make records." By late 1976, the Grateful Dead were playing the big indoor places again. And they continued playing bigger and bigger places. As the group were reliant on money from live shows, of course the venues they were playing grew, and they hit upon a totally different way of making money from what anyone else in the rock business was doing at the time. They didn't make a studio album between 1981 and 1987, but in that time they became a bigger and bigger live act, because they finally figured out some of what was giving them a fanbase, and started to exploit it. People had always traded tapes of Dead shows, but up until the early eighties, the group had discouraged this, as all bands did, fearing bootlegging. What they realised was that since they weren't making much money from records anyway, traded tapes weren't cutting into their profits much. What they *were* doing was acting as advertising for the live shows, where they *were* making money. They went from cutting the mics of tapers to setting up special "tapers areas" at shows, reserved areas where people could record the shows, so long as they only traded the recordings, never sold them. These tapes being traded led to the creation of a whole fan culture, analysing the different shows, and commenting on what was the best version of each song, what was the best era of the band, and so on. People started to go to *every* show they could, travelling to see each show on a tour, sometimes seeing literally hundreds of shows. A thriving ecosystem of small businesses started to follow the group, selling home-made merchandise (and the group brought the best of these people in to make their own merchandise, which they sold through their mailing list) or food in the parking lots to concert-goers. The parking lots themselves became party spaces, so much so that a lot of people would follow the band from town to town not to go to the gigs, but to party in the parking lots. The group encouraged this kind of thing by setting up their own ticketing company, and allocating chunks of tickets to people on their mailing list, which encouraged more people to sign up for the list, which encouraged them to think of themselves as "Dead Heads". The Dead didn't understand their fanbase -- everything you read about them suggests that they didn't really get *why* this was happening -- but between good luck and good management they'd managed to hit on a formula which is now the one used by every single artist who makes a living in the Internet era, thirty years before it started to become just the way you do things. Build a core audience by making work available for free or cheap, and then charge the true fans for extras, like live shows or merchandise or Patreon bonuses. And there's a reason that everyone working in a creative field is following the example set by the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Grateful Dead's fanbase were intimately connected with the Internet from even before the World Wide Web became a thing. LONG before. The group's geographic connection to the Bay Area, and its connection to psychedelic drugs -- many of the 70s generation of computer scientists were interested in expanding their own intelligence as well as that of their computers -- and vague science fictional leanings, meant that they were a natural fit for the kind of person who was online when there were only a handful of networked computers in the world. The first web page came online in August 1991. The first Grateful Dead email list was started in the seventies, by researchers in the AI department in Stanford. When Usenet came along, originally there was just one newsgroup for music, but so many people were posting about the Grateful Dead that the moderators of that newsgroup eventually suggested that a separate Dead newsgroup be set up so anyone who wanted to talk about any other bands could get a word in edgewise, and they became the first band to have their own newsgroup. A 1994 book called Skeleton Key -- a guide to the culture of Dead fandom -- has a whole appendix called "How to Become a Nethead", which lists phone numbers of nineteen Grateful Dead bulletin boards along with their modem bitrates, and which says that there were at the time forty thousand subscribers to the Grateful Dead newsgroups, at a time when almost nobody was yet online. Rather charmingly, it says of the newsgroup "before you post your first message, take stock: Writing to tens of thousands of people at once is not quite like writing a personal letter. You should take care that the information you are publishing is accurate." The bulletin board The WELL, set up in 1985 by Stewart Brand, one of the organisers of the Trips Festival, became a huge gathering place for Dead fans, and for people in the group's organisation, especially Barlow, who got into talks on the WELL that led to him co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first civil liberties organisation devoted to speech on the Internet, and Brand sat on the board. Brand's slogan "Information wants to be free" became a rallying cry on the Internet well into the new millennium, and the culture of the Internet, and of Silicon Valley, grew up *heavily* influenced by the Grateful Dead's fan culture, and in particular by their encouragement of tape trading. *Everything* about the way that music technology, and entertainment technology more broadly, evolved -- the growth of filesharing, the embrace by record companies of streaming as a way to provide music free at the point of listening to meet that demand, and the fact that where thirty years ago mid-level bands made a modest income from recordings and toured to promote them, while now they make a modest income from touring but release records to promote the tour... all of that comes back to the fact that it was Grateful Dead fans who were the first online, and who shaped the culture of the Internet in ways, good and bad, that we're still seeing today. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the Grateful Dead have had a more lasting, and greater, cultural impact than the Beatles, despite not even having a thousandth of their fanbase or their specifically musical influence. The whole Californian ideology, in all its self-contradictory complexity, is in many ways an outgrowth of Deadhead ideology, for better and for worse. And *that* is why I had to cover the Grateful Dead in such depth here. Because without them, the very model I use to fund this podcast would not exist. If it had been fans of Frank Zappa or the Velvet Underground who had been working in Stanford's AI lab, rather than the Dead, the world would be unrecognisable now. [Excerpt: Grayfolded] But while the Dead were growing their audience, they were not doing well. And much of that was down to Jerry Garcia. Garcia's heroin addiction was getting worse, to the point where he was nodding off on stage at times, and the man who had spent most of the seventies desperate to play music was now starting to resent being on stage, because the crowds had grown too big. Once again they were touring not because they wanted to, but because they had obligations to all their employees to keep the show on the road no matter what their health, playing more to support the crew than for pleasure. Eventually, Garcia collapsed. His health had deteriorated thanks to his heroin use, he had undiagnosed diabetes, and he dehydrated on a hot day. He was rushed to hospital, and given Valium, which the doctors didn't know he was allergic to. He was in a coma for several days, and when he came out of it his memory was scrambled. He had to relearn how to play the guitar and banjo, spending months with the help of his friend Merl Saunders, slowly piecing his skills back together. And for a while, at least, he came off the heroin and controlled his diet. The group started rehearsing again, and at first it seemed like Garcia wouldn't be good enough, but then one day in October 1986, Mickey Hart came into the Dead's office smiling and saying "We just did a really good ‘Dark Star'. It's back." They started booking a comeback tour the same day. Garcia's first show back with the group opened with a song which they'd been playing for ages, but which took on a new life as an anthem of Garcia's recovery, and which would become the lead-off single for their first studio album in six years: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Touch of Grey"] And that, twenty-two years after the band formed, gave them their first and only hit single. In part it was because the time was ripe. 1987 saw a lot of media coverage of the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, and also as the Tralfamadorians among you will know, the late eighties saw mini career peaks for a host of the Dead's contemporaries, with the period between late 1986 and late 1989 seeing Paul Simon, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison all making commercially successful albums that were hailed as returns to form after a patchy decade, and Dylan and Harrison's supergroup the Travelling Wilburys become a minor phenomenon. Other than Simon, the Dead were very slightly ahead of the curve in appealing to an audience of Boomers starting to enter middle age and get nostalgic for the musicians of their youth, and while "Touch of Grey" is not an entirely happy lyric, lines like "a touch of grey kind of suits you anyway" will have given it appeal. But the success was also helped, even more, by the video, the first one the group ever did, which was filmed after one of the group's shows and featured life-size skeleton puppets, modeled after the skeletons that had appeared on many of the group's album covers, playing the song in front of the audience (with a fun moment on the line "dog has not been fed in years" when a dog runs on to the stage and steals Mickey Hart's legbone, and a roadie has to chase the dog down and reattach the bone to the drummer) before turning into the real Dead lipsynching their hit. It was huge on MTV, and got the record into the top ten, making the Grateful Dead finally a one-hit wonder: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Touch of Grey"] But that success brought its own problems. The group's audience became even more massive, with an influx of new fans who the Deadhead culture found it difficult to absorb and enculturate. But at least at first, the Grateful Dead were enthusiastic about their new audience, and that enthusiasm was infectious. They did a co-headlining tour that year with Bob Dylan, acting as his backing band as well as his support act. The shows weren't great, and the live album that resulted has often been called the worst thing either the Dead or Dylan has ever done: [Excerpt: Dylan and the Dead, "All Along the Watchtower"] But Dylan was enthused enough by the experience of performing with the group, and by their evident enjoyment of performing on stage, that he started what has come to be known as the "Never-Ending Tour" the next year, and other than a break in 2020 at the height of the covid-19 pandemic he's kept an intense concert schedule ever since, having played over three thousand shows in the thirty-five years since then. The late eighties also saw a change in the sound of the Grateful Dead, as the group started to experiment more with MIDI controlled instruments. Oddly this meant that Brent Mydland, on keyboards, moved steadily more towards playing patches that sounded like "real" acoustic instruments, while Mickey Hart, for example, would be playing percussion that triggered a whole bank of different sounds. Garcia was particularly pleased with the ability to use his guitar as a MIDI controller and play sounds like a soprano sax -- he talked in interviews about how he would use it to imitate Eric Dolphy. For a while, "Dark Star" came back into the set, now augmented by MIDI, but its place as the part of the set that encouraged the group to improvise had been taken by a piece called "Space", and while they played it a lot it never took off the way it used to. But the group were having problems. Now they had a hit, their already fanatical audience was being joined by another group of new fans, who hadn't previously been part of the Deadhead culture and didn't know its unspoken rules. And they were playing the biggest venues in America -- by now they were far and away the most financially successful touring act around. By late 1987 Garcia was already saying "The audience requires the band, the band requires the audience, you know what I mean? And anything short of live performances is short of live performances. So some sort of video isn’t going to get it. Bigger venues isn’t going to get it. When you’re at the stadium, that’s it, that’s the top end, and that’s already not that great … As far as I can tell, we’re at the cul-de-sac, the end of popular music success. It doesn’t mean there’s no place to go from here. But now we have to be creative on this level as well, and invent where we’re going to go." MTV did a Day of the Dead, where they devoted a whole day to the group, and that included a lot of coverage of the party scene in the parking lots, and suddenly *those* became exponentially greater, filled with people who didn't even intend to see the group live, but were just there to hang out outside and get drunk and stoned. This started to cause problems for the infrastructure of any city and venue where the group played, and required yet more work from their staff. According to some in the Dead's management team at that point, if they played a sixty-thousand-seat stadium there'd be a further thirty-thousand people outside. They were back in the position they'd been in in the seventies, playing to massive audiences not for the pleasure of playing, but because now they were a multi-million-dollar industry. They had to perform to pay the roadies, and the staff in their ticket company, and the promoters, and the staff on their mailing list... there were hundreds of people relying on the group for a pay-cheque, and the bigger they got, the bigger the organisation behind them. By 1989 Robert Hunter was saying "This is our big, big problem now: what to do with the unruly factor now that’s causing a large group situation to become aggravated and exhibit mob behavior. I don’t know; I don’t know that anybody’s ever known, short of imposing absolute authoritarian control, and that is of course the opposite of what the Grateful Dead stand for. Will we be forced to become our own opposites? Interesting philosophical question." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] By 1989 the group started to clamp down on the people selling merchandise outside the shows, in order to cut down on the number of people outside causing a nuisance. This led to a huge backlash from the fans, which led to the group and their organisation deciding the fans were just entitled. At the end of 1989, Brent Mydland had his first overdose. Like all the group's official keyboard players, Mydland was a retiring, quiet, submissive personality, and nobody in the band up to that point seems to have even known he was using heroin, though they all knew he also had a drinking problem. When it happened, he was put on probation by the band and told to clean up, but he didn't, and in July 1990 he had his second, fatal, overdose. So it goes. Garcia was particularly hit by this death. He'd been the closest in the band to Mydland, but also, to quote Dennis McNally, who at the time was the group's publicist (and was closer to Garcia than to the other members) "My theory was that Jerry to some extent took some responsibility for Brent’s death. He recognized that the internal dynamics of the Grateful Dead—the way they treated each other as human beings—was a fraud, was non-supportive, non-anything that any human being would want to be a part of. Look how these guys managed to pick the same personality four times. Pigpen was the starter: all three of his successors had the same emotionally vulnerable personality...But they were so devastated, and being “manly men,” they wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t confront it, they just tried to put themselves in total denial, get another keyboard player, and keep going. It was almost archetypal, the way they failed to deal with what had just happened to them. I think Jerry knew this, whether he wanted to admit it out loud or not, and it put him in a bad place, and you can hear it in his guitar playing for the rest of his life." The group were meant to be on tour four weeks after Mydland's death, and they had such a huge staff that cancelling the tour was not an option. They had four weeks to find a keyboard player. They ended up choosing two. The Dead had had two keyboard players for much the seventies -- even when Tom Constanten had left but before Keith Godchaux joined, various other players, especially Lesh's friend Ned Langin, had played with them on stage though hadn't formally joined the band, and Langin had played with the group consistently for a period up to the hiatus -- and they went back to this for their first summer tour of the nineties. For many of the shows they were joined by Bruce Hornsby, a longtime Deadhead who had become a star a few years earlier with his hit "The Way it Is": [Excerpt: Bruce Hornsby and the Range, "The Way It Is"] Hornsby was a big star in his own right, but still played with the group for about a hundred shows in the early nineties. The official story as it's always told is that Hornsby was never an official member of the group and was just there to help them ease the new guy in, but reading between the lines of various statements -- always a dangerous thing to do -- it seems like Hornsby was trying to push the group out of their comfort zone and towards playing more experimentally, and the group were happy going through the motions, and he eventually tired of this. That new guy -- who did become a full member of the group, and would stay with them until the end -- was Vince Welnick. Welnick came from a very different sort of music to anything the group had done before -- he was a founder-member of the wonderfully camp art-pop proto-punk glam band the Tubes: [Excerpt: The Tubes, "Don't Touch Me There"] After seventeen years with the Tubes, Welnick had left them to tour with Todd Rundgren, who he played with for a few months before joining the Dead. Welnick wasn't hugely familiar with their music, but had been casually friendly with Garcia since the early seventies, when the Tubes had played on the same bill as Garcia when he did some solo shows. Welnick took a scholarly attitude to the music, and studied it carefully, listening back to shows every night and taking notes. But Garcia's mental health went downhill after Myland's death, and it took a further knock when in October 1991 Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash. So it goes. Soon Garcia was back on the heroin, and according to Welnick would sometimes fall asleep on stage in the middle of guitar solos, wake up, and then carry on playing. Hornsby would occasionally rejoin them as the nineties went on, and he wasn't flattering about what he saw. He said later "I sat in with them a couple of times. In ’94, I remember playing with them at Giants Stadium, and it was just horrifically bad. They all knew it, the [band members] were all bummed and embarrassed. I’m looking out at the audience, I’m playing accordion, and I’m standing there in the midst of a sea of mediocrity on the bandstand. Everyone knew it—it wasn’t just me—and you’re looking out and seeing these people going completely crazy, and you’re going, “This is surreal and strange.” It was hard. It was tough for everybody, because no one seemed to be able to reach Garcia. That was tough." The last time Jerry Garcia ever performed "Dark Star" was at the Omni in Atlanta in 1994. Far from the extended jams of old that could last forty minutes, it was only ten minutes long. He only sang the first verse. The song would remain forever unfinished: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 1994)" same clip as at the start] Garcia was clearly very ill at this point, and would only tour for another year or so before checking himself into a stint in rehab which, as it turned out, he would never leave, and which would end the Grateful Dead. But it wouldn't end their organisation, because having already invented the way that all new up-and-coming artists now have to build a career, they now invented, twenty years early, the way that all rock stars of their age monetise their intellectual property. By the early nineties, the group had discovered that there was money to be made from their old live recordings, recordings that nobody had thought had any value. They started releasing albums of classic old shows, most of which most Deadheads already had tape copies of, and were astonished to find that they sold in phenomenal amounts, so much so that in the years after Garcia's death the group actually made more money from archive CDs and sales of merchandise than they had from touring while he was alive. Indeed, they were so successful that at one point many of the band members threatened to sue archive.org, the epitome of the "Information must be free" idea, which had a vast trove of the recordings the group had previously encouraged fans to share, to get them to take them down. But Lesh, who had become estranged from the other three, had something of a Damascene conversion to the Deadhead cause and now thought of himself as the fans' representative and a representative of integrity -- he had earlier said "The Grateful Dead have never accepted corporate sponsorship or venture capital money, and I remain unalterably opposed to any deal that would lease, license or otherwise collateralize the music in the vault”. When he heard about the proposed lawsuit he went ballistic and posted a statement on his website saying“I was not part of this decision-making process and I was not notified that the shows were going to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it,” The group reversed course and came to a compromise which allowed archive.org to keep the soundboard tapes as streaming only, with the lower-quality audience recordings still available for free download, a compromise which is still in place. They also tried to do some interesting things with the archive material, even before Garcia's death. For example Phil Lesh invited the avant-garde composer John Oswald, who made music using sampling in what he called "Plunderphonics", to do an extended composition using versions of "Dark Star", mixing and matching different performances from over the decades, putting some in reverse, layering them on top of each other. The result was the only Grateful Dead recording on which every official member of the band -- Garcia, Lesh, Weir, Kreutzmann, Constanten, Pig Pen, Keith and Donna-Jean Godchaux, Brent Mydland, and Vince Welnick, all appeared: [Excerpt: Grayfolded] In 2006, the Grateful Dead leased all their intellectual property to Rhino Records, a subsidiary of Warners, for thirty million dollars for a ten-year lease -- a lease that has since been renewed. Mickey Hart said“I think it was a common thought that if we got rid of the business, we might become friends again, we might actually play again. We really love each other, and, deep down, we’re tied at the heart." The same week, Ram Rod, the roadie who had been considered the heart and soul of the group's crew, died of lung cancer. So it goes. Vince Welnick had continued touring with Bob Weir's side band Ratdog for a while after the Grateful Dead had split, but had been sacked from Ratdog after a suicide attempt -- he was replaced by, of all people, Chuck Berry's old piano player Johnny Johnson. He'd been suffering from depression ever since the group split, and would struggle with it for the rest of his life. He did play occasionally with some of the other ex-members for a couple of years after the split, but was not invited to take part in partial reunions advertised as "featuring the former members of the Grateful Dead", under names like The Other Ones and The Dead, and he'd been heartbroken not to be included. As far as he was concerned, he *was* a member of the Grateful Dead - he said“I am and always will be a member of the Grateful Dead. It’s a lifetime thing that Jerry bestows upon a person.” Two weeks after the Vault was moved to Warners, Welnick, who hadn't spoken with the other members of the band in years, died by suicide. So it goes. Phil Lesh performs with a group called Phil Lesh and Friends. Weir, Kreutzmann, and Hart have spent the last few years performing as Dead & Company with singer and guitarist John Mayer. They recently announced a farewell tour for this summer, and even more recently announced that Kreutzmann will not be joining the tour, though they didn't say why other than a "shift in creative direction". In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "I Bid You Goodnight" into very end of Grayfolded] ... Read more

20 May 2023

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20 May 2023


#208

Episode 164: “White Light/White Heat” by the Velvet Underground

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, [on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/80624667) . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at  [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust)  and  [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one.  [Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga] (https://amzn.to/3K7KWwb) is the best book on the group as a group. I also used [Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico.] (https://amzn.to/41dUjBN) Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to,  [Transformer] (https://amzn.to/3nLj49C) . The other was  [Lou Reed ] (https://amzn.to/3nLjrRy) by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from  [Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell] (https://amzn.to/3nCU4S6) . Information on Nico came from  [Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon] (https://amzn.to/3U16z69) by Richard Witts. I used  [Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw] (https://amzn.to/3nCUEPM) as my main source for La Monte Young,  [The Roaring Silence by David Revill] (https://amzn.to/3Gbszp8) for John Cage, and  [Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik] (https://amzn.to/3m2mjsV) for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the [2021 documentary ] (https://amzn.to/3Kt1xfp) The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set  [Peel Slowly and See] (https://amzn.to/3Kt1xfp) , which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of  [my backers on Patreon] (http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey) . Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn’t know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he’s not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I’d read Cowell’s New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez’s Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There’s none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn’t want your husband’s work confused with my husband’s work, any more than you’d want some . . . any artist’s work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn’t study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn’t study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I’ve always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that’s going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn’t go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn’t do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn’t even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New York University, Reed was put through a course of electroconvulsive therapy, and that for the rest of his life he resented his parents for putting him through that. According to Reed himself, the primary "illness" for which he was being treated was his sexual attraction to other men, and he was forced to undergo it by his domineering, abusive, father. According to Reed's younger sister, who is now herself a mental health professional, the shock treatment was not for his sexuality, and their father was a kind, liberal, man with enlightened attitudes about sexuality for the time period. According to her, the treatment was for anxiety and depression, which he had been suffering from for several years. Whatever the truth, Reed's memory suffered as a result of the treatment (which was much, much, stronger than the similar treatments used today) and whatever it was intended to treat it did the opposite -- Reed's personality became much bleaker and more cynical, his depressive phases got worse, and he started registering copyrights on songs with titles like "You'll Never, Ever, Love Me" and "Kill Your Sons". After the treatments he didn't go back to NYU, but instead started to study at Syracuse, where among other things he had his own college radio show, "Excursions on a Wobbly Rail", named after a jazz piece by Cecil Taylor he used as the theme tune: [Excerpt: Cecil Taylor, "Excursion on a Wobbly Rail"] The show was ostensibly a jazz show, but it was actually just based around Reed's personal tastes, so it combined the free jazz of people like Ornette Coleman with soul and R&B records by groups like the Marvelettes and doo-wop records by Dion, his favourite singer at this point. Reed later described his musical influences by saying “I was a very big fan of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp. Then James Brown, the doo-wop groups, and rockabilly. Put it all together and you end up with me.” Reed was still trying to make it as a rock and roller. He formed a band at university, LA and the Eldorados, who played various college and fraternity parties, and he also went back to Bob Shad to record a couple more tracks, clearly showing the influence of Dion, though those wouldn't get released for decades: [Excerpt: Lewis Reed, "Your Love"] But at the same time he was trying to become a writer, and one influenced by serious writers like William Burroughs. He was studying under the acclaimed poet Delmore Schwartz, who thought Reed had great potential as a writer, and the two became very close. Reed took Schwartz's teachings about writing, and about integrity, very seriously, but also found himself having to hide many of his own ambitions and huge chunks of his own life, because Schwartz had a deep loathing for rock and roll music and found it contemptible, and was also virulently homophobic. Reed, who was having affairs with both men and women, and was playing rock and roll music, found himself feeling split in two. He was also, by this point, a serious user of heroin. And it was his experiences buying and using the drug that gave him the ideas for some of what would become his best-known songs. At this point, Reed was still absorbing all the popular music of the time. He would later emphasise the influence of Brill Building songwriters like Goffin and King, and Bacharach and David, of Steve Cropper and the other writers at Stax, and of Brian Wilson's writing for the Beach Boys, and one can see all those absolutely in his later work. But one huge influence he always pretended had never influenced him at all was Bob Dylan, and around this time Reed was slavishly imitating him: [Excerpt: Lou Reed, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (home recording 1963)"] And as Dylan was broadening the definitions of what could count as a rock and roll lyric, Reed saw ways to push it further. He said later “I thought, look, all these writers are writing about only a very small part of the human experience,whereas a record could be like a novel, you could write about this. It was so obvious, it’s amazing everybody wasn’t doing it. Let’s take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock-and-roll song! But if you’re going to talk about the greats, there is no one greater than Raymond Chandler. I mean, after reading Raymond Chandler and going on to someone else, it’s like eating caviar and then turning to some real inferior dish. Take the sensibility of  Raymond Chandler or Hubert Shelby or Delmore Schwartz or Poe and put it to rock music.” So Reed started to write songs about the kind of dark, real-life, topic a Chandler might write about -- like going to buy heroin: [Excerpt: Lou Reed, "Waiting for the Man (May 1965 alternate version)"] But these Chandleresque songs were not going to get recorded any time soon -- indeed that recording we just heard is from May 1965, roughly two years after Reed wrote "Waiting for the Man". Reed's move into the rock and roll business was going to be with lyrics that were a little less challenging: [Excerpt: The Beach Nuts, "I've Got a Tiger in My Tank"] Don Schupak, the manager of LA and the Eldoradoes, had gone to work for Pickwick Records after leaving university, and Schupak got Reed a job as a staff songwriter, performer, and producer. For twenty-five dollars a week, he and three other staffers, Terry Phillips, Jerry Vance, and Jimmy Sims, would write and record whatever Pickwick needed. Often Pickwick would have managed to license one or two early tracks by someone who'd just had a big hit, and then they'd need to fill out a compilation with recordings by other supposed bands in the same style. As Reed told it “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. We just churned out songs, that’s all. They would say, ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. While I was doing that, I was doing my own stuff and trying to get by, but the material I was doing, people wouldn’t go near me with it at the time. I mean, we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let the Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’ I didn’t see it as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a  songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give me a subject, and we’d write." Reed and his collaborators, and a handful of session singers and musicians, would sometimes be the Beach Nuts: [Excerpt: The Beach Nuts, "Cycle Annie"] Sometimes the Hi-Lifes: [Excerpt: The Hi-Lifes, "Soul City"] Sometimes The J Brothers: [Excerpt: The J Brothers, "Ya Running, But I'll Getcha"] And, fatefully, they'd become The Primitives: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Reed, Cale, Conrad, and de Maria had a very brief career playing as the Primitives, but while they played in front of the normal audiences of screaming girls, the record didn't do anything on the charts, and the group, such as it was, soon split up. Cale also developed a dislike of de Maria's style of drumming, which was very influenced by jazz. If he *was* going to do any more rock and roll, he wasn't going to do it with someone who played so much on the ride cymbal. But as well as Cale and Conrad continuing to perform together with Young, Cale and Reed continued to hang out together, and even started writing songs together. Their first collaboration, written with Reed's normal partners Phillips and Vance, was this, released as a B-side by The All-Night Workers, some friends of Reed's: [Excerpt: The All-Night Workers, "Why Don't You Smile Now?"] Reed kept trying to get Cale to listen to the *other* songs he was writing, the ones that he'd played for Pickwick but they'd turned down, but at first Cale was totally uninterested. Reed was playing them on an acoustic guitar, in a Bob Dylan style, and Cale *despised* the folk music scene and everything about it. He refused to listen. But eventually Reed wore him down. Cale said later "He kept pushing them on me, and finally I saw they weren’t the kind of words you’d get Joan Baez singing. They were very different, he was writing about things other people weren’t. These lyrics were very literate, very well expressed, they were tough.” He later explained “I recognised a tremendous literary quality about his songs which fascinated me—he had a very careful ear, he was very cautious with his words. I had no real knowledge of rock music at that time, so I focused on the literary aspect more.” [Excerpt: Lou Reed, "Heroin (1965 demo)"] And Reed also introduced Cale to the life he was writing about. As Cale put it “before I met Lou, I had snorted, smoked, and swallowed the best drugs in New York, courtesy of La Monte, but I had never injected anything. We smoked pot, took acid and other pills, mostly downs or Benzedrine. Now dime and nickel bags of heroin were added to the menu.” Reed moved in with Cale, after Conrad moved out of the flat they shared, and they started jamming with the Eternal Theatre's percussionist Angus MacLise, who lived in the same building. By this point Reed was no longer working for Pickwick -- he was determined to make the music he wanted to make -- and the two of them scraped together money by giving blood, and by having their photos taken to be used in fake tabloid newspaper articles, where they were accused of being child molestors and serial killers. Reed also around this time had a sideline in selling powdered sugar to gullible people and telling them it was heroin, then hanging around with them pretending to be stoned, as he put it, "watching carefully to make sure they didn’t OD on sweets". The fourth part of their new group, which they called The Warlocks, came when Reed happened to bump into an old friend, Sterling Morrison, on the subway. Morrison was someone he had known at Syracuse, though Morrison hadn't been a student there, but they'd been introduced by a mutual friend who was, Jim Tucker, and had bonded over a shared love of the guitar and of the music of Ike and Tina Turner. The new group thus had two contingents with different influences. The rhythm section -- Cale played bass as well as viola -- were from the experimental tradition, while Reed and Morrison's tastes ran to Brill Building pop, the Beach Boys, hardcore R&B and doo-wop. One thing they were all agreed on though was what they were *not* going to do, which was turn into one of the white blues bands that were starting to spring up. “We actually had a rule in the band,” Reed explained. “If anybody played a blues lick, they would be fined. Everyone was going crazy over old blues people, but they forgot about all those groups, like the Spaniels, people like that. Records like ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette,’ and ‘I Need a Sunday Kind of Love,’ the ‘Wind’ by the Chesters, ‘Later for You, Baby’ by the Solitaires. All those really ferocious records that no one seemed to listen to anymore were underneath everything we were playing. No one really knew that.” [Excerpt: The Solitaires, "Later For You Baby"] Reed was very vehement about his love of these forms that were already starting to fall out of fashion somewhat. In an essay he wrote around this time for a literary magazine -- he was still trying to make it as a writer as well -- he wrote “How can they give Robert Lowell a poetry prize? Richard Wilbur. It’s a joke. What about the Excellents, Martha and the Vandellas (Holland, Dozier, Jeff Barry, Elle Greenwich, Bacharach and David, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, the best songwriting teams in America). Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the CHORDS. Phil Spector being made out to be some kind of aberration when he put out the best record ever made, ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.’” Another inspiration for the group came from the records that Cale would bring back from his regular trips to the UK -- bands like the Who and the Kinks who weren't having hits in the US at this point but were big in Britain. On his trips home, Cale also brought a tape of the new band, now renamed the Velvet Underground, and tried to get some interest from Andrew Loog Oldham, thinking some of the songs might be suitable for Marianne Faithfull: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Venus in Furs (demo)"] Faithfull was not interested in recording "Venus in Furs", even though there was a family connection -- her great-great uncle, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we get the word "masochism", had written the novel on which that song was based. The group's new name also came from a book -- in this case a cheap sexploitation book that Tony Conrad had literally found in a gutter. The group liked the book's title because it implied a connection with underground film, the only art form at this point that was really called underground, and indeed the group's first performances were as live accompaniment to projections of silent underground films at various happenings. Indeed it was at one of these performances that the group were filmed for the first time, for a TV piece about underground film. Shortly after that Al Aronowitz, the pop music correspondent for the New York Post, offered to manage the group. Aronowitz booked them as the support act for another group he managed, The Myddle Class -- and MacLise quit the group. The idea of showing up *at a specific time* to play music, and then *finishing* at a specific time to let the next band go on, was completely alien to him, and he wanted no part of this at all. With only days to go, the group needed a new drummer *fast*, and they found what they assumed would be a temporary replacement in Jim Tucker's sister Maureen. Moe Tucker, as she was always known, was nineteen at the time and didn't play in a band, but she did have a drum kit, which she played at home along with Rolling Stones and Bo Diddley records: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Bo Diddley"] Tucker's style was a unique one. As she put it herself "I always hated drummers like Ginger Baker, oh my God, every possible moment smashing something. I just hated that, even before I started playing drums. So, when I started to play, Charlie Watts was a big influence on me, and I don’t think I even  realised at the time why I liked him so much. He plays so simply. He never does anything that is unnecessary. I just find it so much more effective." -- and when she started playing, that's what she did too. Her musical tastes in R&B went in much the same direction as Reed and Morrison, but there was a problem -- Cale was adamant. There would be "no chicks", in the wording he used, in his band. Eventually he was placated by the idea that she would be only temporary, just for this one gig. And as it turned out, Tucker's style was one that the rest of the group all appreciated for their own reasons. Cale, as I've said already, strongly disliked the overuse of ride cymbal, and Tucker didn't use cymbals at all, just snare, tom, and bass drum -- which she turned on its side and hit with a stick like she would the other drums, while playing standing up. This lack of cymbals actually resonated with two of Reed's musical passions, too. While Al Jackson at Stax records did play the cymbals, he stuck to the hi-hat and barely ever played the ride, and his hi-hat was never miced and only showed up on the recordings through leakage -- Steve Cropper always said that women bought most records, and women's ears were more sensitive to high frequencies than men's, so high-pitched noises from cymbals were a bad idea. Similarly, when Brian Wilson was producing the Beach Boys' records, from 1964 onwards he got the session drummers to play without cymbals -- if there was going to be any high-frequency percussion on any Beach Boys records, it would be hand percussion like sleighbells or tambourines, not ride cymbal or hi-hat. The new lineup of the group gelled almost instantly. Moe Tucker played simple but powerful rhythms, holding down the bottom end, steady as a rock. Reed and Morrison would play twin guitars, in styles taken from the R&B records they loved, but also employing the feedback techniques Cale had been using with La Monte Young. Cale would either play bass -- in an unconventional style, as he was unfamiliar with the cliches of rock bass playing and so never resorted to them -- or, more often, his electric viola, creating ear-splitting sheets of sound. And Reed would sing his lyrics about heroin and sadomasochism in a monotone voice that bore some resemblance to his Bob Dylan impression, but was much less emotional and inflected than Dylan ever was. There was a large improvisational component to the music, but in contrast to the style of the bands becoming successful on the West Coast, where improvisational instrumental sections were a vector for individual self-expression in the eyes of the music's fans, or self-indulgence in the eyes of detractors like the Velvets, this was collective improvisation in the service of the overall sound, with individuality sublimated to the collective: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Heroin (Factory Rehearsal)"] After the gig supporting The Myddle Class, Aronowitz thought the group needed to get a good solid run of live performances behind them, and so he booked them into a residency at the Cafe Bizarre. There the group played a mixture of their own material and as many cover versions as they could work up in the time -- songs like Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie" and Jimmy Reed's "Bright Lights, Big City". This R&B core to the Velvets' work is overlooked, but if you listen to the few recordings that have surfaced of their rehearsals from this period, you can hear a clear link between, for example, them running through Bo Diddley's "Crackin' Up": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Crackin' Up (Factory Rehearsal)"] And the early arrangement of Reed's song "There She Goes Again": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "There She Goes Again (Factory Rehearsal)"] At one of the group's early shows at the Cafe Bizarre, Barbara Rubin, an underground film-maker the group had worked with, came to see them and brought an acquaintance, Gerard Malanga. Malanga loved the band's music, and got up and started dancing, using a bullwhip in his dance. During a break Reed and Cale came up to Malanga and told him that he could come back and dance any time. Malanga loved this -- he was someone who desperately desired recognition and attention -- and so he became a big fan of the band. The next day he and Rubin came back with two more friends -- Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol. Warhol was by this point one of the most famous artists in the world, possibly *the* most famous, but he'd actually given up for the moment on paintings and screen-printings. According to Morrissey, who was Warhol's business manager, this was to create an artificial scarcity in the market and make his paintings appreciate in value so when he did do more they'd make more money. But of course, he still needed to be creating *something* to keep his reputation, and thus his earning potential, alive, and he'd also needed to do some expensive work so he could write the costs off against tax. So he'd bought some film equipment and gone into a new medium -- underground film. Partially inspired by La Monte Young's minimalism -- Warhol was a big fan of Young's work -- he'd created a series of films like "Sleep", a five-and-a-half hour film of Warhol's then-boyfriend sleeping; "Eat", a forty-five minute silent film of the painter Robert Indiana eating a mushroom (to which La Monte Young had performed a live soundtrack when it was shown); "Taylor Mead's Ass", a seventy-six-minute film of Warhol's friend Taylor Mead's buttocks (including some "special effects" shots that make it look like he's shoving dollar bills, magazines, and books up his anus); and "Empire", a film he co-directed with John Palmer which consists of eight hours and five minutes of footage of the top of the Empire State Building from a single fixed location. In total, Warhol directed somewhere in the region of a hundred and fifty films. Many of them were conceptual ones like those I've just listed, but there were also quite a few that had attempts at conventional narrative, though done deliberately shoddily, and often using characters from pop culture which Warhol didn't bother to get permission to use, like his 1964 film Batman Dracula, or 1963's Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of. These films, which helped establish the camp and trash cinema aesthetic, attracted to Warhol a crowd of wannabe stars, who flocked to The Factory, Warhol's studio, which had been painted all in silver by Billy Name, the photographer and artist who had been part of the first lineup of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Warhol referred to these people as his "superstars" -- a term he got from the underground filmmaker Jack Smith, and which Warhol popularised. These "superstars" saw appearing in Warhol's underground films as their ticket to fame and fortune. Most of them got neither, and there is an argument to be made that Warhol exploited these people, many of whom were vulnerable in one way or another -- mostly queer at a time of repressive laws against their sexualities, often drug addicts, often mentally ill, all younger than him. Warhol and his defenders on the other hand would point out that he always encouraged those people to look after their own careers, and to use the publicity he got them the way he did himself, to further their ambitions. After all, *he* wasn't making money directly from the films a lot of the time himself, just indirectly from what they did for his reputation. That reputation was now at the point where he was a major celebrity, and as you may remember from the episode on "The Twist", one thing that happened to celebrities at this time was that when nightclubs wanted publicity, they would pay celebrities to go to the club. Michael Myerberg, a Broadway producer with a penchant for the slightly arty -- he had been the first person to produce Beckett's Waiting For Godot in the US -- had decided he wanted to open his own discotheque, and offered to pay Warhol to go there every night. According to Morrissey, he made a counteroffer. "I immediately said, ‘I have a better suggestion. There’s no real reason to just come out and sit there and get paid.’ (It wasn’t much money anyway.) ‘The only reason Andy will go is if he could be like Brian Epstein and present a group he managed." According to Morrissey, Myerberg liked the idea, so Morrissey expanded on it: "‘Not only will Andy’s presence be justified because his group is there, but behind the group we’ll be projecting two or three images of film footage,’ because we were making all these movies that we’d been showing at the Cinematheque that had no commercial value, and I thought this would be a good way to have them generate some money too. This was agreed upon and I was set to go out and find a rock’n’roll group. I didn’t know what group it was going to be." The Velvet Underground seemed the perfect group for Warhol to manage -- Warhol and Cale had even appeared together in underground films before -- but there was one problem. Morrissey thought that Lou Reed couldn't sing and had no charisma. Luckily, almost simultaneously, a solution presented herself, someone who Warhol described as "a new kind of Superstar": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground and Nico, "Femme Fatale"] Nico's life before her late teens is difficult to untangle. By all accounts, she lied all the time, about everything. Some of this seems to have been just for fun, telling a good story rather than the truth, but other parts seem to have been a psychological defence mechanism -- she was born in Cologne in 1938 and grew up just outside Berlin, her earliest years being those of the Second World War, and she never seems to have fully recovered from the trauma of the war and occupation. Many who knew her have said she was suffering from what we would now call PTSD, and that seems to be borne out by things she said herself. She later said "I cannot be surprised by hell, which I do believe in. I have seen hell, I have smelt hell, which was in Berlin when the bombs destroyed it. Hell is like a city destroyed, and it is beautiful to see." Of herself, she said "Yes, I remember the war years very well. But that was not me, that was another girl. I seem to myself to be a criminal who spends her entire life with faked documents. I can’t identify myself with the past. Life consists of experiences which one accepts or refuses; you are formed by the things you accept. My memory consists of shreds and short flashes, never the whole picture." One thing she did remember was the music she listened to as a child. Her mother would regularly take her to the Berlin Opera House, which was kept open after the war with very cheap tickets, as a propaganda tool for the Soviets, who ran that section of occupied Berlin. Her mother was also a fan of Zarah Leander, the Swedish schlager singer whose career had been promoted by Goebbels, and who became the German equivalent of Britain's "Forces' Sweetheart" Vera Lynn. In later years, Nico's own vocals would bear a remarkable resemblance to Leander's: [Excerpt: Zarah Leander, "Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76wGnsMUgOQ ] Nico was first discovered as a teenager. She had started hanging around a prestigious German shop called the KaDeWe, because she thought that fashion designers and photographers went there regularly. Eventually one did, and she became a model, at first working as a "mannequin" -- someone who shows off dresses in expensive shops for upmarket customers. She soon moved to Paris, though, and became an in-demand photographic model. There she made two changes. The first was to change her name to Nico, after Nico Papatakis, a nightclub owner who one of her gay friends lusted after. She liked the idea of having a male name, and later made many comments like "The most beautiful boys were interested in the most beautiful boys – I can understand that. I wanted to be a boy myself. I mean, why should I want to be a woman? I liked my homosexual friends the best" and "I gave the impression of being a boy, with my short hair and low voice. In those days I had a weakness for gay men and wanted to be one myself, so I told everyone that I was." The other change she made was to start dying her hair blonde. She would later always claim that she started doing this after an encounter with Ernest Hemingway, saying "He had just won the Nobel Prize and I thought that if a winner of the Nobel Prize told you to do something about your hair, there is something to consider. I could be a Nobel blonde. I did this eventually. It was not so easy then as it became, to keep your hair blonde. But it was good for me to do it. Don’t they say “blondes have more fun”? Well, I don’t agree. It is more correct to say “blondes have more money”.’" Whether that's true or not, nobody can know, but it *is* true that throughout her life Nico would have many, many, encounters with famous men -- and that most of them, unlike that one, caused her a great deal of harm. In Paris, she started hanging around with a much artier, more sophisticated, crowd than she had in Berlin, including people like the DaDaist artist Tristan Tzara, and started thinking of herself as a beatnik. She said of the beatniks "It took me a long time to understand anything, because it was a foreign language inside a foreign language, but I knew I was not alone in my thinking." The beatniks also widened her musical interests. Now as well as opera and schlager, she was listening to the modern jazz of Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, and to the chansons of singers like Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens: [Excerpt: Georges Brassens, "Le Gorille"] She particularly liked the simplicity of this style, with just a singer and a guitar, and when she eventually started to do her own musical performances that was the style she liked to go back to. She was also given a small part in Fellini's film La Dolce Vita, playing a model called Nico. This was actually a problem for her -- the way Fellini saw it, she was just playing herself, so it should have been easy. The way Nico saw it, though, "Nico" was herself a character, so she was playing a character playing a character, and she had no idea how to do this. Eventually Fellini hit on the solution of having her play a character utterly *unlike* herself, though still using the same name -- Nico was very quiet and didn't say much, so Fellini insisted she be talking constantly every time she was on screen, getting her to babble nonsense words which were later overdubbed with sensible dialogue. She only had a small role in the film, but she was a hit, and she appeared in another, more conventional, film, with Alain Delon. She then started a relationship with the man she'd named herself after, Nico Papatakis, and they spent two years together, moving to New York where she studied acting at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio, and where she developed a nodding acquaintance with Allen Ginsberg. But then she had a brief fling with Delon, which resulted in a child who Delon disowned, but who was eventually adopted by Delon's mother, and she moved to Ibiza to be near her own mother. In the suite above hers was a jazz band, led by Victor Brox, who I have to mention here attended the same school as I did, though many decades before me, and who died last month. Brox is now most famous for having played the role of Caiaphas on the original concept album version of Jesus Christ Superstar: [Excerpt: Jesus Christ Superstar cast, "This Jesus Must Die"] But he had a very long career in blues and jazz, as both a singer and an instrumentalist. Brox and Nico had a brief affair, but his main importance to her was teaching her about music. He said later "She’d been curious about the free music group I ran and she wanted to know everything about jazz and blues, absolutely everything. She started to come upstairs and I’d talk her through the history of the forms, the styles, the key musicians, the singers like Bessie Smith – just everything I could tell her and play her. She just sat there and listened intently, though I had no way of knowing how much she took in. Then she came over to the improvisation sessions. There was a rule for entry – you had to bring an instrument. Nico brought her tape recorder." For the rest of her life, she credited Brox, the "professor of jazz" as she called him, with introducing her properly to music and teaching her how to sing. She then moved on to Paris, where she was introduced by a mutual friend to Bob Dylan, with whom she had a brief affair. She'd been aware of him, though she didn't think much of his music, saying she didn't understand his lyrics. "Twing, twang, twing, twang, baybee: that’s how it went" was Nico's summary of Dylan's work at that point. Dylan did though write a song while they were together for those few days, supposedly about Nico, which she later recorded: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'll Keep it With Mine"] According to Nico, "he didn’t like it when I tried to sing along with him. I thought he was being chauvinistic and a little annoyed that I could sing properly – at least in tune – so he made me more determined to sing to other people." Dylan did, though, suggest that if Nico wanted to become a singer, she should try the Blue Angel club in New York, and the next time she was in the city, in autumn 1964, she got herself a booking there, doing torch songs. Her favourite song to sing in the show was "My Funny Valentine", a song she would keep in her solo sets for the rest of her life, and which she modelled on the version by the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, who she said introduced her to heroin: [Excerpt: Nico, "My Funny Valentine"] At the end of 1964, she moved again, this time to London, because Swinging London was becoming the centre of the new youth culture and she wanted to be a part of it. Unfortunately, at twenty-six she was already past her prime as a model, and she was also no longer the fashionable type of figure. She was, though, still a good-looking woman, and she got herself introduced to Andrew Oldham, who she had heard was looking for another female star to go with Marianne Faithfull, who he was managing. Oldham was interested, especially after she told him about being in La Dolce Vita and having Dylan write a song for her, but he took a while to decide on what to do with her. In the meantime, she started dating Brian Jones, in what turned into an on-again, off-again relationship for the next couple of years. At first, it was very much on, and she travelled with the Stones to France, where she met Andy Warhol for the first time, and to America on their 1965 US tour. Unfortunately, Jones treated her the way he treated all the women in his life, and while they seem to have at times enjoyed a relationship that was at least partly based around consensual BDSM, from reading the accounts of it he also crossed a line, several times, into some quite horrific nonconsensual physical and sexual abuse of her. As Nico put it, "He was charming, until he locked the door." But her relationship with Jones did keep her around Andrew Oldham, and Oldham eventually offered her a record deal with his new label, Immediate. Nico decided that her first single should be the song Bob Dylan wrote for her, and handily Dylan was soon in London playing the last shows of his 1965 tour: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr Tambourine Man (live in London)" ] Nico missed the gig, but did manage to get to the aftershow party, and there she asked Dylan to let her record the song (not realising he'd just given it to Judy Collins, who would soon release it as a single, or that Dylan had told Collins he'd written the song about *her*). She tried to persuade Dylan to let her record the song, and at first he wasn't keen -- according to Nico, he had been put off the idea of having women sing his songs by Joan Baez. But eventually Dylan told her he was planning to go into the studio with some British musicians after a few days in Portugal, and they could try it then. That session had to be put off, due to the illness and/or bad trip we talked about in the episodes on "Brand New Cadillac" and "Like a Rolling Stone", and when the session did happen, with Dylan attempting to record with members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, with Nico present, it didn't go well, and only a fragment of that recording circulates, and not a fragment featuring Nico: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] She also had a talk with Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, who agreed to manage her, but only in the US. At the session, they did cut a quick, one-take, demo of "I'll Keep it With Mine", with Dylan on piano and Nico singing, and Nico played it excitedly to Oldham, but Oldham said that while it was a good song, it should be her second single, not her first. The first should be something more uptempo. He decided on a song by another of Grossman's clients, Gordon Lightfoot: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Saying"] The B-side, "The Last Mile", was written by Oldham and the record's producer, Jimmy Page, and is a simple track with just Nico and two guitars. Discographies differ over whether Page, Brian Jones, or both of them play the guitars, though the simple acoustic strumming could be anyone: [Excerpt: Nico, "The Last Mile"] Nico made an appearance on Ready, Steady, Go! performing "I'm Not Saying", on an episode with Jonathan King and the Walker Brothers, but that wasn't enough to get the record into the charts, and while Immediate Records would soon become successful, Oldham didn't ever get round to making the promised second record. Nico left for New York, to try to connect again with Albert Grossman. But she also had the business card of Gerard Malanga, who had visited her in London and remembered her from her meeting with Warhol in Paris. She visited the Factory, just as Warhol and Paul Morrissey had decided to start managing the Velvets, and just as Morrissey was trying to persuade the group that they needed a new frontperson. After she played them her new single, and her acetate copy of the demo she'd made with Dylan, Morrissey was convinced. Instead of dull, uncharismatic, Lou Reed, the group's singer should be Nico, who was going to be the latest Warhol "Superstar". The group were unsure about this. They already had some doubts about Warhol -- Cale said of him "So much of what Andy did seemed to be a diluted version of the Downtown avant-garde scene. I had previously worked with the composer La Monte Young and we were concerned with philosophical attitudes to art. La Monte was concerned with durations and longevity, and so we viewed Andy’s dollar bills and Elvises and soup cans with grave suspicion. La Monte’s work was about long duration, and Andy dealt in repetition. We got the feeling that strong ideas were being recycled and thinned out by people like Andy." Now they were having another member foisted on them -- and to make matters worse, it was another "chick". But also, Warhol was going to be their ticket to the big time. They eventually compromised -- Nico could perform with them, but would be billed separately. They would be The Velvet Underground And Nico: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground and Nico, "Femme Fatale"] Reed, in particular, was unhappy with this, but none of the band were happy. In particular, they all felt that her voice just didn't suit most of the group's material, but she wanted to sing it all. According to Tucker, Nico “was a schmuck, from the first. She was this beautiful person who had travelled through Europe being a semistar. Her ego had grown very large. The songs Lou wrote for her were great, and she did them very well. Her accent made them great, but there was a limit! I kept to myself until she wanted to sing ‘Heroin.’ But then I had to speak my piece." Things got a little better when Reed and Nico started a brief affair, and Reed wrote a handful of songs specifically for her to sing, like the lovely ballad "I'll Be Your Mirror": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground and Nico, "I'll Be Your Mirror"] But that affair soon ended, and Reed became more resentful of her than ever, especially after she made antisemitic comments about him. The new expanded lineup of the group made their first appearance on January the thirteenth, 1966, at a psychiatrists' convention. Warhol had been asked to give an after-dinner speech at the convention, and had offered instead to show some of his films. What they got for their after-dinner performance was a happening, which started with Barbara Rubin rushing in and pointing a film camera with a bright light directly in the faces of the diners and loudly asking them personal questions about their penis size and sex lives. Then on came the Velvet Underground, performing their songs about BDSM and heroin in front of the shocked audience. Soon this became the basis of a multimedia happening, first titled Andy Warhol's Up-Tight, and then later renamed first the Erupting Plastic Inevitable and then the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Several of Warhol's films were projected simultaneously, including on to the performers, while the Velvet Underground played and Gerard Malanga and another of Warhol's "superstars", Mary Woronov, danced improvised dances in fetish gear, brandishing a whip. Warhol also put together a series of slides and a coloured light show which were also projected onto the stage, and used a mirrorball and strobe lights, a decade before such things became commonplace. Nico sang the three songs Reed had written for her, sang along with her demo recording of "I'll Keep it With Mine", and banged a tambourine out of time the rest of the time. After the psychiatrists' convention, a brief run at the Cinematheque in New York, and some out-of-town tryouts in places like Ann Arbor Michigan, the group were ready for their residency at the new club. But then Morrissey was informed by the manager the day before the residency that Myerberg had decided to book the Young Rascals instead. But then someone overheard Warhol and Morrissey talking about their lack of a venue in a cafe, and recommended somewhere called The Dom, which they could rent relatively cheap for a residency. The shows at the Dom went down a storm, taking in somewhere in the region of $18,000, and soon the group were in the recording studio, putting together an album that Warhol, who would be the credited producer, hoped to sell to Columbia Records: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Venus in Furs (alternate version)"] Warhol knew a man named Norman Dolph, who at the time was working for Columbia, though he'd given his notice, working for the division that pressed up records for small independent labels with no pressing plants of their own. On the side Dolph ran a mobile disco and provided music for art shows, which he'd do in exchange for free paintings, and he'd also done the sound at the Dom. Dolph got in touch with John Licata, an engineer at Scepter Records, who had their own studio. The idea was that the group would record a quick album in four days, and Dolph would use his connections at Columbia to get it released. The job of producer was split multiple ways, though Warhol is the only one to get label credit. From all accounts, Licata took charge of the technical aspects, Dolph acted as "line producer", doing all the organisational work, Cale supervised the arrangements, Reed, who was the only member of the band with any real studio experience, made sure that the sound Licata was getting on tape was the same sound the band wanted, and Warhol, in Reed's words, was "behind the board gazing with rapt fascination at all the blinking lights", doing little or nothing of the actual production. Though Reed would go on to qualify this, saying "In a sense he really did produce it, because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren’t large enough to be attacked … as a consequence of him being the producer, we’d just walk in and set up and do what we always did and no one would stop it because Andy was the producer. Of course he didn’t know anything about record production—but he didn’t have to. He just sat there and said “Oooh, that’s fantastic,” and the engineer would say, “Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic, isn’t it?”" They recorded a ten-track album in four days -- two days to record, one to play back and choose takes, and one to mix -- featuring the three songs Nico sang with the band -- "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Femme Fatale", and "I'll Be Your Mirror" -- plus seven other songs, ranging from the abrasive "Black Angel's Death Song", which unlike most of the album has Cale credited as a co-writer: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Black Angel's Death Song"] to the poppy "There She Goes Again", which shows Lou Reed's experience as a writer of catchy three-minute pop songs: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "There She Goes Again"] According to Dolph "There were three separate ambiences. One was when Lou sang “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man,” and he was deeply concerned that it not break down—that he got it all down in one shot… and in those there was a great deal of intensity in the room. In the songs that Nico sang, there was a very delicate, deferential “let’s see what we have to do to get this done” ambience … and the third was a workmanlike attempt to recreate just what they had done the night before in the live gig." Everyone was convinced the album was a masterpiece, but in quick succession Columbia, Atlantic, and Elektra Records, the three labels with a substantial East Coast presence that would have been most likely to take it, turned the album down. Luckily, they were about to go to the West Coast, for a booking at the Trip on the Sunset Strip followed by the Fillmore, where they were sure they'd go down well. They were sure of this right until they turned on the radio in California for the first time: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Monday Monday"] The Velvet Underground, all of them, *loathed* the hippie scene and everything about it, and hearing the Mamas and the Papas on the radio seemed to summarise everything they despised about the hippies and about the West Coast. As Reed put it “The West Coast bands were into soft drugs. We were into hard drugs.” The booking at The Trip was a bust -- on their opening night, plenty of celebrities turned up, but most of them reacted like Cher, who left early and was quoted saying their music wasn't "going to replace anything except suicide". Though a young student named Jim Morrison also attended, and seemed very taken with Malanga's leather persona. The club was closed down by the police after three days of their residency, but by musicians' union rules, so long as they stayed in LA and remained theoretically available for work for the full length of the residency, they would get paid as if they'd played, so they spent the time in LA *not* working, and staying at The Castle, a large mansion house in Los Feliz where lots of rock groups stayed. Which, just to make life difficult for people like me, is *not* The Castle, the large mansion house in Los Feliz that Love moved into around the same time and which also hosted other rock musicians. (This explains, incidentally, the rumours that Bob Dylan stayed at the "Love" Castle, which Johnny Echols denies -- he didn't, he spent time at the Velvets Castle, in 1965). After that, they went on to the Fillmore, where they played third on the bill to Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers of Invention. They did not go down well there. Ralph Gleason, whose word was taken more or less as gospel by the San Francisco scene, said of their performance “Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable show was nothing more than bad condensation of all the bum trips of the Trips Festival. Few people danced (the music was something of a dud, the Velvet Underground being a very dull group). It was all very campy and very Greenwich Village sick. If this is what America’s waiting for, we are going to die of boredom because this is a celebration of the silliness of cafe society, way out in left field instead of far out, and joyless.” The feeling was mutual -- Reed said of the West Coast bands “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things, ’cause somebody really should say something. Frank Zappa is the most untalented bore who ever lived. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane,  Grateful Dead, all those people are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically. I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke.” Oddly, in all their discussions of their hatred of the San Francisco scene, all of the Velvet Underground lumped Frank Zappa in with the San Francisco groups and indeed single him out as being an example of the "love and peace" music they despised, even though he was an LA musician who shared all their criticisms of the San Francisco scene and would articulate them viciously, and more publicly than they did, on songs like "Who Needs the Peace Corps?": [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] Lou Reed would later retract some of his criticisms, and indeed would posthumously induct Zappa into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but at the time the two groups had an intense, vicious, rivalry that seems at least in part to have been the narcissism of small differences. Both of them had similarly cynical attitudes, both namechecked many of the same old doo-wop records, both were influenced by the same avant-garde composers and free jazz musicians -- of *course* they hated each other! And both bands turned out to have the same producer. It seems to be on this first LA trip -- I say "seems to be" because there are some nuances of the timeline that just don't fit right -- that the Velvet Underground first encountered Tom Wilson. Wilson had just moved from Columbia Records to MGM/Verve, and in 1966 as well as producing the Mothers he was working on everything from live albums by Connie Francis to the Blues Project's Projections album: [Excerpt: The Blues Project, "You Can't Catch Me"] More interestingly, he worked on two separate projects that might have appealed to Warhol's Pop aesthetic, both of them combining experimental music with a cash-in on the popularity of the Batman TV show. One was an album of instrumentals, titled Batman and Robin, performed by "The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale": [Excerpt: The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale, "Batman Theme"] The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale were, in this instance, actually a supergroup consisting of members of the Blues Project and of Sun Ra's Arkestra, with Sun Ra and Al Kooper sharing keyboard duties. The album has since been reissued as by "Sun Ra and the Blues Project". Then there was "Boy Wonder I Love You": [Excerpt: Burt Ward, "Boy Wonder I Love You"] That was the one single released by Burt Ward, who played Robin in the TV series, and was written for Ward by Zappa, who also conducted the orchestra. Given Wilson's background in the experimental jazz music the Velvets loved, his production of Dylan's folk-rock records which were probably the closest thing to their music in the commercial realm, and his current work with Zappa, who despite what they all said was a very similar artist to them, he was clearly the one producer in the world who was working for a major label and likely to actually be receptive to the Velvet Underground. Wilson immediately started work on fixing up their first album for release. He started producing overdubs and editing the tracks they'd recorded in New York for release. The first thing to come out of these sessions was a version of "All Tomorrow's Parties", edited down to three minutes and released as a single in July 1966 backed with "I'll Be Your Mirror": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground and Nico, "All Tomorrow's Parties (single version)"] Wilson also produced new recordings of what he thought were the three weakest performances on the album -- "I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Heroin"] While all this was going on, though, the band were in crisis. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable show basically ended in May, because it became unsustainable to tour a show with lights, dancers, and projections. There would be occasional shows for the rest of the year and into the next but with decreasing frequency and diminishing returns. After the shows in California, Reed ended up in hospital for six weeks with hepatitis, and the rest of the group (minus Nico, who'd gone off to Ibiza) had to pull together a show they could perform without him as they were booked in for a week-long stint in Chicago. For those shows, Angus MacLise returned to the band on drums, allowing Moe to take over the bass, so Cale could play Reed's guitar parts and sing lead. After performing again with the group, MacLise started pushing to rejoin, realising he had made a mistake in quitting the group. Reed refused to even countenance the idea, and lectured MacLise from his hospital bed while yellow with jaundice, telling him that he was only back temporarily and not to get any ideas. Reed was already beginning to realise that there was a tension in the band between his pop songwriting, however dark the subject matter, and Cale's avant-garde tendencies. Not only was he loyal to Tucker on principle, but this meant that if he allowed MacLise to take over from her, Cale would have an ally in the group. There was another problem as well -- the group had lost the Dom. While they'd been away on their disastrous Californian adventure, the agent who'd booked them for the California shows had gone behind their back and worked with Albert Grossman to take over the club, which they renamed the Balloon Farm. They then offered to let the Velvets play there, but just as a regular band, not with Warhol and Morrissey promoting, so they'd make much less money for the same thing. The group refused the offer, and indeed were so disgruntled that this most New York of bands didn't play in New York again for the rest of the sixties, making their musical base in Boston, where they would build up their biggest following. While Nico was still performing with them on some occasions, more and more Reed in particular was resenting this. When Tom Wilson suggested that they needed another commercial track for the album before it could be released, to put out as a single, and that it should be sung by Nico like the first single had been, Reed initially agreed, and wrote a song for Nico to sing, but eventually insisted on singing it himself on the record, though Nico would sing it live. That single, "Sunday Morning" was inspired by Warhol suggesting that he write a song about paranoia -- but some have pointed out that it also seems to have been inspired by that Mamas and Papas song the group had hated so much in California: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Sunday Morning (single version)"] Nico was a semi-detached part of the band, but she was trying to build a career in her own right -- she had spent part of the summer starring in a film Warhol and Morrissey were making, Chelsea Girls, about the Chelsea Hotel. Reed had been asked to write a song for her to sing for its theme, but had been dragging his feet, and the film was eventually released without its song. There was a space below the Balloon Farm which was looking for an act. According to Morrissey its reasoning was quite awful -- the owner of the venue thought they were getting too many Black customers and not enough white ones. The owner decided to ask Nico to perform there while the group weren't playing live much, as he thought she'd put Black people off. But when Morrissey asked the group members if any of them would back Nico on solo electric guitar  -- he didn't want them to be seen as folk musicians -- for her solo performances, all any of them would do was record some tapes for her to play. She had to bring a tape player on stage with her and press play at the start of each song, and stop at the end. Apparently Cale or Morrison would occasionally show up and back her, but not very often. Eventually, Danny Fields -- who you may remember from the episode on "All You Need is Love" as the managing editor of Datebook Magazine when the "bigger than Jesus" story made its cover, but who was by this time working for Elektra Records and with the Doors, suggested that they get in an Elektra artist, Tim Buckley, as both Nico's support act and her guitarist: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Sally Go 'Round the Roses"] Buckley played with Nico for a while, before being replaced by another Tim, Tim Hardin: [Excerpt: Tim Hardin, "If I Were a Carpenter"] Hardin caused problems though -- he quickly got nicknamed "Tim Heroin" -- but luckily a replacement was at hand, a teenage fan of Tim Buckley's who had been coming to all of the shows that Buckley had played, and had got to know Morrissey. Soon Nico's accompanist was Jack Browne: [Excerpt: Jackson Browne, "These Days"] Browne would of course soon start going by his full name, Jackson Browne. After extensive delays, the Velvet Underground and Nico album finally came out in March 1967, almost a year after it was recorded, in an expensive package designed by Warhol showing a banana skin. The skin, on these early pressings, was a sticker you could peel off to reveal a very phallic, pink, banana underneath. There's a line attributed to Brian Eno that the record only sold thirty thousand copies (it actually sold about twice that) but that everyone who bought a copy formed a band. That actually, if anything, undersells its influence, because the record was starting to influence musicians *even before it was released*. A British manager called Kenneth Pitts had visited the Factory in November 66, and had been given an acetate of the album. The band The Riot Squad, who had been working with Joe Meek up until Meek's suicide, took on a new lead singer who was a client of Pitt's after Meek's death, and they started performing "Waiting For The Man" live with the new singer, who would not perform under his own name but only as "the Toy Soldier", months before the record even came out. And shortly after the album did come out, the Riot Squad went into the studio to cut an original written by "the Toy Soldier", titled "Little Toy Soldier". Well, I say an original... this verse may sound very familiar: [Excerpt: The Riot Squad, "Little Toy Soldier"] That track didn't get released at the time, and soon David Bowie was back to being a solo artist. However, while the album immediately started influencing people, it was a commercial failure. It looked at first as if it might be a success, but then one of the Warhol "superstars", Eric Emerson, sued because the back cover included a photo of the group performing in front of a Warhol film in which Emerson's face was visible. He needed money and hadn't given likeness permission, and so sued hoping to shake down MGM Records. Instead they recalled the album, expensive packaging and all, and reissued it with an airbrushed version of the photo. But the album not being available during the crucial period when it was just beginning to become popular killed all of its momentum. By that point, though, work had started on Nico's first solo album, titled Chelsea Girl after the theme song Reed had belatedly co-written with Morrison: [Excerpt: Nico, "Chelsea Girls"] The album was produced by Tom Wilson, and contained songs written for Nico by Reed, Cale, and Morrison, plus one by Tim Hardin, her version of "I'll Keep it With Mine", and a few by Jackson Browne. For the initial sessions, Nico was backed by one or two accompanists -- Reed and Cale, Reed and Morrison, or Cale alone for the songs written by them, and Browne on the other songs -- but then as he had done successfully with Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, Wilson supervised an overdub session to which the artist was not invited, this time adding strings and flute: [Excerpt: Nico, "Chelsea Girls"] Nico said later "I cried when I heard the album. I cried because of the flute. I hate it so much! It is a great mistake. The arrangements in general were not so good. Even so, I could bear the string sound. But I wish I could take the flute off. There should be a button on record players, a “No Flute” button. There could be an “Add drums” button, too, why not? You would think they could do this. It would be fun to orchestrate some things and to un-orchestrate some things. Well, I wish I could un-orchestrate Chelsea Girl. The flute, anyway. " Reed agreed, saying “If they’d just have allowed Cale to arrange it and let me do more stuff on it. I mean everything on that song ‘Chelsea Girls,’ those strings, that flute, should have defeated it, but the lyrics, Nico’s voice, managed somehow to survive." Nico's romantic life had grown ever more complex -- after dating Reed for a while, she'd had a brief affair with Cale, and then had dated Browne, and was now in the process of dumping him for Jim Morrison. Partly to escape from these increased entanglements, and partly to seek medical treatment for a problem with her ears, she flew off to London. She turned up at the house of an acquaintance, the photographer David Bailey, expecting to be able to stay with him, but he panicked when he saw her on the doorstep with her suitcases, and instead suggested she go to stay with Paul McCartney, who he knew. She did, and was with him around the time of the release of Sgt Pepper: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "A Day in the Life"] That track caused a bit of a faux pas, though. In Nico's words: "There is a song I liked on Sgt Pepper, called ‘A Day in the Life’. It has a beautiful song and then this  strange sound like John Cale would make (he told me it was an orchestra, actually) and then this stupid little pop song that spoils everything so far. I told this to Paul, and I made a mistake, because the beautiful song was written by John Lennon and the stupid song was written by Paul. It can be embarrassing when you speak the truth." After Nico had stayed with McCartney for a couple of weeks, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey turned up in London, wanting to speak with Brian Epstein about the possibility of Epstein promoting a Velvet Underground tour, having heard that he liked the album. When they realised that Nico was trying McCartney's patience, they dragged her back to America, telling her that there was a Velvet Underground gig she had to be at in Boston. There *was* a Velvet Underground gig in Boston, but when they got there the group refused to let Nico on stage, saying they'd been doing fine without her. Nico essentially told them they could stick their group -- after all, she'd recorded an album by herself and they hadn't -- and flew off to California, where she met up again with her on-again off-again lover Brian Jones and went with him to the Monterey Pop Festival. This brought to a head things that had been brewing for some time. The group had been getting more and more convinced that Warhol, who had been such an advantage for them early on, was losing interest in them, while Morrissey was always more interested in Nico than in the rest of the band. The group sacked Warhol and Morrissey at a business meeting the day after the Boston gig, and there are conflicting reports about how amicable the split was, with everyone involved saying different things at different times. There seems to have been some bitterness over some of the business affairs, but still some remaining friendship, if slightly strained, between Reed and Cale on one side and Warhol on the other. By this time, the group had already been performing, for months, much of the material that would make up their second album -- an album that wouldn't have had any room in it for Nico anyway: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat"] White Light/White Heat was the first studio album just to be released by the Velvet Underground, without any additional members. As it turned out, it was the *only* studio album to be released by the original pre-Nico lineup of the Velvet Underground -- there were five studio albums credited to the group between 1967 and 1973, and no two of them had the same lineup. Where The Velvet Underground and Nico had been an eleven-track album where Lou Reed's pop sensibility and Cale's avant-garde experimentalism were in a creative tension, here the entire band were united in a drive to make a record that was, in Cale's words, "consciously anti-beauty". Where the majority of the songs on the first album had been credited to Reed alone, as he had brought in the words, chord sequences and melodies around which the band had created the arrangements, this time three of the six songs were credited either to all four of the group members or to Reed, Morrison and Cale, suggesting (and interviews about the album back this up) that they evolved from jam sessions and improvisations. The lengths of the tracks also bear this out, with two of the three collaborative tracks coming in at mammoth lengths. One, "The Gift", is over eight minutes long and features a rare vocal from Cale. That track was originally an instrumental the group had titled "Booker T.", but Cale suggested that over the instrumental he should recite a short story Reed had written a few years earlier. The story had originally been written as a letter to a long-distance girlfriend of Reed's, with whom he was in an on-again, off-again, relationship for much of the time covered by this episode, and was about a man in a similar relationship who mails himself as a surprise present to his girlfriend -- who then in her haste to open the box and see what's inside stabs it, killing him: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "The Gift"] The other extra-long track on the album is "Sister Ray", included partly as a favour to Warhol, who while he was no longer the group's manager was still close enough to them to design the cover of the album, uncredited. Warhol apparently told them they had to include that "sucking on my ding-dong song", and so they did, all fourteen minutes of it: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Sister Ray"] The album is relentless, dark, and brooding. It's a paranoid, angry, scary album, and one that can partly be explained by the change in the principal band members' drug of choice in the two and a half years since the writing of the first album from heroin -- a drug which pacifies you -- to amphetamine, which puts you on edge and makes you, as their original Warhol show had put it, "uptight". And nowhere could that be seen more than on the title track, which was also the opening track and first single. "White Light/White Heat" is an intense evocation of the amphetamine experience, jittery, hard, and twitchy: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat"] The material on the album was the closest the group ever got to fully expressing the artistic vision that John Cale had for the band, but much like with Chelsea Girl the group, and Cale in particular, were unhappy with the production, again by Tom Wilson. This time, though, it was not because Wilson took charge of the record and changed it, but because he *didn't* take charge. Wilson was, without a doubt, one of the great record producers of the 1960s. And he could at times be one of the most imaginative and innovative -- it was him who had turned Dylan electric, and who had turned Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" from a folk flop to a folk-rock hit. But he was only a creative producer when he needed to be -- when he was working with musicians who didn't know what they wanted, who needed their ideas shaped. Wilson had come up in jazz, producing records for Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and others, and in those situations the job of the producer was much the same one that Andy Warhol had performed on the Velvets' first sessions -- to get out of the way, and to stop anyone else getting *in* the way, and let the artists take control. This was what Wilson did, for example, on the early Mothers of Invention albums. Frank Zappa knew what he was doing, and Wilson's job was to let Zappa do it and shield him from record company nonsense. For White Light/White Heat, Wilson was working with an accomplished engineer, Gary Kellgren, and with musicians he respected, who he'd worked with before, and who he knew had a very clear idea of what they wanted.  Lou Reed had been a staffer at Pickwick -- he knew his way around a studio. John Cale was one of the most highly trained and experienced musicians in the world, not just in rock music. Both those men knew what they were doing, so Wilson stayed out of their way. They didn't have much of a budget, because their first album had been very expensive and sold poorly. They only had a few days' time in the studio, not enough time to do anything fancy, so the best thing to do was let them get on with it. The problem was that they were used to playing *loud* and wanted the record to sound like they did when they played live, and they insisted on playing at the same volume in the studio that they did on stage, to replicate that sound. Gary Kellgren tried to explain to them that the volumes they were playing at simply couldn't be recorded accurately by the equipment in the studio -- it was overloading and distorting. But they didn't take that in properly -- wasn't distortion what they wanted, anyway? But when they listened back to the finished record, they realised what Kellgren had been saying. The record sounded flat and overdistorted, and not like they wanted it to at all: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Sister Ray"] The group were all unhappy with the finished production, but three of the members were particularly unhappy with the mix on one song, "I Heard Her Call My Name": [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "I Heard Her Call My Name"] The problem with that track, according to Cale, Tucker, and Morrison, was that Reed had gone behind their backs and remixed it, boosting his own vocal. Morrison went so far as to briefly quit the group when he discovered what had been done, which he thought ruined one of the group's best songs. It's likely that Reed was encouraged in this by the group's new manager, Steve Sesnick, who John Cale described as "a real snake". Cale said of this period "Lou was calling us ‘his band’ while Sesnick was trying to get him to go solo. Maybe it was the drugs he was doing at the time. They certainly didn’t help. Basically, Sesnick just became an apologist for Lou. He was just a yes-man, and he came between us. It was maddening, just maddening. Before, it had always been easy to talk to Lou. Now you had to go through Sesnick, who seemed pretty practiced in the art of miscommunication. We  should have been able to sort out our own problems. He should never have been brought in. Things had been bad between us for a while, but when Sesnick arrived, they got worse." Despite these problems though, the production on White Light/White Heat has since been praised as an early example of lo-fi recording, and the Velvet Underground's mistake has since been intentionally embraced by generations of garage bands -- something which, if nothing else, must have had some appeal for Cale, as a big part of the avant-garde tradition he came out of comes from John Cage's understanding of Zen, which says there is no such thing as a mistake: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat"] The album came out in early 1968, preceded by the title track, released as a single. Neither was a success, and 1968 was a tough year for the Velvet Underground in many ways. Shortly after the release of the album, Tom Wilson left MGM, meaning they no longer had an advocate with the label. Then in June, Andy Warhol was attacked by Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist writer and author of the SCUM Manifesto -- SCUM standing for Society for Cutting Up Men. This manifesto argued for the replacement of the capitalist wage-work system with what the kids today would call Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but also argued that all men are inherently genetically inferior and need to be eliminated for the good of womankind. Solanas was also convinced that Warhol -- to whom she had given a copy of a script she had written, which he had misplaced -- was in a conspiracy to steal her ideas, and shot him. He was actually pronounced dead, but was later revived, though he had severe organ damage, had to wear a surgical truss for the rest of his life, and some have argued that the health problems that eventually led to his death nineteen years later could be traced back to, or at least were exacerbated by, the shooting. Reed was at first afraid to even phone Warhol in hospital, given how strained their relationship was, but the two soon found themselves gossiping as if nothing had happened. Reed later talked about wanting to execute Solanas for what she'd done, and it also affected his attitudes to his own work. He said  “I had to learn certain things the hard way. But one of those things I learned was work is the whole story. Work is literally everything. Most very big people seem to have enemies, and seem to be getting shot, which is something a lot of people should keep in mind. There is a lot to be said for not being in the limelight.” But the group struggled on, and went back into the studio, first recording a relatively light poppy song, "Temptation Inside Her Heart", and then the more avant-garde "Hey Mr. Rain", on which Reed's lighthearted melody and Cale's modal viola seem almost to be part of different records: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Hey Mr. Rain"] That was left unreleased, and would be the last song Cale would record as a member of the band. Ever since Sesnick had become the group's manager, he had been working at the existing tensions between Reed and Cale's views of the band. Sesnick had been convinced that the Velvet Underground could be the next Beatles -- and he had even worked on Brian Epstein to try to get Epstein involved with their career, before Epstein's death. But he didn't believe that anything like that could happen while John Cale was in the band. While all the band members made invaluable creative contributions to the records, the core of what made the band so exciting for listeners at the time was the way that Reed would write commercial, hooky, melodies and riffs -- albeit with transgressive lyrics -- but then Cale would twist those melodies in the arrangement, adding incongruous elements that made them sound different from any other band. But in Sesnick's view, it would be even better if they *just* had the commercial, hooky, melodies and riffs. And he was starting to win Reed round. Reed, of course, had a longstanding relationship with Cale, and had always been eager to incorporate his ideas. But also, it's very hard for even the least egotistical of people -- something nobody has ever accused Reed of being -- to resist being told that they're a genius and that everyone else is hanging on to their coat tails. It's even harder when you're struggling financially and someone points out that your ideas are the kind that will make money, while your collaborator's ideas are the kind that lose money. Why not... just be the boss? Why shouldn't Reed just do things his way without Cale? This was a persuasive argument, and Sesnick needled at Reed for months, exploiting every tiny interpersonal conflict. Eventually, Reed gave an ultimatum to Morrison and Tucker -- either Cale went or he would. Morrison was given the task of delivering the news of his dismissal to Cale, and never truly forgave Reed, who had previously been his closest friend in the group. Cale's last show with the group was in September 1968, and that month he also started work on another project -- Danny Fields was by now managing Nico, and she was about to record her second solo album, her first made up of her own songs which she'd started writing after Leonard Cohen had given her a harmonium. Fields asked Cale to act as arranger and de facto producer on the album (Frazer Mohawk, the credited producer, has said that he spent most of the sessions using heroin and not paying attention). The album, The Marble Index, has been described as the first Goth record, and as the precursor to the experimental music Scott Walker would later do: [Excerpt: Nico, "Facing the Wind"] According to Cale, “When we finished it, I grabbed Lou and said, ‘Listen to this: this is what we could have done!’ He was speechless.” Cale and Nico more or less leave the episode here, but they'll be back in future episodes. Meanwhile, the Velvet Underground had a new bass player, Doug Yule. Yule was a very good musician, but a far more conventional one than Cale -- he played melodically, and he also sang melodically, having a sweet voice. He was somewhat younger than the rest of the band, and looked up to Reed, and started copying his mannerisms -- though Tucker always thought that Reed had little time for Yule as a person outside of work. The next album, just titled The Velvet Underground, isn't completely free of the band's more challenging side -- very few people will have thought of the nine-minute-long track "The Murder Mystery" as a hummable piece of bubblegum pop, for example: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "The Murder Mystery"] But on the whole it was much... *prettier* than the previous album. The album opens with "Candy Says", a song about Candy Darling, a trans woman who was one of Warhol's superstars. Yule sings it gently, and Reed called it "probably the best song I’ve written": [Excerpt, The Velvet Underground, "Candy Says"] That would actually be the last song Reed would sing in public, in a performance in 2013, when he knew he was dying, performing with the Johnsons, whose singer, Anohni, came out publicly as trans herself shortly afterwards. The album is, for the most part, gently melodic, and contains some of the band's most-loved songs. "Jesus" shows that Cale wasn't the only one in the band to be influenced by the Everly Brothers' harmonies: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Jesus"] "Pale Blue Eyes" is actually a song that Reed had demoed in 1965, and it's quite astonishing that what became one of the group's most loved and most covered songs had been left off their first two albums: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Pale Blue Eyes"] And "After Hours" features a rare lead vocal by Tucker, as Reed thought the song was too innocent and pure for his voice: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "After Hours"] Sadly, no matter how commercial they had tried to make the record, it did even worse than its predecessor on the charts, even though it was released on the main MGM label rather than the Verve subsidiary. And once again there was a mixing issue. The band were all credited as co-producers on the album, but Reed supervised the final mix himself, and did the same thing that he'd done on "I Heard Her Call My Name", pushing his own vocals up in the mix and moving the other musicians back. Sterling Morrison said the result sounded like it was mixed in a closet. The album was pulled and replaced with another mix, approved of by the other members, which has become the standard version of the album -- though Reed's version, labelled the "closet mix", has been included as a bonus on some expanded reissues of it. Morrison was by this point utterly sick of Lou Reed -- between his shenanigans with the mixes and him getting Morrison to do his dirty work, Morrison had no time for him at all any more, and would barely speak to him for the rest of the group's career. With the failure of The Velvet Underground, the group decided they needed a new record label. This was especially true since MGM had just taken on a new CEO, Mike Curb, who was obsessed with the bottom line, and who was also shortly to be given an award by President Nixon for his work in cleaning up music and getting rid of drug-influenced lyrics. They started looking for another label, but they still owed MGM fourteen tracks, so shortly after the release of The Velvet Underground, they went back into the studio, with a returning Gary Kellgren, and cut an album that they already knew was likely not to be released. It says something about the group that this album, the tracks from which didn't come out until the 1980s, is still a solid record with several tracks that are now regarded as classics. "Lisa Says" was one of several songs from the album that Reed would later reuse for his first solo album: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Lisa Says"] While "I'm Sticking With You", another song with a Moe Tucker lead vocal, would be used as a basis for an entire career by about a million twee indie-pop bands in the nineties and early 2000s: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "I'm Sticking With You"] The album wasn't released, as they knew it wouldn't be, and the group moved on to Atlantic Records. But by this point, Sesnick had been up to his tricks again. Doug Yule had quickly become a hugely popular member of the band -- he had a pleasant voice, he was good-looking, and unlike the other members he would do the traditional rock musician act on stage. And he'd also idolised Reed so much that he'd picked up a lot of Reed's mannerisms and attitudes, including his desire to be in charge. Sesnick started to wonder if the Velvet Underground really *needed* Lou Reed. Reed was a difficult man to work with, and Yule was far more pliable. Sesnick started to manipulate Yule in exactly the same way he'd previously manipulated Reed, talking about how he was the star and should be the leader. Yule was in an even better position when it came to recording the next album, Loaded. Tucker had got pregnant, and couldn't physically reach the drums in her normal position because her belly was in the way. She had to take maternity leave, and in her place came Doug's brother Billy, who drummed with the band for six dollars a day -- though several other people also provided drum tracks for the album, none of whom could replicate Moe Tucker's sound. Sterling Morrison *was* on the album, but by this point he was also a part-time student, and for large parts of the album left Reed and Yule to get on with it. The result is arguably the closest thing the group ever did to a commercial record. "Rock and Roll" shows that there's less distinction between the Velvets and Bruce Springsteen than fans of either might want to admit: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Rock and Roll"] "Who Loves the Sun", with Doug Yule on lead, showed that Reed hadn't forgotten the songwriting lessons he'd internalised when he was making Beach Boys knockoffs years earlier: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Who Loves the Sun"] And "Sweet Jane" became one of the group's most covered songs: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "Sweet jane"] The album was meant to be a fresh start for the group, but by the time they finished recording it, Reed was out of the band. Reed said later "There were a lot of things going on that summer. Internally, within the band, the situation, the milieu, and especially the management. Situations that could only be solved by as abrupt a departure as possible once I had made the decision. I just walked out because we didn’t have any money, I didn’t want to tour again—I can’t get any writing done on tour, and the grind is terrible—and I’d wondered for a long time if we were ever going to be accepted on a large scale. Words can’t do justice to the way I got worked over with the money." The group were playing again in New York. They had a residency at Max's Kansas City, Andy Warhol's favourite nightclub, during the recording of Loaded. Brigid Polk, one of Warhol's "superstars", happened by pure coincidence to record the night of Reed's last gig: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light/White Heat (live)"] Even more coincidentally, Moe Tucker had decided to turn up to watch her bandmates perform. Reed hadn't told any of the band members that he was quitting, and she was the first he told. The others only found out when Reed's parents came to pick him up -- they were taking him back home to Long Island. When Loaded came out, Reed found that Yule had done what the other band members had always been upset at Reed for doing -- he'd radically remixed and edited several of Reed's songs, without telling him. The group struggled on without Reed for a while -- Moe did rejoin the group after her maternity leave. But first Morrison left the group, and then Sesnick fired everyone except Doug Yule. The final Velvet Underground album, Squeeze, which came out in 1973 is a Doug Yule solo album, with Yule playing everything except the drums, which are played by Ian Paice of Deep Purple, and a little bit of saxophone: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "She'll Make You Cry"] Doug Yule hated the final mix of the album, which was done by Steve Sesnick, who ignored his input. There's one final anecdote about the group that's worth telling though. I'm going to quote an English fan here, talking about a gig he attended: "I was singing along with the band, stuck right there at the apron of the stage. 'Waiting For The Man', 'White Light/ White Heat', 'Heroin'...All that kind of stuff. And then after the show, I went back stage and I knocked on the door, and I said "Is Lou Reed in? I'd love to talk to him, I'm from England, cos I'm in music too, and he's a bit of a hero to me." This guy said "Wait here". And Lou comes out and we sat talking on the bench for about quarter of an hour about writing songs, and what it?s like to be Lou Reed, and all that...and afterwards I was floating on a cloud, and went back to my hotel room. "I said to this guy that I knew in New York: "I've just seen the Velvet Underground and I got to talk with Lou Reed for fifteen minutes", and he said, "Yeah? Lou Reed left the band last year, I think you've been done." I said, "It looked like Lou Reed" and he said "That's Doug Yule, he's the guy that took over from Lou Reed." I thought what an impostor, wow, that's incredible. It doesn't matter really, cos I still talked to Lou Reed as far as I was concerned. " David Bowie, who told that anecdote, was inspired by the idea that a fake rocker could be a real one. That was the missing piece he needed to go with his thoughts about Vince Taylor and a rock and roll messiah. Soon after that meeting, he created Ziggy Stardust. ... Read more

03 Apr 2023

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03 Apr 2023


#207

Episode 163: “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay", Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on ["Soul Man" by Sam and Dave] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/79253988) . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust) and [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Redding, even if I split into multiple parts. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Redding was [Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky] (https://amzn.to/3Y5EafE) . Ribowsky is usually a very good, reliable, writer, but in this case there are a couple of lapses in editing which make it not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, but the research on the biographical details of Redding seems to be the best. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: [Soulsville USA: The Story of Staxby Rob Bowman] (https://amzn.to/3nPGLZp) , and [Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosionby Robert Gordon] (https://amzn.to/3ftoePF) . [Country Soulby Charles L Hughes] (https://amzn.to/3lul5BR) is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. There are twoOriginal Album Series box sets which between them contain all the albums Redding released in his life plus his first few posthumous albums, for a low price. [Volume 1] (https://amzn.to/3md2MG8) , [volume 2] (https://amzn.to/3Z01fS6) . Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of [my backers on Patreon] (http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey) . Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I begin -- this episode ends with a description of a plane crash, which some people may find upsetting. There's also a mention of gun violence. In 2019 the film Summer of Soul came out. If you're unfamiliar with this film, it's a documentary of an event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, which gets called the "Black Woodstock" because it took place in the summer of 1969, overlapping the weekend that Woodstock happened. That event was a series of weekend free concerts in New York, performed by many of the greatest acts in Black music at that time -- people like Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and the Fifth Dimension. One thing that that film did was to throw into sharp relief a lot of the performances we've seen over the years by legends of white rock music of the same time. If you watch the film of Woodstock, or the earlier Monterey Pop festival, it's apparent that a lot of the musicians are quite sloppy. This is easy to dismiss as being a product of the situation -- they're playing outdoor venues, with no opportunity to soundcheck, using primitive PA systems, and often without monitors. Anyone would sound a bit sloppy in that situation, right? That is until you listen to the performances on the Summer of Soul soundtrack. The performers on those shows are playing in the same kind of circumstances, and in the case of Woodstock literally at the same time, so it's a fair comparison, and there really is no comparison. Whatever you think of the quality of the *music* (and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock), the *musicianship* is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (live)”] And of course there's a reason for this. Most of the people who played at those big hippie festivals had not had the same experiences as the Black musicians. The Black players were mostly veterans of the chitlin' circuit, where you had to play multiple shows a day, in front of demanding crowds who wanted their money's worth, and who wanted you to be able to play and also put on a show at the same time. When you're playing for crowds of working people who have spent a significant proportion of their money to go to the show, and on a bill with a dozen other acts who are competing for that audience's attention, you are going to get good or stop working. The guitar bands at Woodstock and Monterey, though, hadn't had the same kind of pressure. Their audiences were much more forgiving, much more willing to go with the musicians, view themselves as part of a community with them. And they had to play far fewer shows than the chitlin' circuit veterans, so they simply didn't develop the same chops before becoming famous (the best of them did after fame, of course). And so it's no surprise that while a lot of bands became more famous as a result of the Monterey Pop Festival, only three really became breakout stars in America as a direct result of it. One of those was the Who, who were already the third or fourth biggest band in the UK by that point, either just behind or just ahead of the Kinks, and so the surprise is more that it took them that long to become big in America. But the other two were themselves veterans of the chitlin' circuit. If you buy the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Monterey Pop, you get two extra discs along with the disc with the film of the full festival on it -- the only two performances that were thought worth turning into their own short mini-films. One of them is Jimi Hendrix's performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode. The other is titled Shake! Otis at Monterey: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Shake! (live at Monterey Pop Festival)"] Otis Redding came from Macon, Georgia, the home town of Little Richard, who became one of his biggest early influences, and like Richard he was torn in his early years between religion and secular music -- though in most other ways he was very different from Richard, and in particular he came from a much more supportive family. While his father, Otis senior, was a deacon in the church, and didn't approve much of blues, R&B, or jazz music or listen to it himself, he didn't prevent his son from listening to it, so young Otis grew up listening to records by Richard -- of whom he later said "If it hadn't been for Little Richard I would not be here... Richard has soul too. My present music has a lot of him in it" -- and another favourite, Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Indeed, it's unclear exactly how much Otis senior *did* disapprove of those supposedly-sinful kinds of music. The biography I used as a source for this, and which says that Otis senior wouldn't listen to blues or jazz music at all, also quotes his son as saying that when he was a child his mother and father used to play him "a calypso song out then called 'Run Joe'" That will of course be this one: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Run Joe"] I find it hard to reconcile the idea of someone who refused to listen to the blues or jazz listening to Louis Jordan, but then people are complex. Whatever Otis senior's feelings about secular music, he recognised from a very early age that his son had a special talent, and encouraged him to become a gospel singer. And at the same time he was listening to Little Richard, young Otis was also listening to gospel singers. One particular influence was a blind street singer, Reverend Pearly Brown: [Excerpt: Reverend Pearly Brown, "Ninety Nine and a Half Won't Do"] Redding was someone who cared deeply about his father's opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer, because he started his career with a foot in both camps. What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, his father came down with tuberculosis. Even a few years earlier this would have been a terminal diagnosis, but thankfully by this point antibiotics had been invented, and the deacon eventually recovered. But it did mean that Otis junior had to become the family breadwinner while his father was sick, and so he turned decisively towards the kind of music that could make more money. He'd already started performing secular music. He'd joined a band led by Gladys Williams, who was the first female bandleader in the area. Williams sadly doesn't seem to have recorded anything -- discogs has a listing of a funk single by a Gladys Williams on a tiny label which may or may not be the same person, but in general she avoided recording studios, only wanting to play live -- but she was a very influential figure in Georgia music. According to her former trumpeter Newton Collier, who later went on to play with Redding and others, she trained both Fats Gonder and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the lineup of James Brown's band that made Live at the Apollo, and Collier says that Hamlin's arrangements for that album, and the way the band would segue from one track to another, were all things he'd been taught by Miss Gladys. Redding sang with Gladys Williams for a while, andshe took him under her wing, trained him, and became his de facto first manager. She got him to perform at local talent shows, where he won fifteen weeks in a row, before he got banned from performing to give everyone else a chance. At all of these shows, the song he performed was one that Miss Gladys had rehearsed with him, Little Richard's "Heeby Jeebies": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Heeby Jeebies"] At this time, Redding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two greats of fifties Georgia R&B -- Little Richard and James Brown -- plus some by his other idol Sam Cooke, and those singers would remain his greatest influences throughout his career. After his stint with Williams, Redding went on to join another band, Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, whose guitarist Johnny Jenkins would be a major presence in his life for several years. The Mighty Panthers were soon giving Redding top billing, and advertising gigs as featuring Otis "Rockin' Robin" Redding -- presumably that was another song in his live repertoire. By this time Redding was sounding enough like Little Richard that when Richard's old backing band, The Upsetters, were looking for a new singer after Richard quit rock and roll for the ministry, they took Redding on as their vocalist for a tour. Once that tour had ended, Redding returned home to find that Johnny Jenkins had quit the Mighty Panthers and formed a new band, the Pinetoppers. Redding joined that band, who were managed by a white teenager named Phil Walden, who soon became Redding's personal manager as well. Walden and Redding developed a very strong bond, to the extent that Walden, who was studying at university, spent all his tuition money promoting Redding and almost got kicked out. When Redding found this out, he actually went round to everyone he knew and got loans from everyone until he had enough to pay for Walden's tuition -- much of it paid in coins. They had a strong enough bond that Walden would remain his manager for the rest of Redding's life, and even when Walden had to do two years in the Army in Germany, he managed Redding long-distance, with his brother looking after things at home. But of course, there wasn't much of a music industry in Georgia, and so with Walden's blessing and support, he moved to LA in 1960 to try to become a star. Just before he left, his girlfriend Zelma told him she was pregnant. He assured her that he was only going to be away for a few months, and that he would be back in time for the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia rich and marry her. Her response was "Sure you is". In LA, Redding met up with a local record producer,James "Jimmy Mack" McEachin, who would later go on to become an actor, appearing in several films with Clint Eastwood. McEachin produced a session for Redding at Gold Star studios, with arrangements by Rene Hall and using several of the musicians who later became the Wrecking Crew. "She's All Right", the first single that came from that session, was intended to sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible, and was released under the name of The Shooters, the vocal group who provided the backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Shooters, "She's All Right"] "She's All Right" was released on Trans World, a small label owned by Morris Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts records (and "She's All Right" seems to have been released on both labels). Neither of Bernstein's labels had any great success -- the biggest record they put out was a single by the Hollywood Argyles that came out after they'd stopped having hits -- and they didn't have any connection to the R&B market. Redding and McEachin couldn't find any R&B labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marry Zelma a few days before the birth of their son Dexter. Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the Pinetoppers, and he and Jenkins started trying local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them. Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers put out a single, "Shout Bamalama", a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as "Gamma Lamma" for McEachin, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard: [Excerpt: Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers, "Shout Bamalama"] That single was produced by a local record company owner, Bobby Smith, who signed Redding to a contract which Redding didn't read, but which turned out to be a management contract as well as a record contract. This would later be a problem, as Redding didn't have an actual contract with Phil Walden -- one thing that comes up time and again in stories about music in the Deep South at this time is people operating on handshake deals and presuming good faith on the part of each other. There was a problem with the record which nobody had foreseen though -- Redding was the first Black artist signed to Smith's label, which was called Confederate Records, and its logo was the Southern Cross. Now Smith, by all accounts, was less personally racist than most white men in Georgia at the time, and hadn't intended that as any kind of statement of white supremacy -- he'd just used a popular local symbol, without thinking through the implications. But as the phrase goes, intent isn't magic, and while Smith didn't intend it as racist, rather unsurprisingly Black DJs and record shops didn't see things in the same light. Smith was told by several DJs that they wouldn't play the record while it was on that label, and he started up a new subsidiary label, Orbit, and put the record out on that label. Redding and Smith continued collaborating, and there were plans for Redding to put out a second single on Orbit. That single was going to be "These Arms of Mine", a song Redding had originally given to another Confederate artist, a rockabilly performer called Buddy Leach (who doesn't seem to be the same Buddy Leach as the Democratic politician from Louisiana, or the saxophone player with George Thorogood and the Destroyers). Leach had recorded it as a B-side, with the slightly altered title "These Arms Are Mine". Sadly I can't provide an excerpt of that, as the record is so rare that even websites I've found by rockabilly collectors who are trying to get everything on Confederate Records haven't managed to get hold of copies. Meanwhile, Johnny Jenkins had been recording on another label, Tifco, and had put out a single called "Pinetop": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, "Pinetop"] That record had attracted the attention of Joe Galkin. Galkin was a semi-independent record promoter, who had worked for Atlantic in New York before moving back to his home town of Macon. Galkin had proved himself as a promoter by being responsible for the massive amounts of airplay given to Solomon Burke's "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)"] After that, Jerry Wexler had given Galkin fifty dollars a week and an expense account, and Galkin would drive to all the Black radio stations in the South and pitch Atlantic's records to them. But Galkin also had his own record label, Gerald Records, and when he went to those stations and heard them playing something from a smaller label, he would quickly negotiate with that smaller label, buy the master and the artist's contract, and put the record out on Gerald Records -- and then he would sell the track and the artist on to Atlantic, taking ten percent of the record's future earnings and a finder's fee. This is what happened with Johnny Jenkins' single, which was reissued on Gerald and then on Atlantic. Galkin signed Jenkins to a contract -- another of those contracts which also made him Jenkins' manager, and indeed the manager of the Pinetops. Jenkins' record ended up selling about twenty-five thousand records, but when Galkin saw the Pinetoppers performing live, he realised that Otis Redding was the real star. Since he had a contract with Jenkins, he came to an agreement with Walden, who was still Jenkins' manager as well as Redding's -- Walden would get fifty percent of Jenkins' publishing and they would be co-managers of Jenkins. But Galkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Redding himself. The one person he did tell was Jerry Wexler, who he phoned up and asked for two thousand dollars, explaining that he wanted to record Jenkins' follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered, who sang with Jenkins' band. Wexler agreed -- Atlantic had recently started distributing Stax's records on a handshake deal of much the same kind that Redding had with Walden. As far as everyone else was concerned, though, the session was just for Johnny Jenkins, the known quantity who'd already released a single for Atlantic. Otis Redding, meanwhile, was having to work a lot of odd jobs to feed his rapidly growing family, and one of those jobs was to work as Johnny Jenkins' driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving license. So Galkin suggested that, given that Memphis was quite a long drive, Redding should drive Galkin and Jenkins to Stax, and carry the equipment for them. Bobby Smith, who still thought of himself as Redding's manager, was eager to help his friend's bandmate with his big break (and to help Galkin, in the hope that maybe Atlantic would start distributing Confederate too), and so he lent Redding the company station wagon to drive them to the session.The other Pinetoppers wouldn't be going -- Jenkins was going to be backed by Booker T and the MGs, the normal Stax backing band. Phil Walden, though, had told Redding that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stax, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins' "Spunky": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "Spunky"] Cropper later remembered “During the session, Al Jackson says to me, ‘The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he’s been bugging me to death, wanting me to hear him sing,’ Al said, ‘Would you take some time and get this guy off of my back and listen to him?’ And I said, ‘After the session I’ll try to do it,’ and then I just forgot about it.” What Redding didn't know, though Walden might have, is that Galkin had planned all along to get Redding to record while he was there. Galkin claimed to be Redding's manager, and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Stax who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, that Wexler had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording. Stewart was unimpressed -- Jenkins' session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down, but Galkin offered Stewart a trade -- Galkin, as Redding's manager, would take half of Stax's mechanical royalties for the records (which wouldn't be much) but in turn would give Stewart half the publishing on Redding's songs. That was enough to make Stewart interested, but by this point Booker T. Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the forty minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut. The first track they cut was "Hey Hey Baby", which didn't impress Stewart much -- he simply said that the world didn't need another Little Richard -- and so with time running out they cut another track, the ballad Redding had already given to Buddy Leach. He asked Cropper, who didn't play piano well, to play "church chords", by which he meant triplets, and Cropper said "he started singing ‘These Arms of Mine’ and I know my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn’t believe this guy’s voice": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That was more impressive, though Stewart carefully feigned disinterest. Stewart and Galkin put together a contract which signed Redding to Stax -- though they put the single out on the less-important Volt subsidiary, as they did for much of Redding's subsequent output -- and gave Galkin and Stewart fifty percent each of the publishing rights to Redding's songs. Redding signed it, not even realising he was signing a proper contract rather than just one for a single record, because he was just used to signing whatever bit of paper was put in front of him at the time. This one was slightly different though, because Redding had had his twenty-first birthday since the last time he'd signed a contract, and so Galkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid -- not realising that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother, and so was also legal. Walden also didn't realise that, but *did* realise that Galkin representing himself as Redding's manager to Stax might be a problem, so he quickly got Redding to sign a proper contract, formalising the handshake basis they'd been operating on up to that point. Walden was at this point in the middle of his Army service, but got the signature while he was home on leave. Walden then signed a deal with Galkin, giving Walden half of Galkin's fifty percent cut of Redding's publishing in return for Galkin getting a share of Walden's management proceeds. By this point everyone was on the same page -- Otis Redding was going to be a big star, and he became everyone's prime focus. Johnny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency -- which quickly grew to represent almost every big soul star that wasn't signed to Motown -- but he was regarded as a footnote. His record came out eventually on Volt, almost two years later, but he didn't release another record until 1968. Jenkins did, though, go on to have some influence. In 1970 he was given the opportunity to sing lead on an album backed by Duane Allman and the members of the Muscle Shoals studio band, many of whom went on to form the Allman Brothers Band. That record contained a cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Guilded Splinters" which was later sampled by Beck for "Loser", the Wu-Tang Clan for "Gun Will Go" and Oasis for their hit "Go Let it Out": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of his life for taking the stardom he thought was rightfully his, and would be one of the few people to have anything negative to say about Redding after his early death. When Bobby Smith heard about the release of "These Arms of Mine", he was furious, as his contract with Redding *was* in fact legally valid, and he'd been intending to get Redding to record the song himself. However, he realised that Stax could call on the resources of Atlantic Records, and Joe Galkin also hinted that if he played nice Atlantic might start distributing Confederate, too. Smith signed away all his rights to Redding -- again, thinking that he was only signing away the rights to a single record and song, and not reading the contract closely enough. In this case, Smith only had one working eye, and that wasn't good enough to see clearly -- he had to hold paper right up to his face to read anything on it -- and he simply couldn't read the small print on the contract, and so signed over Otis Redding's management, record contract, and publishing, for a flat seven hundred dollars. Now everything was legally -- if perhaps not ethically -- in the clear. Phil Walden was Otis Redding's manager, Stax was his record label, Joe Galkin got a cut off the top, and Walden, Galkin, and Jim Stewart all shared Redding's publishing. Although, to make it a hit, one more thing had to happen, and one more person had to get a cut of the song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That sound was becoming out of fashion among Black listeners at the time. It was considered passe, and even though the Stax musicians loved the record, Jim Stewart didn't, and put it out not because he believed in Otis Redding, but because he believed in Joe Galkin. As Stewart later said “The Black radio stations were getting out of that Black country sound, we put it out to appease and please Joe.” For the most part DJs ignored the record, despite Galkin pushing it -- it was released in October 1962, that month which we have already pinpointed as the start of the sixties, and came out at the same time as a couple of other Stax releases, and the one they were really pushing was Carla Thomas' "I'll Bring it Home to You", an answer record to Sam Cooke's "Bring it On Home to Me": [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "I'll Bring it Home to You"] "These Arms of Mine" wasn't even released as the A-side -- that was "Hey Hey Baby" -- until John R came along. John R was a Nashville DJ, and in fact he was the reason that Bobby Smith even knew that Redding had signed to Stax. R had heard Buddy Leach's version of the song, and called Smith, who was a friend of his, to tell him that his record had been covered, and that was the first Smith had heard of the matter. But R also called Jim Stewart at Stax, and told him that he was promoting the wrong side, and that if they started promoting "These Arms of Mine", R would play the record on his radio show, which could be heard in twenty-eight states. And, as a gesture of thanks for this suggestion -- and definitely not as payola, which would be very illegal -- Stewart gave R his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top twenty on the R&B charts, and slipped into the lower end of the Hot One Hundred. "These Arms of Mine" was actually recorded at a turning point for Stax as an organisation. By the time it was released, Booker T Jones had left Memphis to go to university in Indiana to study music, with his tuition being paid for by his share of the royalties for "Green Onions", which hit the charts around the same time as Redding's first session: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] Most of Stax's most important sessions were recorded at weekends -- Jim Stewart still had a day job as a bank manager at this point, and he supervised the records that were likely to be hits -- so Jones could often commute back to the studio for session work, and could play sessions during his holidays. The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, often Cropper, who played piano on Redding's next sessions, with Jenkins once again on guitar. As "These Arms of Mine" didn't start to become a hit until March, Redding didn't go into the studio again until June, when he cut the follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs", with the MGs, Jenkins, and the horn section of the Mar-Keys. That made number twenty-seven on the Cashbox R&B chart -- this was in the period when Billboard had stopped having one. The follow-up, "Pain in My Heart", was cut in September and did even better, making number eleven on the Cashbox R&B chart: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Pain in My Heart"] It did well enough in fact that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Pain in My Heart"] Though Redding didn't get the songwriting royalties -- by that point Allen Toussaint had noticed how closely it resembled a song he'd written for Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart": [Excerpt: Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart"] And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Toussaint used. By this point Redding was getting steady work, and becoming a popular live act. He'd put together his own band, and had asked Jenkins to join, but Jenkins didn't want to play second fiddle to him, and refused, and soon stopped being invited to the recording sessions as well. Indeed, Redding was *eager* to get as many of his old friends working with him as he could. For his second and third sessions, as well as bringing Jenkins, he'd brought along a whole gang of musicians from his touring show, and persuaded Stax to put out records by them, too. At those sessions, as well as Redding's singles, they also cut records by his valet (which was the term R&B performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gofer or roadie) Oscar Mack: [Excerpt: Oscar Mack, "Don't Be Afraid of Love"] For Eddie Kirkland, the guitarist in his touring band, who had previously played with John Lee Hooker and whose single was released under the name "Eddie Kirk": [Excerpt: Eddie Kirk, "The Hawg, Part 1"] And Bobby Marchan, a singer and female impersonator from New Orleans who had had some massive hits a few years earlier both on his own and as the singer with Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, but had ended up in Macon without a record deal and been taken under Redding's wing: [Excerpt: Bobby Marchan, "What Can I Do?"] Redding would continue, throughout his life, to be someone who tried to build musical careers for his friends, though none of those singles was successful. The changes in Stax continued. In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stax. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single, but every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon but the equipment was broken. After a couple of weeks of this, Wexler decided something fishy was going on, and sent Tom Dowd, his genius engineer, down to Stax to investigate. Dowd found when he got there that the equipment *was* broken, and had been for weeks, and was a simple fix. When Dowd spoke to Stewart, though, he discovered that they didn't know where to source replacement parts from. Dowd phoned his assistant in New York, and told him to go to the electronics shop and get the parts he needed. Then, as there were no next-day courier services at that time, Dowd's assistant went to the airport, found a flight attendant who was flying to Memphis, and gave her the parts and twenty-five dollars, with a promise of twenty-five more if she gave them to Dowd at the other end. The next morning, Dowd had the equipment fixed, and everyone involved became convinced that Dowd was a miracle worker, especially after he showed Steve Cropper some rudimentary tape-manipulation techniques that Cropper had never encountered before. Dowd had to wait around in Memphis for his flight, so he went to play golf with the musicians for a bit, and then they thought they might as well pop back to the studio and test the equipment out. When they did, Rufus Thomas -- Carla Thomas' father, who had also had a number of hits himself on Stax and Sun -- popped his head round the door to see if the equipment was working now. They told him it was, and he said he had a song if they were up for a spot of recording. They were, and so when Dowd flew back that night, he was able to tell Wexler not only that the next Carla Thomas single would soon be on its way, but that he had the tapes of a big hit single with him right there: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog"] "Walking the Dog" was a sensation. Jim Stewart later said “I remember our first order out of Chicago. I was in New York in Jerry Wexler’s office at the time and Paul Glass, who was our distributor in Chicago, called in an order for sixty-five thousand records. I said to Jerry, ‘Do you mean sixty-five hundred?’ And he said, ‘Hell no, he wants sixty-five thousand.’ That was the first order! He believed in the record so much that we ended up selling about two hundred thousand in Chicago alone.” The record made the top ten on the pop charts, but that wasn't the biggest thing that Dowd had taken away from the session. He came back raving to Wexler about the way they made records in Memphis, and how different it was from the New York way. In New York, there was a strict separation between the people in the control room and the musicians in the studio, the musicians were playing from written charts, and everyone had a job and did just that job. In Memphis, the musicians were making up the arrangements as they went, and everyone was producing or engineering all at the same time. Dowd, as someone with more technical ability than anyone at Stax, and who was also a trained musician who could make musical suggestions, was soon regularly commuting down to Memphis to be part of the production team, and Jerry Wexler was soon going down to record with other Atlantic artists there, as we heard about in the episode on "Midnight Hour". Shortly after Dowd's first visit to Memphis, another key member of the Stax team entered the picture. Right at the end of 1963, Floyd Newman recorded a track called "Frog Stomp", on which he used his own band rather than the MGs and Mar-Keys: [Excerpt: Floyd Newman, "Frog Stomp"] The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stax for some time. He'd started out as a singer, and had made a record, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round", at American Sound, the studio run by the former Stax engineer and musician Chips Moman: [Excerpt: Isaac Hayes, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round"] But that hadn't been a success, and Hayes had continued working a day job at a slaughterhouse -- and would continue doing so for much of the next few years, even after he started working at Stax (it's truly amazing how many of the people involved in Stax were making music as what we would now call a side-hustle). Hayes had become a piano player as a way of getting a little extra money -- he'd been offered a job as a fill-in when someone else had pulled out at the last minute on a gig on New Year's Eve, and took it even though he couldn't actually play piano, and spent his first show desperately vamping with two fingers, and was just lucky the audience was too drunk to care. But he had a remarkable facility for the instrument, and while unlike Booker T Jones he would never gain a great deal of technical knowledge, and was embarrassed for the rest of his life by both his playing ability and his lack of theory knowledge, he was as great as they come at soul, at playing with feel, and at inventing new harmonies on the fly. They still didn't have a musician at Stax that could replace Booker T, who was still off at university, so Isaac Hayes was taken on as a second session keyboard player, to cover for Jones when Jones was in Indiana -- though Hayes himself also had to work his own sessions around his dayjob, so didn't end up playing on "In the Midnight Hour", for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse. The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was an Otis Redding single, either his fourth single for Stax, "Come to Me", or his fifth, "Security": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] "Security" is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding really comes into his own, and started directing the musicians more. There's a distinct difference, in particular, in the interplay between Cropper's guitar, the Mar-Keys' horns, and Redding's voice. Where previously the horns had tended to play mostly pads, just holding chords under Redding's voice, now they were starting to do answering phrases. Jim Stewart always said that the only reason Stax used a horn section at all was because he'd been unable to find a decent group of backing vocalists, and the function the horns played on most of the early Stax recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordanaires had played for Elvis, or the Picks for Buddy Holly, basically doing "oooh" sounds to fatten out the sound, plus the odd sax solo or simple riff. The way Redding used the horns, though, was more like the way Ray Charles used the Raelettes, or the interplay of a doo-wop vocal group, with call and response, interjections, and asides. He also did something in "Security" that would become a hallmark of records made at Stax -- instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] According to Wayne Jackson, the Mar-Keys' trumpeter, Redding was the one who had the idea of doing these horn ensemble sections, and the musicians liked them enough that they continued doing them on all the future sessions, no matter who with. The last Stax single of 1964 took the "Security" sound and refined it, and became the template for every big Stax hit to follow. "Mr. Pitiful" was the first collaboration between Redding and Steve Cropper, and was primarily Cropper's idea. Cropper later remembered“There was a disc jockey here named Moohah. He started calling Otis ‘Mr. Pitiful’ ’cause he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads. So I said, ‘Great idea for a song!’ I got the idea for writing about it in the shower. I was on my way down to pick up Otis. I got down there and I was humming it in the car. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom—we had it. When Jim Stewart walked in we had it all worked up. Two or three cuts later, there it was.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] Cropper would often note later that Redding would never write about himself, but that Cropper would put details of Redding's life and persona into the songs, from "Mr. Pitiful" right up to their final collaboration, in which Cropper came up with lines about leaving home in Georgia. "Mr Pitiful" went to number ten on the R&B chart and peaked at number forty-one on the hot one hundred, and its B-side, "That's How Strong My Love Is", also made the R&B top twenty. Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept a guitar permanently tuned to an open chord so that Redding could use it. Redding couldn't play the guitar, but liked to use one as a songwriting tool. When a guitar is tuned in standard tuning, you have to be able to make chord shapes to play it, because the sound of the open strings is a discord: [demonstrates] But you can tune a guitar so all the strings are the notes of a single chord, so they sound good together even when you don't make a chord shape: [demonstrates open-E tuning] With one of these open tunings, you can play chords with just a single finger barring a fret, and so they're very popular with, for example, slide guitarists who use a metal slide to play, or someone like Dolly Parton who has such long fingernails it's difficult to form chord shapes. Someone like Parton is of course an accomplished player, but open tunings also mean that someone who can't play well can just put their finger down on a fret and have it be a chord, so you can write songs just by running one finger up and down the fretboard: [demonstrates] So Redding could write, and even play acoustic rhythm guitar on some songs, which he did quite a lot in later years, without ever learning how to make chords. Now, there's a downside to this -- which is why standard tuning is still standard. If you tune to an open major chord, you can play major chords easily but minor chords become far more difficult. Handily, that wasn't a problem at Stax, because according to Isaac Hayes, Jim Stewart banned minor chords from being played at Stax. Hayes said“We’d play a chord in a session, and Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to hear that chord.’ Jim’s ears were just tuned into one, four, and five. I mean, just simple changes. He said they were the breadwinners. He didn’t like minor chords. Marvell and I always would try to put that pretty stuff in there. Jim didn’t like that. We’d bump heads about that stuff. Me and Marvell fought all the time that. Booker wanted change as well. As time progressed, I was able to sneak a few in.” Of course, minor chords weren't *completely* banned from Stax, and some did sneak through, but even ballads would often have only major chords -- like Redding's next single, "I've Been Loving You Too Long". That track had its origins with Jerry Butler, the singer who had been lead vocalist of the Impressions before starting a solo career and having success with tracks like "For Your Precious Love": [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "For Your Precious Love"] Redding liked that song, and covered it himself on his second album, and he had become friendly with Butler. Butler had half-written a song, and played it for Redding, who told him he'd like to fiddle with it, see what he could do. Butler forgot about the conversation, until he got a phone call from Redding, telling him that he'd recorded the song. Butler was confused, and also a little upset -- he'd been planning to finish the song himself, and record it. But then Redding played him the track, and Butler decided that doing so would be pointless -- it was Redding's song now: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I've Been Loving You Too Long"] "I've Been Loving You Too Long" became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the R&B chart and twenty-one on the Hot One Hundred. It was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and Ike & Tina Turner, and while Redding was still not really known to the white pop market, he was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on the R&B scene. His record sales were still not matching his live performances -- he would always make far more money from appearances than from records -- but he was by now the performer that every other soul singer wanted to copy. "I've Been Loving You Too Long" came out just after Redding's second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, which happened to be the first album released on Volt Records. Before that, while Stax and Volt had released the singles, they'd licensed all the album tracks to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, which had released the small number of albums put out by Stax artists. But times were changing and the LP market was becoming bigger. And more importantly, the *stereo* LP market was becoming bigger. Singles were still only released in mono, and would be for the next few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo. This was a problem for Stax, because they only had a mono tape recorder, and they were scared of changing anything about their setup in case it destroyed their sound. Tom Dowd, who had been recording in eight track for years, was appalled by the technical limitations at the McLemore Ave studio, but eventually managed to get Jim Stewart, who despite -- or possibly because of -- being a white country musician was the most concerned that they keep their Black soul sound, to agree to a compromise. They would keep everything hooked up exactly the same -- the same primitive mixers, the same mono tape recorder -- and Stax would continue doing their mixes for mono, and all their singles would come directly off that mono tape. But at the same time, they would *also* have a two-track tape recorder plugged in to the mixer, with half the channels going on one track and half on the other. So while they were making the mix, they'd *also* be getting a stereo dump of that mix. The limitations of the situation meant that they might end up with drums and vocals in one channel and everything else in the other -- although as the musicians cut everything together in the studio, which had a lot of natural echo, leakage meant there was a *bit* of everything on every track -- but it would still be stereo. Redding's next album, Otis Blue, was recorded on this new equipment, with Dowd travelling down from New York to operate it. Dowd was so keen on making the album stereo that during that session, they rerecorded Redding's two most recent singles, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "Respect" (which hadn't yet come out but was in the process of being released) in soundalike versions so there would be stereo versions of the songs on the album -- so the stereo and mono versions of Otis Blue actually have different performances of those songs on them. It shows how intense the work rate was at Stax -- and how good they were at their jobs -- that apart from the opening track "Ole Man Trouble", which had already been recorded as a B-side, all of Otis Blue, which is often considered the greatest soul album in history, was recorded in a twenty-eight hour period, and it would have been shorter but there was a four-hour break in the middle, from 10PM to 2AM, so that the musicians on the session could play their regular local club gigs. And then after the album was finished, Otis left the session to perform a gig that evening. Tom Dowd, in particular, was astonished by the way Redding took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians. Dowd called Redding a genius and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd worked with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Darin and Ray Charles. Other than those singles and "Ole Man Trouble", Otis Blue was made up entirely of cover versions. There were three versions of songs by Sam Cooke, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose death had hit Redding hard -- for all that he styled himself on Little Richard vocally, he was also in awe of Cooke as a singer and stage presence. There were also covers of songs by The Temptations, William Bell, and B.B. King. And there was also an odd choice -- Steve Cropper suggested that Redding cut a cover of a song by a white band that was in the charts at the time: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Redding had never heard the song before -- he was not paying attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the R&B charts -- but he was interested in doing it. Cropper sat by the turntable, scribbling down what he thought the lyrics Jagger was singing were, and they cut the track. Redding starts out more or less singing the right words: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] But quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Otis Blue made number one on the R&B album chart, and also made number six on the UK album chart -- Redding, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US. It only made number seventy-five on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as Stax was concerned -- it *stayed* in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the R&B album charts, for a long time. Redding had become what is known as a "catalogue artist", something that was almost unknown in rock and soul music at this time, but which was just starting to appear. Up to 1965, the interlinked genres that we now think of as rock and roll, rock, pop, blues, R&B, and soul, had all operated on the basis that singles were where the money was, and that singles should be treated like periodicals -- they go on the shelves, stay there for a few weeks, get replaced by the new thing, and nobody's interested any more. This had contributed to the explosive rate of change in pop music between about 1954 and 1968. You'd package old singles up into albums, and stick some filler tracks on there as a way of making a tiny bit of money from tracks which weren't good enough to release as singles, but that was just squeezing the last few drops of juice out of the orange, it wasn't really where the money was. The only exceptions were those artists like Ray Charles who crossed over into the jazz and adult pop markets. But in general, your record sales in the first few weeks and months *were* your record sales. But by the mid-sixties, as album sales started to take off more, things started to change. And Otis Redding was one of the first artists to really benefit from that. He wasn't having huge hit singles, and his albums weren't making the pop top forty, but they *kept selling*. Redding wouldn't have an album make the top forty in his lifetime, but they sold consistently, and everything from Otis Blue onward sold two hundred thousand or so copies -- a massive number in the much smaller album market of the time. These sales gave Redding some leverage. His contract with Stax was coming to an end in a few months, and he was getting offers from other companies. As part of his contract renegotiation, he got Jim Stewart -- who like so many people in this story including Redding himself liked to operate on handshake deals and assumptions of good faith on the part of everyone else, and who prided himself on being totally fair and not driving hard bargains -- to rework his publishing deal. Now Redding's music was going to be published by Redwal Music -- named after Redding and Phil Walden -- which was owned as a four-way split between Redding, Walden, Stewart, and Joe Galkin. Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stax's facilities and musicians. He set up his own label, Jotis Records -- a portmanteau of Joe and Otis, for Joe Galkin and himself, and put out records by Arthur Conley: [Excerpt: Arthur Conley, "Who's Fooling Who?"] Loretta Williams [Excerpt: Loretta Williams, "I'm Missing You"] and Billy Young [Excerpt: Billy Young, "The Sloopy"] None of these was a success, but it was another example of how Redding was trying to use his success to boost others. There were other changes going on at Stax as well. The company was becoming more tightly integrated with Atlantic Records -- Tom Dowd had started engineering more sessions, Jerry Wexler was turning up all the time, and they were starting to make records for Atlantic, as we discussed in the episode on "In the Midnight Hour".Atlantic were also loaning Stax Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stax artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "Soul Man"] Redding was not hugely impressed by Sam and Dave, once saying in an interview "When I first heard the Righteous Brothers, I thought they were colored. I think they sing better than Sam and Dave", but they were having more and bigger chart hits than him, though they didn't have the same level of album sales. Also, by now Booker T and the MGs had a new bass player. Donald "Duck" Dunn had always been the "other" bass player at Stax, ever since he'd started with the Mar-Keys, and he'd played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Lewie Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs. But in early 1965, the Stax studio musicians had cut a record originally intending it to be a Mar-Keys record, but decided to put it out as by Booker T and the MGs, even though Booker T wasn't there at the time -- Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Boot-Leg"] Booker T Jones would always have a place at Stax, and would soon be back full time as he finished his degree, but from that point on Duck Dunn, not Lewie Steinberg, was the bass player for the MGs. Another change in 1965 was that Stax got serious about promotion. Up to this point, they'd just relied on Atlantic to promote their records, but obviously Atlantic put more effort into promoting records on which it made all the money than ones it just distributed. But as part of the deal to make records with Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stax on a contractual footing, rather than their previous handshake deal, and they'd agreed to pay half the salary of a publicity person for Stax. Stax brought in Al Bell, who made a huge impression. Bell had been a DJ in Memphis, who had gone off to work with Martin Luther King for a while, before leaving after a year because, as he put it "I was not about passive resistance. I was about economic development, economic empowerment.” He'd returned to DJing, first in Memphis, then in Washington DC, where he'd been one of the biggest boosters of Stax records in the area. While he was in Washington, he'd also started making records himself. He'd produced several singles for Grover Mitchell on Decca: [Excerpt: Grover Mitchell, "Midnight Tears"] Those records were supervised by Milt Gabler, the same Milt Gabler who produced Louis Jordan's records and "Rock Around the Clock", and Bell co-produced them with Eddie Floyd, who wrote that song, and Chester Simmons, formerly of the Moonglows, and the three of them started their own label, Safice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others, on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had: [Excerpt: Eddie Floyd, "Make Up Your Mind"] Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax. As with almost every decision at Stax, the decision to hire Bell was a cause of disagreement between Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, the "Ax" in Stax, who wasn't as involved in the day-to-day studio operations as her brother, but who was often regarded by the musicians as at least as important to the spirit of the label, and who tended to disagree with her brother on pretty much everything. Stewart didn't want to hire Bell, but according to Cropper “Estelle and I said, ‘Hey, we need somebody that can liaison between the disc jockeys and he’s the man to do it. Atlantic’s going into a radio station with six Atlantic records and one Stax record. We’re not getting our due.’ We knew that. We needed more promotion and he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys. He knew E. Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montagues and so on. He knew every one of them.” Many people at Stax will say that the label didn't even really start until Bell joined -- and he became so important to the label that he would eventually take it over from Stewart and Axton. Bell came in every day and immediately started phoning DJs, all day every day, starting in the morning with the drivetime East Coast DJs, and working his way across the US, ending up at midnight phoning the evening DJs in California. Booker T Jones said of him“He had energy like Otis Redding, except he wasn’t a singer. He had the same type of energy. He’d come in the room, pull up his shoulders and that energy would start. He would start talking about the music business or what was going on and he energized everywhere he was. He was our Otis for promotion. It was the same type of energy charisma.” Meanwhile, of course, Redding was constantly releasing singles. Two more singles were released from Otis Blue -- his versions of "My Girl" and "Satisfaction", and he also released "I Can't Turn You Loose", which was originally the B-side to "Just One More Day" but ended up charting higher than its original A-side. It's around this time that Redding did something which seems completely out of character, but which really must be mentioned given that with very few exceptions everyone in his life talks about him as some kind of saint. One of Redding's friends was beaten up, and Redding, the friend, and another friend drove to the assailant's house and started shooting through the windows, starting a gun battle in which Redding got grazed. His friend got convicted of attempted murder, and got two years' probation, while Redding himself didn't face any criminal charges but did get sued by the victims, and settled out of court for a few hundred dollars. By this point Redding was becoming hugely rich from his concert appearances and album sales, but he still hadn't had a top twenty pop hit. He needed to break the white market. And so in April 1966, Redding went to LA, to play the Sunset Strip: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect (live at the Whisky A-Go-Go)"] Redding's performance at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a venue which otherwise hosted bands like the Doors, the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, and Love, was his first real interaction with the white rock scene, part of a process that had started with his recording of "Satisfaction". The three-day residency got rave reviews, though the plans to release a live album of the shows were scuppered when Jim Stewart listened back to the tapes and decided that Redding's horn players were often out of tune. But almost everyone on the LA scene came out to see the shows, and Redding blew them away. According to one biography of Redding I used, it was seeing how Redding tuned his guitar that inspired the guitarist from the support band, the Rising Sons, to start playing in the same tuning -- though I can't believe for a moment that Ry Cooder, one of the greatest slide guitarists of his generation, didn't already know about open tunings. But Redding definitely impressed that band -- Taj Mahal, their lead singer, later said it was "one of the most amazing performances I'd ever seen". Also at the gigs was Bob Dylan, who played Redding a song he'd just recorded but not yet released: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him, and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts at rehearsing it at least, but never ended up recording it. He thought the first verse and chorus were great, but had problems with the second verse: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Those lyrics were just too abstract for him to find a way to connect with them emotionally, and as a result he found himself completely unable to sing them. But like his recording of "Satisfaction", this was another clue to him that he should start paying more attention to what was going on in the white music industry, and that there might be things he could incorporate into his own style. As a result of the LA gigs, Bill Graham booked Redding for the Fillmore in San Francisco. Redding was at first cautious, thinking this might be a step too far, and that he wouldn't go down well with the hippie crowd, but Graham persuaded him, saying that whenever he asked any of the people who the San Francisco crowds most loved -- Jerry Garcia or Paul Butterfield or Mike Bloomfield -- who *they* most wanted to see play there, they all said Otis Redding. Redding reluctantly agreed, but before he took a trip to San Francisco, there was somewhere even further out for him to go. Redding was about to head to England but before he did there was another album to make, and this one would see even more of a push for the white market, though still trying to keep everything soulful. As well as Redding originals, including "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)", another song in the mould of "Mr. Pitiful", there was another cover of a contemporary hit by a guitar band -- this time a version of the Beatles' "Day Tripper" -- and two covers of old standards; the country song "Tennessee Waltz", which had recently been covered by Sam Cooke, and a song made famous by Bing Crosby, "Try a Little Tenderness". That song almost certainly came to mind because it had recently been used in the film Dr. Strangelove, but it had also been covered relatively recently by two soul greats, Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Live Medley: I Love You For Sentimental Reasons/Try a Little Tenderness/You Send Me"] This version had horn parts arranged by Isaac Hayes, who by this point had been elevated to be considered one of the "Big Six" at Stax records -- Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, and Al Jackson, were all given special status at the company, and treated as co-producers on every record -- all the records were now credited as produced by "staff", but it was the Big Six who split the royalties. Hayes came up with a horn part that was inspired by Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", and which dominated the early part of the track: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] Then the band came in, slowly at first: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] But Al Jackson surprised them when they ran through the track by deciding that after the main song had been played, he'd kick the track into double-time, and give Redding a chance to stretch out and do his trademark grunts and "got-ta"s. The single version faded out shortly after that, but the version on the album kept going for an extra thirty seconds: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] As Booker T. Jones said “Al came up with the idea of breaking up the rhythm, and Otis just took that and ran with it. He really got excited once he found out what Al was going to do on the drums. He realized how he could finish the song. That he could start it like a ballad and finish it full of emotion. That’s how a lot of our arrangements would come together. Somebody would come up with something totally outrageous.” And it would have lasted longer but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realising the track was an uncommercial length even as it was. Live, the track could often stretch out to seven minutes or longer, as Redding drove the crowd into a frenzy, and it soon became one of the highlights of his live set, and a signature song for him: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness (live in London)"] In September 1966, Redding went on his first tour outside the US. His records had all done much better in the UK than they had in America, and they were huge favourites of everyone on the Mod scene, and when he arrived in the UK he had a limo sent by Brian Epstein to meet him at the airport. The tour was an odd one, with multiple London shows, shows in a couple of big cities like Manchester and Bristol, and shows in smallish towns in Hampshire and Lincolnshire. Apparently the shows outside London weren't particularly well attended, but the London shows were all packed to overflowing. Redding also got his own episode of Ready! Steady! Go!, on which he performed solo as well as with guest stars Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, Chris Farlowe and Eric Burdon, "Shake/Land of a Thousand Dances"] After the UK tour, he went on a short tour of the Eastern US with Sam and Dave as his support act, and then headed west to the Fillmore for his three day residency there, introducing him to the San Francisco music scene. His first night at the venue was supported by the Grateful Dead, the second by Johnny Talbot and De Thangs and the third by Country Joe and the Fish, but there was no question that it was Otis Redding that everyone was coming to see. Janis Joplin turned up at the Fillmore every day at 3PM, to make sure she could be right at the front for Redding's shows that night, and Bill Graham said, decades later, "By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now." However, after the Fillmore gigs, for the first time ever he started missing shows. The Sentinel, a Black newspaper in LA, reported a few days later"Otis Redding, the rock singer, failed to make many friends here the other day when he was slated to appear on the Christmas Eve show[...] Failed to draw well, and Redding reportedly would not go on." The Sentinel seem to think that Redding was just being a diva, but it's likely that this was the first sign of a problem that would change everything about his career -- he was developing vocal polyps that were making singing painful. It's notable though that the Sentinel refers to Redding as a "rock" singer, and shows again how different genres appeared in the mid-sixties to how they appear today. In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Redding from a few months later -- "Everybody thinks that all songs by colored people are rhythm and blues, but that's not true. Johnny Taylor, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are blues singers.James Brown is not a blues singer. He has a rock and roll beat and he can sing slow pop songs. My own songs "Respect" and "Mr Pitiful" aren't blues songs. I'm speaking in terms of the beat and structure of the music. A blues is a song that goes twelve bars all the way through. Most of my songs are soul songs." So in Redding's eyes, neither he nor James Brown were R&B -- he was soul, which was a different thing from R&B, while Brown was rock and roll and pop, not soul, but journalists thought that Redding was rock. But while the lines between these things were far less distinct than they are today, and Redding was trying to cross over to the white audience, he knew what genre he was in, and celebrated that in a song he wrote with his friend Arthur Conley: [Excerpt: Arthur Conley, "Sweet Soul Music"] Or at least the label credits on that single, which Redding produced for Conley, who he got signed to Atco after Jotis Records closed down, say it was written by Redding and Conley. Some might say that it bears a slight resemblance to Sam Cooke's song, "Yeah": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Yeah"] Certainly J.W. Alexander, Cooke's old friend and music publisher, thought so. Luckily for Redding and Conley, Alexander was a good sport about it, and agreed to a deal in which Redding would give Alexander the publishing, and would keep on cutting covers of Sam Cooke songs on his albums -- hardly a hardship for Redding, who had been doing so regularly anyway. Indeed he did so on his next album, an album of duets with Carla Thomas: [Excerpt: Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, "Bring it On Home to Me"] That album had been suggested by Jim Stewart, who wanted to replicate the success of "It Takes Two" by Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston. which had just become a big hit two years after it was recorded: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston, "It Takes Two"] This was something Stax did a lot -- Al Bell talked about how he'd got friends working for Motown who would tell him what Motown's new releases were going to be, and Bell would try to co-ordinate Stax releases so they'd have something similar come out at the same time, reasoning that people who were in the shop for the Motown record would be more likely to buy a similar Stax release. Redding had plans for several more albums, including one intriguing project he talked about where he'd cut his greatest hits, but with the styles swapped around, so "I Can't Turn You Loose" would be reworked as a slow-burn ballad, while "I've Been Loving You Too Long" would become an uptempo stomper. But first, there was another tour to do. A Stax tour of Europe. When Redding had toured the UK, it had been a revelation for him, and he came back telling tales of a place where the lemonade was syruppy and full of bubbles, and where they loved his music. Quickly another tour was set up, and this time, while some shows were billed as the Otis Redding Show, in fact it was a much bigger event than just Otis. Phil Walden, Jerry Wexler, and the people at Polydor, Atlantic's UK distributor, put together a list of Walden's acts to tour as a package deal, to promote Stax as a brand in Europe the way that Motown had already been promoted. The list was all those acts that Polydor thought most likely to go down well -- which caused some ruffled feathers among those like Rufus Thomas who didn't get invited. The final lineup was Redding, Carla Thomas (though she had to go back to the USA early and miss much of the tour), Sam and Dave, and Eddie Floyd -- plus Booker T and the MGs and the Stax horn section (billed as the Mar-Keys) backing everyone, and the non-Stax act Arthur Conley, included because he'd just had a big hit and was a friend of Redding's and managed by Walden. The tour started with an invite-only show at the Bag O'Nails club in London, and while Carla Thomas regretted having to go home after only a few shows, she would always remember seeing Paul McCartney watch her as she performed his song "Yesterday": [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "Yesterday (Live in London)"] While most of the singers had toured widely, the musicians were studio musicians first and foremost, and the horn players, unlike the MGs, weren't even salaried studio players -- they actually worried if they could go at all, because they had to ask for time off at a regular gig they played, and were told "you can go, but don't come back", and lost $15 a week each. There was also the problem that, as Wayne Jackson put it, “Everybody assumed that Booker T. and the MG’s had played on the records, the Mar-Keys had played on the records, and we knew the stuff—wrong! You use slate memory when you’re doing records. You remember something for three minutes over and over and when you start the next song, you erase that. We didn’t play those numbers all the time. We had to try to learn a bunch of them, we had to hustle real hard. We had to rehearse the day we got there with no sleep and hung over, of course. It was like a ship constantly on the verge of going out of control.” They also, amusingly, tried to rehearse a version of "Winchester Cathedral" for the UK audience, but gave up when Redding kept singing "Westchester", and never ended up performing it. The tour went beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, and everyone remembers it as a contest between Redding and Sam and Dave as to who could put on the most dynamic show, with most giving the slightest edge to Sam and Dave: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "Hold On, I'm Comin' (Live in London)"] But the tour did something else, too. It showed the musicians they were important. As Steve Cropper later said “It was totally a mind-blower. Hell, we were just in Memphis cutting records; we didn’t know. Then we got over there, there were hordes of people waiting at the airport, autograph hounds and all that sort of stuff. … That was something that happened to Elvis or Ricky Nelson, but it didn’t happen to the Stax-Volt band.” Wayne Jackson said "We didn’t know we were stars. We thought we were kids working at the club to make enough money to pay the rent and making records just getting by. We found out there was a big world out there and that we were a big part of that world. We weren’t just playing horns in a nightclub and putting horn parts on other people’s records for a fee. We had had an impact." This led to immediate changes. Cropper and Al Bell, who was along as the MC, had a massive row on the tour over what Bell saw as Cropper's ego and Crooper saw as someone who'd been with the company five minutes trying to take over, and both nearly quit. At the end of the tour, Bell got promoted to executive vice president, but where before the production credits had been to "staff", now they would go solely to the musician who did most to produce the record -- which a lot of the time would be Cropper. And there was more to do on the production side, because by now Tom Dowd had managed to persuade them to upgrade to an actual four-track machine. Meanwhile, the Mar-Keys horn section had realised that *they* should be getting a salary just like the MGs -- they were stars too, after all. One of them, Joe Arnold, quit working for Stax, so the others were quickly put on a salary. As a result of the tour, Redding got voted the top international male vocalist in the Melody Maker poll in September that year, knocking Elvis off the top spot for the first time in a decade. With typical humility, Redding said that Wilson Pickett should have won. After Europe, the next thing was Monterey. Redding had broken his own band up, as he was planning on getting off the road soon -- he needed to deal with his vocal polyps, which were getting worse -- so for Monterey, he was once again backed by Booker T and the MGs, and the Mar-Keys. He followed Jefferson Airplane, and Jerry Wexler, having seen their performance with a psychedelic light show, was convinced that Redding, in his natty green chitlin' circuit style suit, would go down like a lead balloon. On the other hand, Janis Joplin was busily going round telling everyone she could that they needed to watch Redding, because "Otis Redding is God". The crowds agreed with Janis: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Shake! Live at Monterey"] After that, he did a short tour of California. On that tour he was backed by a new band, the Bar-Kays, named in imitation of the Mar-Keys, who had been signed to Stax recently and had had a hit with "Soul Finger": [Excerpt: The Bar-Kays, "Soul Finger"] The Bar-Kays were all teenagers, and were being groomed as the next Booker T and the MGs or Mar-Keys, studio players who could have their own hits. Redding got on well with them, and decided that when he resumed touring in December, he'd have them as his full-time backing band. But for now, as he finished up the short tour of California in San Francisco, he was looking forward to getting off the road. He had an operation booked to deal with his polyps, and was nervous about what that might do to his voice, but he also wanted to relax. While he was in San Francisco, he had to leave the hotel he was staying in, because he was getting mobbed by fans, and he ended up staying on a houseboat owned by Bill Graham. While he was there, he and his road manager Speedo Sims would sit and watch the boats in the dock, and Redding started working on a song about it. It wasn't like anything else he'd ever worked on. For the last few months he'd been absorbing the new psychedelic rock -- he would spend the summer listening obsessively to Sgt Pepper and Revolver, and of course he'd just been at the centre of the new movement and seen the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the rest. He'd also been impressed by Bob Dylan, even though he did find some of Dylan's lyrics a little abstract, and Al Bell had suggested he should do an album of folk songs. Maybe he would... this song sounded a bit folky. But it was different. Speedo Sims said"I couldn't quite follow it. We must have been out there three or four days before... I could get any concept of where he was going with the song... He was changing with the times is what was happening." Similarly, when he got home and played what he had to his wife, she didn't like it, and said"Oh God, you're changing", to which his response was "Yeah, I think it's time for me to change my music. People might be tired of me." That wasn't the only reason he had to change. After his polyp surgery, he wasn't allowed even to talk for two months, but he kept writing new material, and by the time he could get back into the studio again in late November, he was bursting with songs. He spent three weeks recording, in a creative explosion, songs like "Happy Song (Dum Dum)", a self-mocking reworking of his old "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Happy Song (Dum Dum)"] But he had to sing differently -- he had to develop a whole new style of singing. He couldn't rely any more on yelling and grunting and "Got-ta got-ta got-ta", as effective as those were. His vocal cords were simply too delicate. He had to sing gently. But his new style worked. Redding had about thirty new songs he wanted to record in those three weeks, and not only that, he wanted to redo some of his old stuff. According to Cropper"There was only one reason and that was because he had his throat operated on. He was singing better than he ever had in his life, it was just obvious. So we went back and listened to the things that had been cut on four-track. Things that he didn’t sound all that good on, we recut them; things that probably would never have come out. Some of them were over a year old.” Many of these tracks weren't initially recorded by the full band. Redding was doing so much recording, and cutting so many tracks, that a lot of the time it would come down to a group they called the Midnight Recorders -- Redding on acoustic rhythm guitar, Cropper on lead, and Ronnie Capone on drums. Capone wasn't even a drummer, he was a trainee engineer at Stax, but he was willing to stay up all night drinking whisky with Cropper and Redding and playing a basic beat while they recorded, and Carl Cunningham of the Bar-Kays would later overdub drum fills, a possibility now they had actual multitracking. What happened next has been so mythologised that every single aspect of the rest of this story comes in about four different versions, happening in a different order and with different events depending on who you ask. This version of the story seems to be the one that fits the facts best, but everything in it might be wrong in its details. Redding was on his way to the airport to start a tour, and for the first time he was going to be travelling by private plane, something he'd been bragging about for a while. He'd actually bought his own plane -- not yet a Lear jet like James Brown, but a small eight-seater plane -- and he'd been taking flying lessons, though he had hired a pilot for the tour. He got to the airport, remembered he had one more song to cut, and phoned Steve Cropper from the airport, saying "I've got a smash!" He turned round, got back to the studio, and played Cropper the one verse he had: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay (take one)"] Cropper argued with him about the lyrics, saying that boats don't roll, and if they did they'd sink. But Redding insisted that those were the lyrics he wanted. Cropper said OK, and then worked with him on a second verse, which as Cropper so often did involved elements of Redding's actual life, going from Georgia to the San Francisco Bay. Cropper also came up with the middle eight, and here he took inspiration from an unusual source, one of the other acts who'd performed at Monterey. The Association are often derided now, as they were a bit too soft-pop for modern tastes, but Cropper was impressed by how many ideas their records had, and in particular their recent hit "Windy", written by Ruthann Friedman. He didn't steal anything directly from the record, but there's a definite resemblance between the bridges of "Windy": [Excerpt: The Association, "Windy"] and "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay"] It was recorded, with the full complement of MGs and Mar-Keys there, and at the end of the track, Cropper did what he usually did, and left a long instrumental section for Redding to vamp on. But this time, instead of his got-ta-got-ta vamping, he did something very different and whistled: [Excerpt: OtisRedding, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay"] Cropper got to work overdubbing the track. He added lead guitar, some of his most tasteful playing, and was pleased with the results, though opinion was split in Stax. Al Bell wasn't sure if the track was commercial, and Duck Dunn was hesitant, saying "It had no R&B whatsoever" and "It didn't impress me. I thought it might even be detrimental." Steve Cropper, on the other hand, was sure it was a smash, and Booker T called it "a mother". Redding was convinced it was going to be his first million-seller, though he thought the tape was still missing something when he went off on tour. It was only after he left that Cropper had the perfect idea. He remembered that on the early takes, Redding had joked around making seagull noises at the beginning of the song -- and it's interesting to think given how much he was listening to the Beatles that Redding might have had the sound effects on "Tomorrow Never Knows" in mind when he did that. Cropper went to a nearby ad agency and borrowed a couple of tapes from their sound effects library, waves and seagulls, and overdubbed them on to parts of the track: [Excerpt: OtisRedding, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay"] But as Cropper said later, "Otis never heard the waves, he never heard the seagulls, and he never heard the guitar fills that I did". Indeed, some versions of the story have Cropper not even adding them while Redding was still alive. Because three days after recording the track, on the tenth of December, 1967, precisely three years after the death of his idol, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding got on a plane from Cleveland, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin. Just like Buddy Holly, though for very different reasons, he was making a late-night flight in an upper-Midwestern winter, and just like with Holly there were two more people travelling than there was room for on the plane. For every tour stop, two members of the touring party would have to fly commercial rather than go on Redding's plane, and this time it was James Alexander, the bass player with the Bar-Kays, and Carl Simms, the backing vocalist. The other five members of the Bar-Kays, plus Redding, the pilot, and Redding's valet, were all on the plane when, just after radioing asking for permission to land in Madison, it crashed into Lake Monona, four miles from its destination. The only survivor of the crash was the trumpet player, Ben Cauley. Cauley had fallen asleep on the plane, clutching his seat cushion, which would work as a floatation device, and with his seatbelt unbuckled. He only woke up when he heardPhalon Jones, the sax player for the group, say "Oh no" -- the last words the nineteen-year-old would ever say. Cauley's story varied over the years, understandably given how traumatic the event was, but it seems that he was flung away from the crash, still clutching his seat cushion, and was saved because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. The cushion kept him afloat even though he couldn't swim. Everyone else in the plane was trapped in the ice-cold water, and died. Otis Redding was twenty-six. The four members of the Bar-Kays who died were eighteen and nineteen. "(Sittin on) The Dock of the Bay" became the obvious song to release after Redding's death. Jerry Wexler wanted Steve Cropper to remix it, thinking the vocals weren't loud enough, but Cropper couldn't face touching the track again so soon after his friend's death. The track nearly didn't come out, but then Cropper remembered that what he'd sent Wexler was the stereo tape, with Redding's voice just in one channel. If he sent him the mono mix, Redding's voice would sound louder. He did, Wexler was happy, and the record came out, and became the first posthumous number one record ever in America: [Excerpt: OtisRedding, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay"] The second would come sooner than anyone hoped, and would be by Janis Joplin, the woman who had been such a fan of Redding. "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" marked the end of the first phase of Stax in many ways. Not only had Otis Redding been the face and voice of Stax, and the one person everyone looked up to, but just after it was released, it was announced that Atlantic had been sold to Warner Brothers. Stax's agreement with Atlantic said that if Atlantic was ever sold, they had the ability to walk away from Atlantic, and they chose to do so. And it was only then that Jim Stewart found out that the contract he'd signed, which he thought formalised their handshake agreement, actually said"You hereby sell, assign and transfer to us, our successors or assigns, absolutely and forever and without any limitations or restrictions whatever, not specifically set forth herein, the entire right, title and interest in and to each of such masters and to each of the performances embodied thereon." He'd sold all the rights to every record Stax had made up to that moment for a dollar. Otis Redding was dead, Sam and Dave were signed to Atlantic, not to Stax, and it turned out that for nearly three years they'd all been living a lie. They'd thought they were working for themselves, for a company which gave its musicians shares of the profits, for one big family. Now the favourite son of the family had died young, and it turned out they'd sold the family silver for a dollar to a massive corporation. While Jerry Wexler always claimed that he'd known nothing of that clause, and it was inserted by lawyers, according to Al Bell, Wexler did it deliberately, and had wanted to take over Stax, but now that Otis Redding was dead he just wanted to leave them to rot. Otis Redding Sr, the father who Otis had loved and respected so much, never recovered from his son's death. He lived to see "Dock of the Bay" at the top of the charts, but soon after it left the top spot, he died himself of a heart attack. There's one final coda, in the words of Steve Cropper, "Years later, I was in Sausalito on tour and found myself at a place by the bay having a hamburger. I was watching the water when my eye caught something. The ferries crossing from San Francisco turned a little as they came in, to slow themselves down. The move created a rolling wave to cushion their arrival at the pier. That's when it hit me. Otis had been watching the ferries roll in" [Excerpt: OtisRedding, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" whistling fade into tag] ... Read more

27 Feb 2023

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27 Feb 2023


#206

Episode 162: “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, [on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/77982678?pr=true) . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at  [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust)  and  [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from [monkees.com] (http://monkees.com) , and I’ve used Andrew Sandoval’s liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with  [this five-CD set] (https://amzn.to/34ZGAGw) , which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval’s The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were  [Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz] (https://amzn.to/3gI2yke) , and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters —  [Infinite Tuesday] (https://amzn.to/34LJr6e)  by Michael Nesmith,  [They Made a Monkee Out of Me] (https://amzn.to/3uY3OI2)  by Davy Jones,  [I’m a Believer] (https://amzn.to/3uQANyc)  by Micky Dolenz, and  [Psychedelic Bubble-Gum] (https://amzn.to/3gNZQtA)  by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of  [my backers on Patreon] (http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey) . Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork.  The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We’ve been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love  song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q.  But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while the collage elements of Head are similar to what Zappa did, the songs are much more accessible, as in the Carole King and Toni Stern song "As We Go Along", which features a bank of guitarists including King herself, Ry Cooder, and Neil Young: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "As We Go Along"] Unfortunately, while Head is one of the great art films of the sixties, and an artistic highlight of the career of everyone involved, it had one major problem. The Monkees' fanbase was mostly children between the ages of about ten and fourteen, and while there are of course some exceptions, very few eleven-year-olds want to see art films influenced by the French New Wave and Eastern philosophy, deconstructing themselves, the nature of consumer culture, the media, and karma. Conversely, in 1968, very few intellectuals and artistic types were at all interested in anything from the Monkees, who they disdained as plastic, commercial, and for teenyboppers, and weren't persuaded to come and see the film even by trailers which showed the unblinking, unsmiling, black-and-white face of literary agent (and later, sadly, associate of Jeffrey Epstein) John Brockman looking into the camera rather than footage from the film itself. Head made only $16,111 at the box office, on a budget of $790,000. Without promotion from the TV show, their previous single, "D.W. Washburn", a song Leiber and Stoller had also given to the Coasters almost simultaneously, had only made number nineteen, but "Porpoise Song", the single from Head, only made number sixty-eight, and the album made number forty-five. At this point, pretty much everyone washed their hands of the Monkees. Rafelson and Schneider continued with their film career, and would go on to be among the most important filmmakers of their generation, producing films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show, and becoming the nucleus around which the movement known as New Hollywood formed. It's outside the purview of this podcast, but I would recommend anyone who hasn't read it read the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, to see how much of the modern film industry owes its existence directly or indirectly to Rafelson and Schneider, and to the start they got with the Monkees. The group still had a contract to make a series of TV specials. They ended up only making one. 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee is possibly the most despised piece of media that will be discussed in this series, and it's easy to see why, even though I have more time for it than most. Production on Head had been problematic and caused a final rift in the band, when Dolenz, Jones, and Nesmith had gone on strike at the beginning of filming, saying they weren't going to work without getting screenplay credit. Tork refused to join them because he didn't believe they deserved the credit, leading to the bizarre situation of Nesmith the Rockefeller Republican falling out with Tork the socialist over a labour dispute in which Tork was the one breaking a picket line, albeit an informal one. The management dispute had been rectified, but this had only hastened Rafelson and Schneider's decision to part with the group once and for all, and Tork and Nesmith were no longer on speaking terms. Rather than being produced by Rafelson and Schneider, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was co-written and produced by Jack Good, who seemed far more interested in guest stars Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll than in the Monkees: [Excerpt: 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee] 33 1/3 is basically what you get if you try to remake Head with the production values of a sub-par primary school play, and with a half-written script by someone who watched Head and didn't understand it, and who thinks the peak of music was 1957 and any movement away from 1950s rock and roll has been a terrible example of moral decadence. I find it fascinating, but I can't say it's *good*. Though there are good moments, like a medley featuring Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis all playing pianos one stacked on top of another, singing their classic hits. The one dissenting voice on the special came from George Melly, a more perceptive cultural critic than most, who said in his review (quoted in his great Revolt Into Style): "What made this film worthwhile was that it demonstrated with a certain brilliance how yesterday’s revolutionary can turn into today’s reactionary. Good’s enthusiasm is reserved for rock ‘n’ roll: sexy, extrovert, good dirty fun. When pop went highbrow it lost him. I dare say Sergeant Pepper was his Waterloo, and he used this film to make this point with considerable panache. The Monkees were originally computerized into existence as plastic Beatles but have become, not only adequate performers, but discontented with their lot. Good used this discontent as the vortex of an inventive piece of nostalgia and attack. The final sequence in which he evoked chaos with great discipline was remarkable" As it happened Tork was so discontented with his lot that he paid a reported hundred thousand dollars to buy out his contract and quit the Monkees right after making 33 1/3, which was put up against the Oscars as the network realised nobody would be interested in watching it. The rest of the group continued as a three-piece, and recorded two more albums together, Instant Replay and The Monkees Present. Those albums had some fine music, but nobody was listening. Possibly the most interesting track is one on Instant Replay, "You and I", a song Jones co-wrote with Bill Chadwick which is the howl of anger of a teen idol who's been cast aside, with some scorching guitar from Neil Young, recorded just before Young started recording in this style on his own records: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You and I"] After The Monkees Present, Nesmith bought his contract out too, and the final album released as by the Monkees before they split for good, Changes, was largely a collection of tracks Jeff Barry and Andy Kim had produced for a rejected Andy Kim album onto which Dolenz and Jones overdubbed vocals. Tork tried to start a band with his girlfriend and Lowell George, who had briefly been a member of the Mothers of Invention and would go on to form Little Feat. Tork tried to submit a song to the soundtrack of Rafelson and Schneider's next film, but it was summarily rejected, though he would go on to record it as a solo artist decades later: [Excerpt: Peter Tork and James lee Stanley, "Easy Rider"] The song they chose instead, incidentally, worked a little better in the film, which finally brought Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson to stardom: [Excerpt: Steppenwolf, "Born to be Wild"] Tork quit music and became a teacher for a while, though over the next fifteen years or so he would make occasional ventures back into the music industry, but any chance he had of rebuilding his career was derailed by drug and alcohol dependency. Dolenz and Jones, meanwhile, started up solo careers, though unsuccessfully -- Jones did make a famous appearance on the Brady Bunch singing his solo track "Girl", while Dolenz made several quite decent singles, but neither made a dent, and Dolenz spent much of the early seventies going out and partying with a group of rock star friends nicknamed the Hollywood Vampires -- a loose group of people including Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, and Alice Cooper. In the mid-seventies, there was talk of a Monkees reunion, but when Nesmith wasn't interested, Dolenz and Jones instead teamed up with Boyce and Hart, who had had a few hits as performers themselves after stopping work with the Monkees, and formed Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart, who toured as "The Great Golden Hits of the Monkees Show, The Guys Who Wrote 'Em and the Guys Who Sang 'Em", and recorded an album of new material, which flopped: [Excerpt: Dolenz, Jones, Boyce and Hart, "I Remember the Feeling"] After that group split up, Dolenz and Jones performed in a stage musical in London based on the album The Point, by their old friend Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "It's a Jungle Out There"] But the two fell out during the production, and didn't speak to each other for a decade. Jones went on the nostalgia circuit, while Dolenz stayed in the UK and became a TV director, directing children's shows like Metal Mickey and From The Top (the latter of which starred Bill Oddie, whose own comedy series The Goodies owed more than a little to the Monkees). The reason they started talking to each other again actually had to do with their old bandmate Nesmith. Nesmith, unlike the others, had something of a successful career outside the Monkees. After quitting the group he formed The First National Band, who are now regarded as one of the great pioneers of country rock, and he had some minor hits with them, like "Joanne": [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and the First National Band, "Joanne"] His early-seventies records didn't sell in huge numbers, but they got a great deal of critical respect, and stand up very well to this day. He also, though, formed a company called Pacific Arts, and got into the home video distribution business, becoming one of the major players in the business in the eighties (though the company got stuck in various lawsuits by the nineties). Part of the success of Pacific Arts was down to Nesmith inheriting a fortune from his mother in 1980, which allowed him to branch out into film production, producing cult films like Repo Man and Tapeheads. But even before that, he'd been interested in the possibilities of music video, especially when he made a video for his late-seventies single "Rio" and had a surprise hit with it as a result: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "Rio"] Nesmith got very involved in music video production, putting together his own video special, Elephant Parts, which won the first Grammy for music videos, and his company would also later produce videos for Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson. And he'd created a TV series called Popclips, which just featured music videos hosted by a video jockey, or VJ. Popclips was shown on Nickelodeon, and Nickelodeon's parent company, Warners, decided to start an entire cable channel inspired by the format, which became MTV. And given the lack of music videos available at the time, MTV started showing old episodes of the Monkees. The group got a new fanbase, and reformed -- without Nesmith, who was busy running his companies -- and even had one last hit, though it was released as by "Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork of the Monkees", as the musicians didn't own the trademark on the name and could only license it for touring at the time: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork, "That Was Then, This is Now"] Dolenz, Tork, and Jones toured off and on for the next fifteen years, and put out a new Monkees album, Pool It!, in 1987. They even briefly reunited with Nesmith for the group's thirtieth anniversary, doing a short tour together, making a TV special written and directed by Nesmith, and recording a final album as a four-piece, Justus, which as the title suggests is the only Monkees album to be *entirely* made by the four members, who wrote every song and played every instrument without any outside assistance at all. Tork quit again in 2001 and the remaining duo split up soon after, but they reformed in 2011 for a forty-fifth anniversary tour, where they gave some of the greatest performances of their career -- performing sets that included the whole Head album, and which featured Tork playing keyboards, banjo, guitar, and French horn. When Davy Jones died suddenly in 2012, it seemed like it might be the end of the Monkees, but then rather remarkably Michael Nesmith decided to rejoin the band, and the group toured as a trio for a few years. Both Nesmith and Tork started having health problems, though, and also seem to have not got on with each other, and so in 2015 and 2016 Tork and Dolenz toured as the Monkees without Nesmith. Nesmith did though contribute to the group's final studio album proper, 2016's Good Times, an astonishing return to form produced by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, which featured completed versions of songs they'd left unfinished in the sixties plus new songs written for them by writers they'd influenced, like Schlesinger, Andy Partridge of XTC, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie, and this one by Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Birth of an Accidental Hipster"] It was a great final album, though sadly they spoiled it somewhat by later releasing a Christmas album put together by the same team, but by that point both Nesmith and Tork were clearly struggling with their health, and the music suffered as a result, with most of it just being Dolenz performing solo. In 2017 Tork became too ill to tour, and Nesmith joined Dolenz in his place for a tour in 2018 as "The Monkees Present the Mike and Micky Show". Tork died of cancer in 2019, and Nesmith and Dolenz toured as The Monkees in 2019 and 2021, and released a live album as a duo: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Listen to the Band (Live)"] Nesmith was himself having health problems, though, not helped by the fact that he was raised a Christian Scientist and so didn't like going to see doctors even when in serious pain, though he did eventually relent and have a quadruple bypass in 2018. The Monkees played their final show on November the fourteenth, 2021, and Nesmith was clearly extremely unwell on the final tour. He died less than a month later, finally bringing the Monkees to an end, though Dolenz now tours with his solo show paying tribute to his former colleagues. The Monkees were the first manufactured pop band of the rock era, and they have often been despised for that reason. But when you look at their work in its own right, and at their own lives and history, you find a group of people who consistently chose to try new and different things, and who whatever their origins ended up making some remarkable records and a film which is one of the great sixties psychedelic masterpieces. They were four very different individuals, who were in many ways totally incompatible, and who would never have come together organically, but precisely because of that they had a catalogue that spans more genres than any of their contemporaries I can think of, and does most of them remarkably well. There will still, I know, be a portion of the audience for this episode who don't understand why I've spent so much time on a band they consider worthy of contempt. To them, all I can do is suggest that you do as the song says, and listen to the band. Weren't they good? They made *me* happy... [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Listen to the Band (live)"] ... Read more

31 Jan 2023

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31 Jan 2023


#205

Episode 161: “Alone Again Or” by Love

Episode one hundred and sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Alone Again Or", the career of Love, and the making of Forever Changes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on ["Susan" by the Buckinghams] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/77200267) Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at  [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust)  and  [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Erratum I refer to Bach's Partita No. 1 in B-flat minor in the episode. It's actually in B-flat major, but Amazon wrongly tagged the MP3 copy of Glenn Gould playing Bach's Partitas that I bought from them. Resources As usual, I have created Mixcloud mixes of all the songs excerpted in the episode. This episode's mixes are in two parts -- [part one] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-161a-alone-again-or-part-1/) and [part two] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-161b-alone-again-or-part-2/) . My main source for the episode is  [Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson] (https://amzn.to/3Er1LPK) , and I also referred a lot to [Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns.] (https://amzn.to/3jKi0O5) I also referred to  [Pegasus Epitaph: The Story of the Legendary Rock Group Love] (https://amzn.to/3QCdZuG) , the autobiography of Michael Stuart Ware, and to [the 33 1/3 book on Forever Changes. ] (https://amzn.to/3CHYNq7) [This documentary] (https://amzn.to/3GxIMnO) is a very good look at Love's career. And [this double-CD] (https://amzn.to/3CNQ2eq) contains almost every track anyone other than a serious completist could want by Love. It has Forever Changes in its entirety, plus eleven of the fourteen tracks from the first album, every track except "Revelation" from Da Capo, both sides of the "Your Mind and We Belong Together"/"Laughing Stock" single, the non-album B-side "Number 14", and five of the better tracks from the second version of Love. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.  [Why not join them?] (http://patreon.com/AndrewHickey) Transcript Before I start, I should just say that this episode involves some discussion of drug addiction, mental illness, and racism. In this episode and the next one, we're taking what is almost our final look at the LA pop music scene of the sixties. The story over the last ten episodes or so has been about how the Monterey Pop Festival precipitated an end to LA's dominance in music on the West Coast of the US, and how it was replaced by San Francisco. There will of course be LA artists turning up over the next thirty-odd episodes, especially as we see the Laurel Canyon scene, which is a separate but connected thing to the pop scene, take off towards the end of the sixties. We haven't seen the last of several of the artists from LA we've already looked at, but here and in the next episode we're going to look at the last gasps of the scene that had built up around Sunset Strip and the Hollywood recording studios, the one that encompassed proto-punk garage rock, jangly folk-rock, and modern jazz style harmonies. The influence of that scene would reverberate for decades to come, but the scene itself was largely at an end by the middle of 1967. This episode is an unusual one in some respects, because we're looking at a band who we *have* seen previously, but who haven't had an episode to themselves. Normally, when we've seen a band before, I'd just do a "when we last saw X" intro, but while about half an hour in the middle of the episode on "Hey Joe" was devoted to Love, and to how the band formed, we left the group before they'd even made their first album, and the story was being told in the context specifically of their relationship with that song. So I'm going to do a brief recap of what we covered there, so some of this may sound a little familiar to you. It'll be a much briefer version of the story than I told there, but will include different details. The core of the band that became Love was two Black men born in Memphis, Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Both had been neighbours in their very early childhood, but Lee's family had moved away to LA when he was small. But then Echols' family had also happened to move to LA, and the two had reconnected when Lee was seven and Echols was eight. They both grew up surrounded by musicians -- Echols was neighbours with Ray Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ornette Coleman, and Adolphus Jacobs of the Coasters taught him guitar, while Lee was one of the kids who Johnny Otis involved in his pigeon-breeding club -- leading to a lifelong love of the hobby in Lee's case. Echols formed a group as a teenager, and when Lee joined it was renamed "Arthur Lee and the LAGs" in homage to Booker T and the MGs. Lee would say later "I was playing the organ at these gigs. Johnny Echols was playing the guitar and he was playing some of the best R&B guitar I ever heard. Not only was the playing the best but he was upstaging all the other guitar players in town, too. Johnny was playing behind his back, through his legs, behind his head, and even with his teeth. Talk about putting on a show … and this was before Jimi Hendrix made it big doing all that [and here Lee used an expletive]. That was Mr. Echols, the man with the guitar. I really did admire him." The LAGs released one single, "Rumble Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] After that, Lee and Echols started to work a lot of sessions for small record labels. Lee would write and produce, while Echols played guitar -- though Echols has claimed later that he deserves a co-writing credit on many of the tracks. They would produce pastiches of Phil Spector hits, and of records by Curtis Mayfield, one of Lee's idols, like this track by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Mayfield impression on guitar there is by Jimi Hendrix, and the track is often claimed as the first Hendrix ever played on, though that's disputed and there's good reason to believe he played on a few before that. Then Echols was taken by their schoolfriend Billy Preston, with whom he would sometimes play gigs, to see a show at the Hollywood Bowl by a band Preston had got to know in Germany: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1964)"] Within a few days, Echols and Lee had bought themselves wigs to make themselves look like they had long hair, and formed a new band with a white rhythm section, who were variously called the Weirdos and the American Four. Instead of trying to sing R&B, Lee was now trying to sing in the style of white singers, especially Mick Jagger, originally as a joke, but as he later said “What started out as a put-on materialized as something real and positive.” The American Four also put out one single, which very much wore its influences on its sleeve: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] At this point the group consisted of Lee and Echols on guitars and vocals, John Fleckenstein on bass, and Don Conka on drums. Incidentally, pretty much every book on the group spells Conka's name C-o-n-k-a, but I recently read an online article about him which stated that his name was spelled C-o-n-c-a, and that it has been persistently misspelled over the decades because Lee spelled it wrong and nobody ever checked with Conka.  As Conka's now dead and this is just something I've seen on a single website, with no way to check either way, I've spelled his name the standard way in the transcript of this episode, but thought it worth noting. Lee was never a very good guitarist -- he'd started out on keyboards and only learned the rudiments of guitar -- and they decided that they needed to let him just be the frontman, and get in a second guitarist, copying the lineup of the Rolling Stones, and also of the Byrds, whose style the group had now decided to emulate. They also changed their name, this time to the Grass Roots. This change in style was partly because there was another multiracial band on the scene doing Stones-type material, and rather than compete with the Rising Sons they wanted to stand out, but also because the Byrds had a large crowd of followers who would attend all their gigs, the same crowd of hipsters led by Franzoni and Vito who also followed the Mothers of Invention, and it would be a good idea to appeal to a devoted fanbase like that. Lee also thought they needed a good-looking white man up front, and so they decided to get in someone from the circle around Vito and Franzoni. Initially they got in a good-looking young man who Lee quickly nicknamed "Bummer Bob", but Bobby Beausoleil was soon out of the band, and instead they got in Bryan MacLean, a former roadie for the Byrds who had been performing a bit with people like Taj Mahal. MacLean had a bit of a reputation as a spoiled brat -- he was from a very privileged background, and for example Liza Minnelli was his childhood girlfriend -- but he was also a good rhythm guitarist and singer, he looked a little like Brian Jones, he was a talented songwriter, though his writing was always more inspired by show tunes than by the music the rest of the band were playing, and he was friends with the whole Vito and Franzoni crowd, and he could get them to come along to the group's shows. The new group were soon the hottest thing on the Sunset Strip scene, and started looking around for a record deal. They recorded some demos with, of all people, Buck Ram, the manager of the Platters and the Penguins, who we last talked about exactly a hundred and thirty episodes ago. A demo of Lee's song "You I'll Be Following" recorded in Ram's home studio in 1965, shows the sound this group had, a sound that seems to combine the jangle and block harmonies of the Byrds with the stomping rhythms of the Rolling Stones and a Jagger-like vocal: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the Grass Roots, "You I'll Be Following"] Soon the group had to change their name again, this time because another band was using their name. According to Johnny Echols, this was not a mere accident -- the group had annoyed Lou Adler by not showing him the proper respect in front of a woman he was trying to impress, and Adler had started yelling about how "You'll never work in this town again!" Soon after that, a studio group put together by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri on Adler's Dunhill label were releasing singles under the name "The Grass Roots": [Excerpt, The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] As Sloan and Barri's studio group started having hits, the group were resigned to changing their name. Lee had worked for a time at a bra shop named Luv Brassieres, and the rest of the group thought this was hilarious, and decided to name themselves after it. The newly-renamed Love were now playing regularly at Bido Litos, a small venue where they were so popular the crowds overflowed into the street. Luckily, the venue was on a side street and so part of the road would be closed off and speakers placed outside so those who couldn't get in could at least hear the music. The group would always open with a version of Howlin' Wolf's blues classic "Smokestack Lightnin'", which would extend into a long improvised jam, of which Lee later said "It would go into a lot of jazz feelings, like John Coltrane – it could get really far out, expressing what the person playing was feeling in the song. With a steady beat going, we used to improvise, everyone changing the music to what he wanted but somehow making it fit with what the others were playing. We’d play that song until it hypnotized the audience." Sadly none of those shows were recorded, but we can get some idea of what it might have sounded like from a live recording from 2003, when Lee, Echols, and Conka were reunited on stage for one song and chose to play their old opener, though that track only lasts about eight minutes rather than the forty it would sometimes stretch to in the sixties, and so doesn't have much of the improvisational aspect: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee, Johnny Echols, Don Conka, and Love, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] By this point, the group had a clearly defined dynamic. Arthur Lee was the undisputed leader -- he was the lead singer, the frontman, and a pioneer of the LA freak scene, wearing multi-coloured glasses and a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other. He also wrote most of the group's original material -- though precisely who contributed what to the arrangements of some songs, and to what extent they should be considered co-writers, has been a matter of some dispute. Then on either side of him were his two lieutenants -- Johnny Echols, his oldest friend, a supremely talented blues and jazz guitarist, good looking -- people said he looked like Johnny Mathis -- and regarded by many as the group's secret weapon, the Keith Richards to Lee's Jagger; and Bryan MacLean, a blonde surfer boy with a completely different look, who played jangly guitar and wrote sweet ballads and knew everyone on the scene. Behind them were a rhythm section, who were as good as any around, but for different reasons would soon exit the group. The first to go was John Fleckenstein, who quit the band because he had a chance to join the Cameraman's Guild and get into the film industry. He would later briefly play bass with the Standells, as on their classic garage-rock track "Riot on Sunset Strip": [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] But for the most part he worked in film, later going on to be a cameraman on films like ET. His replacement was Ken Forssi, who had previously played bass with a late line-up of the Surfaris. While Forssi was originally just playing the parts Fleckenstein had previously played, Echols has nothing but praise for him, saying later "He was a real Renaissance Man. His bass playing was the underpinning of our sound. He was perfect for us. He was able to pick up our stuff quickly and was able to fit in, so we hired him right on the spot." The first recordings by Love actually didn't feature Arthur Lee at all. The group had a friend, Vince Flaherty, who would sometimes sit in with them on vocals and harmonica. Like about half the people in the LA scene, it seems, Flaherty had been a child actor, but now wanted to be a musician, and he got the four instrumentalists from Love to back him on demos: [Excerpt: Vince Flaherty, "Dead From You"] Flaherty's music career went nowhere, however, even though later demos over the next couple of years would feature, as well as Echols, Forssi, and MacLean, Jimi Hendrix, Gene Clark, and Daryl Dragon of the Captain and Tennille. He returned to acting and later also stood unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for the House of Representatives. Those tracks are the only studio recordings in existence of Love with Don Conka on drums, though. Conka was, by all accounts, one of the best drummers around, and people compare his playing at the time with Buddy Rich. He would often take extended drum solos which were considered highlights of the group's shows, and he had his own fanbase among the audience. The problem was that Conka was using heroin. This would later become a problem for almost every member of the band, but at this time they were all relatively straight with the exception of Conka. They were using a bit of dope and psychedelics, but Conka was a heroin addict, and as heroin addicts will, he started missing work. More and more often Ken Forssi's flatmate was called on to sit in with the group instead. Alban Pfisterer, who went by the name "Snoopy", was younger than the band, and a trained keyboard player who could play the drums reasonably well. He was no Don Conka, and neither Echols nor MacLean liked him as a person -- MacLean later said "I didn’t feel he was homogeneous with what we were doing. He seemed like this straight kid. He wasn’t hip and didn’t look right", while Pfisterer said “I didn’t like Bryan, and the feeling was mutual. He mistreated me more than any of them. He was really nasty to me. He thought I was square and he was hip – and I wasn’t the drummer he wanted. Also, Arthur liked me…” But Lee took him on as something of a mascot. He didn't become a full member of the group -- whenever they signed union contracts for gig bookings, Conka's name would be on the contract, and Snoopy would just be given a token payment rather than an equal share. There's some dispute as to whether this was because they were still holding out hope for Conka's return, or it was just because the other band members disliked him and didn't want to give him an equal share. But when Conka didn't turn up for the sessions for the group's first album, Snoopy ended up on that, too -- although perhaps appropriately, there were no drums at all on the album's highlight, "Signed D.C.", a rewrite of "House of the Rising Sun" with lyrics about Conka's heroin addiction: [Excerpt: Love, "Signed D.C."] The album came about through Herb Cohen, who we've seen before as the manager of the Mothers of Invention and the Modern Folk Quartet, among others. Cohen apparently at this point had a personal management contract with Arthur Lee, though no contract with the rest of the band. Cohen was soon replaced -- he got a woman named Ronnie Haran to start a fan club for the group, and as she told the story "I called Arthur up and said, ‘Hi Arthur, my name is Ronnie Haran; Herbie Cohen suggested I call you about running your fan club.’ This was Arthur’s response: ‘Oh yeah, well, how’d you like to fire Herbie Cohen for me?’ That was my introduction to Arthur Lee." Haran became the group's manager instead, though her gender caused some problems, at a time when misogyny was even more rampant than it is now, and she would sometimes have to deal with overzealous security guards who assumed she was a groupie and wouldn't believe she could be their manager. But Cohen was still around in some capacity for a while, and he introduced the group to Jac Holzman of Elektra Records, who at this point was starting to get interested in signing rock bands. Love agreed to sign to Elektra, in part because Elektra were the only label they spoke to who would let them keep their own publishing rights. Every other label had wanted to grab their publishing, but Echols and Lee were friendly with the older generation of R&B performers, people like Little Richard, who had told them that that was where the money was and giving it up would be a big mistake. Love set up their own publishing company, Grass Roots Music, but they didn't fully understand what they were doing, and while they owned Grass Roots, the way the contract was set up it was administered by Third Story Music, the publishing company owned by Cohen and his brother, who took a percentage off the top for their trouble. This is actually fairly standard for artists who own their own publishing -- very few of them want the bother of doing all the boring admin that comes with music publishing -- but it wasn't properly explained to the group, and they didn't realise this was happening for literally decades. According to Echols “We thought we had no relationship with Herb whatsoever; we had signed nothing with him. He’d introduced us to Jac Holzman, nothing more, as far I know. Here we were, thinking we were smarter than those guys that came before us, like Little Richard, who were all ripped off … we thought we had all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, when, in fact, we were just as naive and stupid as they were. We didn’t have the savvy or the business sense to have somebody look at the contracts. That was our own naivety, but it was also because Arthur thought he knew everything. In the 90s, Arthur was looking to sell Grass Roots Music to Leiber and Stoller’s Trio Music. That’s when I found out that Third Story had been collecting part of the publishing on the songs for all those years. We thought we had all the bases covered and didn’t see the signs.” They signed the contract -- including a clause stating “All checks shall be made to Arthur Lee on behalf of the group.” -- on the third of January 1966. Conka's name was included on the contract, but he didn't sign. Snoopy's wasn't, and he only got a hundred dollars of the five thousand dollar advance -- Lee kept the rest of his share, keeping nineteen hundred, while the other three got a thousand dollars each. As a result, Snoopy only got session fees for the records he played on, no royalties, though he was pictured as an equal band member on the first two albums. Three weeks after signing to Elektra they were in the studio. The plan had originally been to use Paul Rothchild as the producer, but he was in prison after a drug bust, and so the album was produced by Holzman and Elektra staff producer Marc Abramson, with assistance from Bruce Botnick, who was engineering and who did the final mix himself. Botnick, and Sunset Sound studios where he worked, had been recommended to Holzman by another Elektra artist and Herb Cohen act, Tim Buckley. Love's first album was a classic of garage rock, taking the jangly sound of the Byrds and mixing it with the aggression of the Rolling Stones, and coming out with something spiky and harsh, punk a decade before punk was a thing. The song that most obviously shows the group's influences is "Can't Explain", which takes a melodic fragment from the Stones' "What a Shame": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "What a Shame"] gives it the title of a Who song, and marries it with the Byrds' jangle, to come up with something that doesn't sound quite like any of them: [Excerpt: Love, "Can't Explain"] The album contains seven songs credited solely to Lee as a writer -- though again, there has been some dispute as to how much the other band members, especially MacLean and Echols, contributed -- plus two songs credited to Lee and Echols alone, one to the two of them with Fleckenstein, and one to all of the band except Snoopy. MacLean also got a single solo composition on the album, "Softly to Me": [Excerpt: Love, "Softly to Me"] That song quite handily shows up exactly why a fault line was already starting to appear in the group. MacLean thought of himself as at least as talented as Lee -- and he was, to be clear, an excellent songwriter in his own right. He wanted the group to record more of his songs than they did, but as Echols put it "Arthur and I talked about that and we both felt that, while Bryan wrote very nice songs, you could only put maybe one or two on an album. He wrote these Lerner & Loew show-tune kind of songs. As part of a whole album they can work, but not on their own. They would never have been played on the radio. Nowadays they might, but back then you had to have something the kids could relate to. Bryan’s stuff was a bit too soft – too many chocolate-covered rainbows. He saw  everything through rose-tinted glasses. There was always conflict about us doing more of his songs.” Lee always said that what he would have actually liked to do was to co-write more with MacLean, and to collaborate more equally, but that had never worked out, but MacLean insisted all his life that the main reason he only got one or two songs per album was that Lee knew that songwriting was where the money was and wanted to keep it to himself. The obvious choice for a lead-off single for the album was the group's version of "Hey Joe", which might have made MacLean feel better as it was his big live showcase and a song he'd brought to the group, but as we discussed in the episode on Hendrix's version of the song, by this point it had been released by half a dozen other bands, so instead they went for the other cover version on the album. "My Little Red Book" was a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which had originally been recorded by Manfred Mann for the film What's New Pussycat?: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Little Red Book (film version)"] Lee and Echols had been to the cinema to see that film and had started rehearsing a version as soon as they got home. Echols had forgotten some of the chords, having only heard the song once, and even after they learned the lyrics properly from Manfred Mann's record, they kept Echols' misremembered chord sequence -- much to the later disgust of the song's composer, who never liked their version: [Excerpt: Love, "My Little Red Book"] "My Little Red Book" only made number fifty-two on the charts, but up to that point that was the best any record released on Elektra had ever done. When Jac Holzman heard the track on the radio for the first time while driving, he had to pull his car over to the side of the road and cry, because he had never believed he would hear an Elektra record on the radio at all. And while it wasn't a massive hit, it was an influential record. Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground, who were just starting up in New York at the time the record came out, would talk later about how his group would listen to "My Little Red Book" over and over on repeat, trying to figure out how Love got their sound. As the group were now having a little success, they decided to move in together, into a huge mansion which had formerly been owned by the silent film director Maurice Tourneur, and which they nicknamed The Castle. The mansion was dilapidated at the time, and the group were allowed to move in for a rent which just covered the cost of the property taxes. Or at least, all of the group except Snoopy moved in. As he later put it “I’m the only one who did not live in The Castle. I didn’t want to live with them. I didn’t like those guys, and the feeling was mutual. The only person I got along with was Arthur.” The group started promotions for "My Little Red Book", but things were already moving forward. Lee had written a song about his high-school sweetheart, Anita, who like him was born on the seventh of March, and had titled it "7 & 7 is". Originally this had been a folky, acoustic number, but Ken Forssi had been given a new fuzzbox, one of the first bass fuzzboxes on the market, and he had started using it on the song, playing a sliding bass line in octaves. The song soon sped up to accommodate the new tone, though in the studio Forssi had to turn the fuzz off as the recording equipment simply couldn't cope with it -- but he was playing a semi-acoustic bass and managed to get a similar tone through feedback: [Excerpt: Love, "Seven and Seven Is" tracking session] The song wasn't without its problems in the studio, though. As you can hear, the drum part is intense and frenetic, and took a lot of work to get right. Pfisterer later said “The session was a nightmare, I had blisters on my fingers. I don’t know how many times I tried to play that damn thing and it just wasn’t coming out. Arthur would try it; then I’d try it. Finally I got it. He couldn’t do it. By the twentieth take I got it. Everything before that was basically rehearsal.” Lee would sometimes later claim it was him playing on the final record, but Echols concurred, saying “That is Alban ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer, and he did a hell of a job, too. He really played his little heart out on that song and he deserves credit for it. It’s the best he ever played. It was a very physically demanding song. It took about four hours to get it down, and, back then, four hours for one song was a long time.” But at the end, they managed to get the track recorded, and it's a blistering ball of energy: [Excerpt: Love, "Seven and Seven Is"] The song proper ends with the sound of an explosion, and then a slow guitar instrumental. While the only songwriter credited is Lee, both Echols and MacLean at different times have claimed to have written this coda. I believe Echols, for what it's worth, and he says it's an attempt at copying the sound of the instrumental hit "Sleepwalk" by Santo and Johnny: [Excerpt: Love, "Seven and Seven Is"] At the same session, they recorded the B-side for "Seven and Seven Is", "No. 14", and also a demo for a song they would pick up on several months later. The group had become good friends with the Buffalo Springfield, and Lee had been inspired by their record "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", and especially the guitar part: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] And he'd come up with a similar-sounding instrumental, which for now was titled "Hummingbirds": [Excerpt: Love, "Hummingbirds (demo)"] But for now that was put to one side, as "Seven and Seven Is" became a top forty hit and the group had to start promoting it. Or, at least, if they'd been any other group, they would have started promoting the record. But Arthur Lee refused to tour. This is often portrayed as him being a prima donnaish diva, and no doubt there was an element of that -- nobody has ever said that Arthur Lee was the world's easiest person to work with -- but there was more than just that. In LA, Lee could be at home in his own bed every night -- and for all that he was a big face on the scene, he was also someone who needed a lot of time by himself, out of the public eye, and who liked being in familiar surroundings. He was also able to make good money playing as many gigs as he wanted in LA -- if they could play for adoring crowds night after night just on the Sunset Strip, and get more money than they needed, why go anywhere else? Not only that, but every time they ventured any further than San Francisco, they ended up dealing with dodgy promoters -- people they'd never worked with before and never would again, so there was no long-term relationship there and no way to build up trust that they'd pay what they owed, or that the PA would work. There was also the fact that Elektra were a very new label in the rock market and didn't have great distribution outside major cities -- when the group did play elsewhere they'd find that nobody had any of their records. That would later be fixed by the time Elektra signed their next rock act, the Doors, but Love were the band who they made all their mistakes with, mistakes they learned from. And that meant that Love were also not going to get the same spot on bills outside of California. In LA, they would headline with acts like the Buffalo Springfield and the Doors as their support acts, because everyone knew Love were the top of the heap as far as live acts went. When they had offers elsewhere, it was to play third on the bill to the Strawberry Alarm Clock. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, one thing that both Lee and Echols have mentioned in interviews over the years as a reason they didn't tour, but which none of their white business associates ever bring up -- Love were an integrated band with two Black members and three white ones, and with a white woman as their manager. There were large swathes of the US in the mid-sixties where Black men travelling with a white woman would be in danger of their lives, and very few venues where an integrated band could get booked. As Echols put it "A Black group could play the chitlin’ circuit and places like that, in the South, and a white group could go anywhere in the South. But it was different for an integrated group. We could play the West or East Coasts but the Midwest and the South were never big markets for us. It wasn’t that we were lazy; we needed to earn a living and we needed to play.” Haran did start getting the group occasional gigs elsewhere, but they were few and far between, and when she did get them a big showcase gig in Dallas, with a huge amount of effort on her part, Bryan MacLean complained that she was getting the same money as the band members, and she started to back away from Love and concentrate on the Doors, who she had also started doing managerial work for. The Doors, indeed, desperately wanted to be like Love. Ray Manzarek later said "Morrison turned to me and said, ‘You know, Ray, if we could be as big as Love, man, my life would be complete.’ I thought Love was one of the hottest things I ever saw. They were the most influential band in Los Angeles at that time, and we all thought it was just a matter of time before Love conquered America. Johnny was the first guy I ever saw playing guitar behind his head, before Hendrix. Love was also the first band I ever saw playing long, improvisational songs. Out of that came Doors songs like ‘The End,’ ‘When The Music’s Over,’ and the long instrumental parts in ‘Light My Fire.’ Arthur Lee and Love: they were in charge. We wanted to be like Love. Arthur himself was enigmatic, very intense, and sort of possessed by darker forces.” [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Arthur Lee, in turn, did like the Doors and help them get signed, but as he put it "I would see Jim Morrison from time to time, and now Pam was with him. I thought nothing of it until Jim’s death. Then I noticed that on a poster of Jim, he was standing with a black Labrador retriever just like my dog. Later, a book came out about The Doors in which Jim Morrison said that what he wanted to be was as big as Love. I thought that was such a nice compliment, but I couldn’t help thinking that Pam had been my girlfriend, then she was his girlfriend; I had a black Labrador and then he had a black Labrador; I was on Elektra Records and so was he … . It seemed to me that not only did Jim Morrison want to be as big as Love; he also wanted to be like me. Jim never bothered me, but he did kind of copy me." Instead of touring, the group started work on their second album, titled Da Capo. The title was originally a reference to the idea that they were going to go back to their roots -- they were going to stop doing garage rock and start doing Booker T and the MGs style soul, like Lee and Echols had done in the LAGs. Instead, as rehearsals began, that started to change. To start with, they got in Tjay Cantrelli, who had played sax with Lee and Echols in some of their early groups several years earlier. Cantrelli had now become an accomplished jazz sax and flute player, and they started to rework their arrangements to incorporate more of his jazz style. And then the ongoing arguments about Snoopy reached something of a resolution. Everyone was agreed that even though he'd played fantastically on "Seven and Seven Is", he wasn't a natural drummer, and was something of a wooden player. But Lee still wanted him in the band. As he was actually a fairly accomplished keyboard player, it was decided to move him to piano on stage and harpsichord and organ in the studio. In his place on drums, they brought in Michael Stuart-Ware, who had previously been the drummer in The Sons of A dam, a group we talked about briefly in the "Hey Joe" and Buffalo Springfield episodes, and who had recorded one of Lee's songs, "Feathered Fish": [Excerpt: The Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] The music this new lineup of the group started performing was characterised by everyone who heard it at the time as jazz-rock, though by this they didn't mean the genre we now know as jazz-rock, which hadn't yet become a thing. But while everyone involved in making it talks about it as being influenced by jazz, especially Coltrane, and that influence is definitely audible at points, in truth the jazz influence seems to have been something that mostly showed up in the group's live performance. Certainly, you can hear some jazz in Cantrelli's solos, especially, but other than the crashing garage rock of "Seven and Seven Is", recorded by the smaller lineup, the primary styles I hear in Da Capo are baroque pop, folk rock, bossa nova, and more than a little influence from Burt Bacharach. Just as the group's first single was a cover of a song from Bacharach's What's New Pussycat? soundtrack, compare the title track from that film: [Excerpt: Tom Jones, "What's New Pussycat?"] With "Stephanie Knows Who", the opening track of Da Capo: [Excerpt: Love, "Stephanie Knows Who"] "Stephanie Knows Who" is also a good example of the way in which how much the musicians contributed to the song and arrangement could differ, not only from song to song, but within the same song. Everyone is agreed that the chords, melody line, and lyrics to "Stephanie Knows Who" are all Arthur Lee's work -- though often the band would change the chord sequences if Lee wrote a song on guitar, because he only knew a handful of chords, so they'd figure out what he meant and rework his simple triads into more complex chords -- but according to Michael Stuart Ware the instrumental break by Cantrelli and Echols, the most obviously jazz-influenced thing on the whole album, was entirely their work with no input from Lee: [Excerpt: Love, "Stephanie Knows Who"] But on the other hand Pfisterer has said that the harpsichord part he played on the track was dictated note for note by Lee -- which is entirely believable, given that by all accounst Pfisterer was an excellent technical keyboard player but had no aptitude whatsoever for improvisation. That track, like much of Da Capo, was the work of a new production team. Paul Rothchild had now got out of prison, and so after he produced the Doors' first album he moved on to producing Love. Five of the six songs on side one of the album were also recorded at RCA studios, with Dave Hassinger, who engineered for the Rolling Stones when they recorded there, as the group wanted to get the sound he'd got with them -- though Bruce Botnick, who had engineered "Seven and Seven Is" and side two, mixed the whole album to give it a consistent feel. Around this time, Lee also moved out of the group's communal Castle, and into a house that became known as the Trip House, because it had been used in a cheap exploitation film called The Trip, put out by American International Pictures, starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and written by Jack Nicholson: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] The first thing Lee did there was to build cages for his pigeons. Part of the reason for him moving out can be seen in "Stephanie Knows Who", and in another song on Da Capo, "The Castle": [Excerpt: Love, "The Castle"] That line, "A my love, B I love" is a reference to the fact that the titular Stephanie who knows who had dated both A -- Arthur -- and B -- Bryan -- and she'd chosen B, which upset Lee enormously. It caused a rift between the two that would never fully heal, and that would start the serious problems within the band that would soon cause it to split. According to Stuart Ware “In the beginning, Arthur and Bryan were great friends. They loved to be around each other and did things socially together. They were funny. After the Stephanie thing, that began to deteriorate; it got to the point where they didn’t hang together at all. Arthur was trying to organize it so that Bryan was no longer in the group. They rest of us kind of vetoed that.” The other most notable song on Da Capo is "She Comes in Colors": [Excerpt: Love, "She Comes in Colors"] As well as being a live favourite for the rest of Lee's career, that also had a line that was picked up by the Rolling Stones. You might think that turnabout is fair play given what Lee did with "Can't Explain" and "What a Shame", but he was furious when he heard the Stones' "She's a Rainbow", recorded about six months after Da Capo came out: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "She's a Rainbow"] Da Capo is half a great album. Unfortunately it's kept from true greatness by the decision to turn the entire second side over to a single track, "Revelation". This idea was apparently not a bad one in principle. The song, originally titled "John Lee Hooker", was a highlight of their live sets. It had started out as an extended version of "Gloria" by Them, but they'd turned it into a lengthy, largely instrumental, excuse for every band member to get multiple solos and show off their instrumental abilities. But the session took place at Sunset rather than at RCA, which the group didn't like -- Echols has said "It wasn't uptight at RCA as it was at Sunset Sound. Several times we had fistfights at Sunset Sound, 'cause it was a small kind of claustrophobic type of place. The atmosphere and the people – Bruce and all that – just was not as conductive in the way RCA was with Dave Hassinger." According to Lee the group were in a foul mood for the session, and played the song worse than they'd ever played it before as a result, with no feeling. But they did play the track for the full forty-five minutes they normally played it. Obviously that was too long for an album side, but they expected Rothchild to just fade the track out after nineteen minutes, but leave the performance as it was until then. Instead, according to Echols, "It sounded so different live compared to what we got on the album. What Paul Rothchild did was record 45 minutes of this jam, but instead of leaving it alone and just cutting the end off, he hacked the song up into this mishmash, so you can’t get the feeling for what we were trying to do. If it had been done the way we performed it live, it would have been a whole different song, a whole different feel." Rothchild took this Frankensteined version of "Revelation", and because Snoopy wasn't an improvisational player and was largely not on the main track, he took the gigue from Bach's Partita number 1 in B-flat minor, here played by Glenn Gould: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Partita number 1 in B-flat minor, gigue"] And got Snoopy to play that on the harpsichord at the beginning and end, creating a truly bizarre juxtaposition: [Excerpt: Love, "Revelation"] Literally everyone involved agrees that "Revelation" is by far the worst thing the original version of Love were ever involved in, and Da Capo became one of that small number of albums where people play side one to death but never play side two a second time. But even though the album was only a qualified success, the seven-piece lineup of Love was getting more praise than ever in the clubs. This was a band that had already been one of the most versatile bands on the Strip, ranging from psychedelic freakouts to sharp proto-punk to folk-rock jangle, and now they were performing garage rock with jazz flute, songs that sounded like Johnny Mathis singing the Byrds, and songs that were being covered by hip British bands like the Move, and even ripped off by the Rolling Stones! But then the riot on Sunset Strip happened. We've already talked about this in the episode on "For What It's Worth", so I won't go over it again, but the important thing is that this meant that half of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip closed down pretty much overnight. This devastated LA's nightlife, but while every other band that played those clubs was also playing all over the country or the world, Love weren't playing anywhere else. The gigs dried up, the band weren't making enough money, and they had no choice but to sack Snoopy and Cantrelli. Cantrelli was fine with this -- he was a jazz musician, and jazz musicians are always moving between bands -- but Snoopy was understandably bitter, and has had very few good words to say about his erstwhile bandmates in the decades since. These changes seem to have thrown Lee into a depression, and that came out on what would become the group's last album as an actual group, Forever Changes. Lee said later "At the time I wrote those songs, I thought this might be the last album I’d ever make. The words on Forever Changes represented the last words I would say about this planet. The album was made after I thought there was no hope left in the world. I thought I was going to die. I used to sit there in my house on the hillside and think of all the things that had happened, or were happening all around, in my life, as well as to others. I would write them the way I saw them." [Excerpt: Love, "The Red Telephone"] Lee had big ideas for the new album. In fact the whole group did. They were going to record a double album, and it would have songs by Lee and Echols and MacLean, all fully orchestrated. They weren't going to do the thing that rock bands normally did of playing as a band and then getting some strings to embellish things, Lee especially was going to write songs with the orchestration as an integral part. Bruce Botnick suggested Lee work with an arranger, David Angel, who had been an assistant to Nelson Riddle, for whom Botnick's mother worked as a music copyist. Angel spent three weeks working intently with Lee, transcribing Lee's ideas. Lee was not a trained musician, or even a particularly good guitarist or pianist, and as Angel said "Arthur communicated with me without words and without instruction. He knew some things, but he didn’t know how to express them and had no training. He would refer to a ‘string instrument,’ a cello or violin, say, and I got the idea finally that he was referring to any stringed instrument. He would use general words like ‘strings’ or ‘brass.’ Sometimes he’d play a note on the piano and look at me, so I would make a mental note to make sure that note got in there. It was a largely non-verbal communication.” Nonetheless, Angel credited Lee with the final arrangements, insisting on only being given the credit of "orchestrator" on Lee's songs, because he was just implementing Lee's ideas -- he took an arranger credit on Bryan MacLean's songs, because MacLean gave him more of a free hand. Neil Young was brought in as the producer for the album, although he soon dropped out. Reports differ on quite what happened -- according to Botnick, Young worked with Lee on the songs until shortly before the first session, and then said "Man, I can’t do it. I’m hearing too much in my own head for me to immerse myself in someone else’s music." According to Echols meanwhile “We were contemporaries and very good friends with the guys in Buffalo Springfield. If we were playing a club and Neil came in, he’d jump up on stage and play with us. Bruce said he had a friend who needed some money and would come in and maybe produce a few of the songs on Forever Changes. He didn’t tell us it was Neil. I guess Neil told Bruce not to tell us it was him. When he showed up, we all started laughing and said, ‘Come on, this won’t work. We’re not going to listen to Neil.’  We did maybe one song together and that was it. He got some money for that day because he desperately needed it.” It was eventually decided that Lee and Botnick would co-produce, without an outside producer getting involved. If Young did produce one song, it was likely an early take of "The Daily Planet", which he often gets credited for arranging, though he's always denied having anything to do with it: [Excerpt: Love, "The Daily Planet"] But "The Daily Planet", the first song recorded for the new album, was where things started to fall apart. By this point all of the band had severe drug problems, and that's often blamed for the first session going horribly wrong. But in fact there were a whole host of problems. The first was the new way of writing, with an orchestrator. The problem was that in the past, what had always happened was that Lee would come to the band and play them the simplified versions of songs that he had worked up, and they would come up with their own parts, something like what he described. But he'd already done that with David Angel, and now the band had to follow his inarticulate instructions but *also* had to fit with the pre-written orchestral parts. They'd also not had a chance to play the new material live, because they'd hardly been playing any gigs. The only reason they had any money was that they had renegotiated their contract with Elektra. They'd got a twenty-five thousand dollar advance for the album, but they had to pay the costs out of that -- if they could keep the costs down, anything left over was theirs. And then they'd been told by Elektra that they weren't going to be doing a double album after all. They were going to be doing a single album, and it would be all Arthur's songs, with two of Bryan's and none of Johnny's. Echols was hurt by this but put his songs to one side, hoping to put them on a future album, which he started referring to as Gethsemane, because that was where Judas betrayed Jesus and he felt similarly betrayed by the label. But MacLean and Forssi hatched another plan. They were going to do a work-to-rule, and play sloppily on Lee's songs, If their playing on Lee's songs was barely competent, but on MacLean's songs it was great, they reasoned, the label would ditch a few of Lee's songs and put in a few more of MacLean's. So at the initial session, when they started recording "The Daily Planet", there were two musicians, Echols and Stuart Ware, who were trying their best but underrehearsed, and two others who couldn't care less. As the recording dragged on and on without a single decent take, using up valuable studio time and eating into that advance, Lee and Botnick were in the control room, and came up with a way to shake the instrumentalists up. They announced that the group weren't going to be playing on the sessions any more. They were going to bring the Wrecking Crew in. So on “The Daily Planet" and "Andmoreagain", instead of Bryan MacLean, Ken Forssi, and Michael Stuart Ware, the musicians were Billy Strange, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, and Don Randi, though Echols still added lead guitar -- and according to some reports, Carol Kaye couldn't get the bass part down for "The Daily Planet", Forssi showed her how it went, and Lee let him just play it: [Excerpt: Love, "The Daily Planet"] The tactic worked. The band were shaken, and MacLean was apparently in tears. The two tracks cut with the Wrecking Crew were kept on the album, but Botnick and Lee told the group they were going to postpone the rest of the sessions two months. They had better be able to play the songs when they restarted. The group spent the summer of 1967 rehearsing the new material, not playing gigs. They even turned down the Monterey Pop Festival in order to concentrate on learning the new material -- though that may have had as much to do with it being organised by Lee's old bete noir Lou Adler, and it not paying the artists, as it did their concentration on their work, though as Jac Holzman said, it was a sign of how respected they were that they were offered the slot at all, while a band like the Doors weren't even invited to play. Of the eleven songs on the album, nine were Lee's, and many of them combined dark, paranoid lyrics with almost nursery rhyme melodies: [Excerpt: Love, "Live and Let Live"] Even a more optimistic song like the one that had originally been titled "Hummingbirds", all about hummingbirds flying and little girls playing outside, was given the sardonic, undercutting, title "The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This" -- that's not the real world, it's just how the ice cream man sees things. Of course everyone's happy when they're getting ice cream, but the world's still going to end. This does, however, get resolved at the end of the album, with the magnificent "You Set the Scene", which manages to turn that pessimism of imminent death into something positive: [Excerpt: Love, "You Set the Scene"] That track was placed at the end by Jac Holzman, who sequenced the album, and so it was him who placed MacLean's song "Alone Again Or" at the start. Possibly this was in part to placate MacLean, but it's also the most obvious choice for an opener, being far more immediate than anything else on the album. The song had started as a fairly straightforward folk-rock song, and listening to MacLean's later solo demo recordings it sounds like he probably intended it to be vaguely Byrds-like: [Excerpt: Bryan MacLean, "Alone Again Or"] But Echols, as he did on the one or two songs MacLean got per album, tried to steer him into a more interesting direction. He said later “Bryan started ‘Alone Again Or’ as another one of his folk songs. I started playing flamenco licks and flourishes in rehearsal, and it went from being a folk song to a Spanish-influenced song. We changed the cadence of it. I was just noodling around, trying to find different things that would compliment what Bryan was doing. I would always rearrange Bryan’s songs, trying to add something so as to pull them away from sounding like show tunes. It had that Spanish feel, to me. There were probably two or three overdubs of mine where I’m playing inside the chords of that song." And then when Angel arranged the strings and horns, he picked up on Echols' flamenco embellishments. As he put it “Unlike Arthur, Bryan didn’t know what to tell me, He didn’t have any idea what he wanted, so I had to ask him a lot of questions to draw out something that I could hold onto. In the end, I made all the suggestions and he would always say that sounded very cool. With Bryan’s songs, the orchestration was completely an interpretation from my point of view. On “Alone Again Or,” he just told me to take it where I wanted to take it. I heard this very strong Spanish guitar effect and I went with that feeling, more than the song. The song itself had no Spanish effect at all, but the rhythm of the guitar drew me into that feel and I just reacted to it. I suggested to him, ‘What if we have a baroque background with a trumpet doing a kind of Spanish style?’ It’s not Mariachi. It’s not Mexican. What makes it Spanish is that the background is baroque in style, not polka. It’s like bullfight music, because that’s Spanish music": [Excerpt: Love, "Alone Again Or"] "Alone Again Or" is one of only two tracks on Forever Changes with little Arthur Lee involvement. Lee probably doesn't appear at all on MacLean's other song, "Old Man", as while most issues of the album credit him as playing guitar on the record, Johnny Echols has always been insistent that Lee didn't play at all on Forever Changes, just sang and produced. On "Alone Again Or", though, Lee is present -- in the studio he sang harmony with MacLean's lead, but when they were mixing it, it was decided that MacLean's vocals were weak, and so Lee's vocal was raised in the mix, and his harmony became the lead, rather than what was intended to be the melody: [Excerpt: Love, "Alone Again Or"] MacLean later accepted this was necessary, but at the time he was infuriated. That wasn't the only problem band members had with the mix of Forever Changes, either. Both MacLean and Stuart Ware thought that the mix was too light, and didn't have enough of the rhythm section, and Lee was never happy with how the intro of "Alone Again Or" faded in, saying it started too quietly: [Excerpt: Love, "Alone Again Or"] According to Echols, this was because MacLean was using steel picks on his fingers, and they were clattering against the guitar when he played, and he wouldn't let Echols -- who played with his fingers rather than picks -- play it, so it had to be ducked in the mix at the beginning until the other instruments came in to cover up the noise. Bruce Botnick has later said that he thinks he could do a better job, and wishes he had the opportunity to do a surround sound remix of the album, but sadly almost all the multitracks and master tapes are lost and presumably destroyed. The album was originally to be titled "The Third Coming of Love", but at the last minute Lee changed the title. He'd split up with a girlfriend, who had said to him, upset, "You said you'd love me forever!" and he'd replied, "Yeah, well, forever changes", and been so pleased with his cleverness that that became the album's title. The group went into the studio after Forever Changes to record two more tracks, which eventually became a single but were intended for a fourth album. But by this point everything was falling apart. All the group except Lee were using heroin -- Lee had his own drug problems, but heroin was never his drug of choice -- and the rift between Lee and MacLean had grown insuperable. The final straw came when Elektra chose "Alone Again Or" as the single from Forever Changes. Lee needed to be the leader of the group, and he couldn't cope with having someone else's song picked over any of his. And at the same time, MacLean was making plans for a solo album, which Lee was vehemently against, telling him "You're either in Love or you're not". As it turned out, he was not. Then one of the band's roadies died of a heroin overdose. The few gigs the band were playing, they were playing awfully, they were all addicts, they all hated each other. The group didn't formally split up, they just stopped talking to each other. MacLean would always blame Holzman for the split, saying “It was facilitated by Jac Holzman. He’s actually responsible for the end of Love. I might not have quit, but when they offered me a way out I started thinking, ‘Maybe I’m unhappy here.’” He left the group, got himself off heroin, and recorded some demos for the solo album Holzman had been suggesting he could do: [Excerpt: Bryan MacLean, "Claudia"] But Holzman listened to the demos and turned him down. According to Holzman, “His best stuff turned out to be the songs he recorded with Love,” The demos finally got a release in 1997, and MacLean largely left the music business after Love, going into real estate, though with occasional attempts at solo performances in the eighties, and becoming a born-again Christian. The rest of the band tried to struggle on for a while, but without MacLean, the band simply didn't feel like Love, and their addictions were making them flaky and unreliable. Eventually they heard through the grapevine that Lee had put together an entirely new band and was calling that Love. Stuart Ware went on to play with Neil Diamond, before retiring from music so that he could stay off drugs. He later wrote an autobiography about his time in Love. Echols went to New York, got himself clean, and got some session work and became a music teacher, Ken Forssi struggled for most of his life, finding it unable to hold down a job because of his addiction issues. And Lee, he found another group -- didn't take too long: [Excerpt: Love, "Doggone"] But his new group, while it called itself Love, was... *not* Love. The musicians in his new band looked at Lee's older music with contempt. They wanted  to be heavy rockers, not do things with acoustic guitars and harpsichords and mariachi trumpets. They wanted to show off their solos. And it destroyed the music. Like that song we just heard a snatch of, "Doggone", from Out Here, the second album by that version of Love. It's a lovely little gentle ballad. And then it becomes this: [Excerpt: Love, "Doggone"] An eight minute drum solo, by a drummer who, when the group toured the UK, went up to someone he thought was Ginger Baker and started boasting about how much better he was on drums than Baker. These were not the most sympathetic musical companions for Lee. Their recordings did so badly that Lee's new label, Blue Thumb, insisted on him trying to get the old version of Love, minus MacLean, back together for a European tour. They played one gig together in the US, but that was a disaster, and so the New Love continued to be the only Love there was. During the seventies, Lee moved to smaller and smaller labels, and had an ever-changing lineup of musicians. He had his own drug problems now, mostly cocaine, and also some severe mental health issues. He would make albums with one or two new songs that sounded as good as anything he'd done and a bunch of terrible filler. There were moments of hope, like when he reconnected with his old friend Jimi Hendrix, and Hendrix guested on a track on the latest album by a version of Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "The Everlasting First"] According to Lee, Hendrix was considering putting together a new band with Lee and Steve Winwood, but died before the group got together. Or there was the time when Eric Clapton and Robert Plant, two huge fans of Love, persuaded Robert Stigwood to sign Lee to his label. Stigwood gave him a multi-album contract, with a big budget for the first album, and threw all his weight behind promoting the album, including getting Lee a support slot on Clapton's tour. And then on the first night of the tour, with Stigwood in the audience, Lee started complaining on stage about how he'd been treated badly by every record label, about how all the label executives were racist, and about how he was still a slave and Stigwood just his latest master. Stigwood would have nothing further to do with him after that, and Lee never recorded for a major label again. He spent part of the late seventies caring for his terminally-ill stepfather, and then spent the eighties getting into legal trouble and playing bad gigs with bad backing bands, and recording the odd bad album. By 1993, he was a legendary casualty of rock music, so much so that Robyn Hitchcock recorded a song called "The Wreck of the Arthur Lee": [Excerpt: Robyn Hitchcock, "The Wreck of the Arthur Lee"] But then something strange happened. A song from one of those bad albums -- actually his last ever studio album, from 1992 -- was covered by Mazzy Star on their 1993 platinum-selling album So Tonight That I Might See: [Excerpt: Mazzy Star, "Five String Serenade"] Suddenly, people wanted to know Arthur Lee again, and bands that had been influenced by him started talking about him. He played gigs in the UK, backed by the Liverpool band Shack and by the chamber-pop band the High Llamas, and for the first time since the original band split up he was being backed by musicians who actually cared about his music and had the skill to play it. The same thing happened in the US, where he hooked up with Baby Lemonade, a band who were part of a growing scene in LA in the nineties, of experimental powerpop bands that also included the Wondermints, the Negro Problem, and others. These were serious musicians, serious fans of Love, and most importantly they were a band in their own right. Lee had grown used to playing mind games with his musicians and playing them off against each other, threatening to sack individuals if they annoyed him. Baby Lemonade, because they were a band themselves and had been playing together already, had a one-for-all and all-for-one attitude that meant that Lee couldn't bully them. Things were finally going well for Lee, and he even talked with the other original members of Love about working with some of them again, though as far as he was concerned Baby Lemonade were the new Love. But then disaster struck. Lee was arrested for allegedly discharging a gun in the air. The details of what happened are murky, and he was later freed on appeal, but at the time, because he had two previous felony convictions, he was convicted under California's "three strikes" law, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Bryan MacLean started corresponding with him in prison, and the two had apparently patched up their friendship, but while Lee was in prison both MacLean and Forssi died, as did Lee's mother. When he got out of prison after serving five and a half years, he was a changed man. He reconnected with Baby Lemonade, and they started touring, mostly in the UK and Europe. The shows weren't always big or prestigious, at least at first -- the second time I saw him, it was at the Limelight Club in Crewe, a small club venue with a capacity of four hundred that pretty much exclusively hosted tribute acts, and I remember chatting with the sound engineer before the show. Baby Lemonade had soundchecked without Lee, as was their habit, and the sound engineer was complaining about them being one of these young bands who rely on huge numbers of effects pedals, and how you wouldn't get proper old-school musicians like Jimi Hendrix doing that kind of thing. He looked suitably chastened when I explained that the singer with the band had actually sung with Hendrix. But Lee gave truly exceptional performances, even in venues like that, and he got a lot more appreciation than that would suggest. In June 2002, for example, nine MPs signed an early-day motion in the House of Commons "That this House pays tribute to the legendary Arthur Lee, also known as Arthurly, frontman and inspiration of Love, the world's greatest rock band and creators of Forever Changes, the greatest album of all time; notes that following his release from jail he is currently touring Europe; and urges honourable and especially Right honourable Members to consider the potential benefit to their constituents if they were, with the indulgence of their whips, to lighten up and tune in to one of his forthcoming British gigs." This new version of Love -- Arthur Lee and Baby Lemonade -- played the main stage at Glastonbury, played the Royal Festival Hall, and performed the whole of Forever Changes live with string and horn sections: [Excerpt: Love with Arthur Lee, "Alone Again Or (live)"[ In 2004, Johnny Echols even rejoined the group, the two old friends reunited and playing their old classics together. But then, when the band got to the airport for their 2005 UK tour, they called Lee to find out where he was. He was at home. He wasn't coming. He wouldn't tell them why. He told them they couldn't go to the UK either. He was behaving very erratically, but they were used to that. The band were faced with a dilemma -- if they didn't make the trip, all the promoters, people who had supported them for years and who in many cases were fans themselves working on shoestring budgets, would be out thousands. They ended up doing the tour with Echols and without Lee, giving audiences partial refunds if they stayed to watch the show even without its star, or full refunds if they didn't. Mike Randle, Baby Lemonade's guitarist, later said "We paid off the tour bus and that was it. That was a very tough thing, but what made it all right were the fans; they were wonderful. They were feeding us and bringing us groceries because we were dirt poor. We would stop the bus by the side of a road and barbecue whatever the fans had given us. Johnny was wonderful. His house was facing foreclosure; I was facing going to court because I was behind in my child support payments. But all we could do was play the music. We did all this because we didn’t want to stick anyone with the bills. We talked with Arthur every day, several times a day, asking him to come over, but he wouldn’t do it and he wouldn’t tell us why." Randle started blogging about what was happening, in an understandably angry tone, so the fans would know that the situation wasn't the fault of him or his bandmates. This got back to Lee, and Lee decided he was never going to work with them again. He was going to get a new Love. Except while he tried to do that, the new band never played a gig together, because what Lee hadn't told the members of Baby Lemonade was that he hadn't gone to the airport because he was physically incapable of it. He was in too much pain. He'd been ill since he was in prison -- I was amazed to discover later that the vibrant, active, charismatic person I saw on those UK tours between 2002 and 2004 was suffering from Parkinson's disease, and he was also diabetic -- but this was worse. He simply couldn't function any more, he was in so much pain, though he did manage to make one last record, a guest vocal appearance on a record by Chico Hamilton, singing the old standard "What's Your Story, Morning Glory?" [Excerpt: Chico Hamilton, "What's Your Story, Morning Glory?"] Lee had been raised a Christian Scientist, and didn't like going to see doctors, even when he was in agony. When he finally did, he found out he had leukaemia, and needed a stem cell transplant, though even then the prognosis wasn't good -- he was told he had a twenty percent chance of survival if he had the operation, but no chance at all if he didn't. He was uninsured, but the musicians he'd inspired rallied round, putting together a benefit concert in New York to raise funds for his treatment, featuring Ian Hunter, Nils Lofgren, Yo La Tengo, Ryan Adams, and Robert Plant, who did a twelve-song set, including five Love covers, performing with Johnny Echols: [Excerpt: Robert Plant, "Bummer in the Summer"] But sadly, the transplant didn't take, and Arthur Lee died in August 2006. Johnny Echols still tours, performing with Baby Lemonade, the musicians who played with Arthur Lee for longer than any other group of musicians, as either Love Revisited or The Love Band. He's regularly talked about plans to finish up the songs he wrote for the follow-up to Forever Changes with the members of Baby Lemonade and release them as Gethsemane, possibly with Michael Stuart Ware being involved too, and he's also said he's writing an autobiography. I've seen the band twice since Arthur Lee's death, and they put on a great show, devoted to songs from the first three classic Love albums. The story of Love is a story of heartbreak, self-sabotage, and missed opportunities, But then, aren't most stories? They may never have had the commercial success their obvious talents suggested they would, but they inspired artists as different as the Doors and the High Llamas, Robert Plant and Robyn Hitchcock, and they leave behind three classic albums and a bunch of momentarily brilliant might-have beens. The unfulfilled potential of those might-have-beens can sometimes make us forget the very real, existing, music that they made, so I'll leave you with a final clip from Forever Changes: [Excerpt: Love, "You Set The Scene" into theme music] ... Read more

13 Jan 2023

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13 Jan 2023


#204

XMAS BONUS: “Christmas Time is Here Again” by the Beatles

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Hello, and welcome to this week's second Patreon bonus episode. I'm recording this on December the twenty-third, so whether you hear this before Christmas is largely down to how quickly we can get the main episode edited and uploaded. Hopefully, this is going up on Christmas Eve and you're all feeling appropriately festive. Normally for the Patreon bonuses in the last week of December I choose a particularly Christmassy record from the time period we're covering in the main podcast -- usually a perennial Christmas hit like something off the Phil Spector Christmas album or the Elvis Christmas album. However, this year we're in the mid sixties, a period when none of the big hits of US or UK Christmas music were released, because it's after the peak of US Christmas music and before the peak of UK Christmas music. There were Christmas albums by people like James Brown, but they weren't major parts of the discography. So today, we're going to have a brief run-through of the Beatles' Christmas records. These were flexi-discs -- which for those of you who are too young to remember them were records pressed on very, very, thin, cheap plastic, which used to be attached to things like kids' comics or cereal boxes as promotional gimmicks -- sent out to members of the group's fan club. In a way, these were the Beatles' very own Patreon bonuses, sent out to fans and supporters, and not essential works, but hopefully interesting and fun. They very rarely had anything like a full song, being mostly made up of sketches and recorded messages, and other than a limited-edition vinyl reissue a few years back they've never been put on general release -- though one song from the discs, "Christmas Time is Here Again", *was* released as a B-side of the CD single of "Free as A Bird" in 1995: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Other than that, the Christmas records remain one of those parts of the Beatles catalogue which have never seen a proper widespread release. The first record was made on October the 17th 1963, at the same recording session as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", at the instigation of Tony Barrow, the group's publicist, who also came up with a script for the group to depart from: [Excerpt, the Beatles' first Christmas record] Barrow apparently edited the recording himself, using scissors and tape, and much of that was just taking out the swearing. Incidentally, I've seen some American sources talking about the word "Crimble" being a word that the Beatles made up themselves, but it's actually a fairly standard bit of Scouse slang. The second Christmas record was recorded at the end of the sessions for Beatles For Sale and was much the same kind of thing, though this time they incorporated sound effects: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Second Christmas Record] That was never sent to American fans. Instead, they got a cardboard copy of an edited version of the first record (it's possible to make records out of cardboard, but they can only be played a handful of times). They wouldn't get another Christmas record until 1968, though British fans kept receiving them. The third record sees the group parodying other people's hits, including a brief rendition of "It's the Same Old Song" interrupted by George Harrison saying they can't sing it because of copyright, and an attempt to sing Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" and "Auld Lang Syne" at the same time: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Third Christmas Record] The fourth record, from 1966, was recorded during the early sessions for "Strawberry Fields Forever", and titled "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas". For those outside the UK and its sphere of cultural influence, pantomime is a British Xmas stage tradition which is very hard to explain if you've not experienced it, involving performances that are ostensibly of fairy stories like Cinderella or Snow White, but also usually involving drag performances -- the male lead is usually played by a young woman, while there's usually an old woman character played by a man in drag -- with audience participation, songs, and old jokes of the "I do declare, the Prince's balls get bigger every year!" type. As the title suggests, then, the 1966 Christmas record is an attempt at an actual narrative of sorts, though a surreal, incoherent one. It comes across very much like the Goon show -- though like one of the later episodes where Milligan has lost all sense of narrative coherence: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas"] it's probably the best of the group's Christmas efforts, and certainly the most fully realised to this point. The 1967 Christmas record, "Christmas Time is Here Again", is even more ambitious. It's another narrative, which sees the group playing a fictitious group called the Ravellers, auditioning for the BBC: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] It also features parodies of broadcasting formats, which I've seen a few people suggest were inspired by the Bonzo Dog Band's then-recent Craig Torso Show radio performances, but which seem to me more indicative just of a general shared sense of humour: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] But that record has become most famous for having one of the closest things on any of these records to a full song, the title track "Christmas Time is Here Again": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] As well as later being issued as the B-side of a CD single, that was also remade by Ringo as a solo record: [Excerpt: Ringo Starr, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Although my favourite use of the song is actually as an interpolation, with slightly altered lyrics, in "Xmas Again" by Stew of the Negro Problem, one of my favourite current songwriters: [Excerpt: Stew, "Xmas Again"] "Christmas Time is Here Again" would be the last Christmas record the group would make together. For their final two Christmas releases, they recorded their parts separately and got their friend, the DJ Kenny Everett, who was known at this point for his tricks with tape editing, and who shared their sense of humour (he later went on to become a successful TV comedian) to collage them together into something listenable. The highlight of the 1968 record comes from George's contribution. George, a lover of the ukulele, got Tiny Tim to record his version of "Nowhere Man" for the record: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Nowhere Man"] And for the seventh and final Christmas single, recorded after the group had split up but before the split was announced, Everett once again cobbled it together from separate recordings, this time a chat between John and Yoko, Ringo improvising a song and plugging his new film, and Paul singing an original Christmas song: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Merry, Merry, Year"] George's contribution was a single sentence. In 1970, the fan club members got one final record -- an actual vinyl album, compiling all the previous Christmas records in one place. All the Beatles would in future record solo Christmas singles, some of which became perennial classics, but there would never be another Beatles Christmas record [Excerpt, the end of the third Beatles Christmas record] ... Read more

29 Dec 2022

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29 Dec 2022


#203

XMAS BONUS: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

As we’re in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I’d upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I’m uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don’t have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they’re still worth listening to. Transcript It's the middle of December, as you have probably noticed, and that means it's a time when the airwaves in both the UK and the US are dominated by Christmas music. The music that's most prominent in the UK will have to wait until we get to the seventies for a discussion, but this week and next week in these bonus episodes I'll be looking at a few American Christmas classics: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Here Comes Santa Claus"] If I'd been doing these Patreon bonus episodes from the beginning of the podcast, rather than waiting for the first six months or so to do them on a regular basis, I'd have covered Gene Autry in one by about the fourth episode. He's someone whose name you'll have heard a lot in the podcast -- he was an influence on all sorts of musicians we've looked at, in all areas of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, Hank Ballard, Bo Diddley, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, and Les Paul all acknowledged him as someone they were trying to imitate in one way or another, and that's just the ones where I've been able to find clear confirmation. Autry was not, in any direct sense, a precursor to rock and roll. He didn't make records that included any of the elements that later became prominent in the new music, and he didn't have a rebellious image at all. But from the early 1930s to the early 1950s, he was the single biggest star in country music. He starred in many films, had his own radio show, had a line of comics about him, and he was so popular that even his *horse* had his own radio and TV show. British people from my generation may well remember Champion, The Wonder Horse still being repeated as kids' TV in the eighties. THAT's how big Gene Autry was, and so it's unsurprising that he influenced pretty much every singer of note in the rock and roll field. But he was also, along with Bing Crosby, one of the people who pioneered American secular Christmas music: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer"] I specify "American" secular Christmas music here, because one thing that differs between the US and the UK when it comes to Christmas is the music that's ubiquitous. In the UK, Christmas music mostly means glam rock -- you hear Slade and Wizzard incessantly, and other 70s artists like Mud. In the US, though, it means primarily the music of the forties and fifties -- the music of people like Gene Autry. Autry started his career as just another country singer, who performed as "Oklahoma's Yodelling Cowboy". His early recordings were very much in the style of Jimmie Rodgers, and were very different from his later clean-cut image: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Black Bottom Blues"] But in 1932 he had a hit with a song he wrote, which would soon become a standard of country music, a rather maudlin ballad called "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine"] As a result of that hit, Autry started appearing in films. The first film he appeared in was a serial -- The Phantom Empire -- in which he starred as a singing cowboy who is kidnapped by people from the underground super-science kingdom Murania, descendants of the lost tribe of Mu, and has to help them defend themselves from an evil scientist who wants to steal their radium. It may not surprise you that the writer of the film came up with the plot for it while on nitrous oxide, having a tooth extracted. Autry made another forty-four films in the next five years, and every year from 1937 through 1942 he was the top star of Western films in the US, as well as having a whole series of hits with songs like "Blueberry Hill": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Blueberry Hill"] However, in 1942 he enlisted in the army, against the wishes of Republic, the film studio for whom he worked. They told him that if he was just going to go off and fight Nazis instead of making singing cowboy films, they were going to promote Roy Rogers instead. So from 1942 through 1945, Autry was off fighting in the Second World War. After he got back, he was the *second* most successful singing cowboy film star, after Rogers. It was in 1947 that Autry got the inspiration for the song that would define his career. He was riding his horse in a Christmas parade, known as the Santa Claus Lane parade, and he heard spectators saying "here comes Santa Claus": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Here Comes Santa Claus"] "Here Comes Santa Claus" not only charted that Xmas, it charted the Xmas after as well. Given that Autry's recording career was slowly fading, it seemed to make sense for him to record another Christmas song about Santa and see if he could repeat his success: [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"] Not only did that go to number one -- and become the first number one of the fifties -- but "Here Comes Santa Claus" charted for the third year in a row. So of course, the next year (after an Easter single, "Peter Cottontail", which also charted, but didn't have the same repeat success as the Christmas songs), he recorded yet another Christmas single, "Frosty the Snowman": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Frosty the Snowman"] The next year, he didn't release a Christmas single at all, and he seemed to lose momentum. In 1952 he released one final Christmas record, "Up on the Housetop": [Excerpt: Gene Autry, "Up on the Housetop"] But that had nothing like the success his earlier Christmas records had. He carried on making films and TV shows until the mid-fifties, and he finally retired in 1964. He died in 1998. His Christmas records still occasionally hit the charts in December, and regularly feature in the special Holiday charts Billboard publish every year. ... Read more

28 Dec 2022

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28 Dec 2022


#202

XMAS BONUS: Little St. Nick

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Transcript We talked in the last bonus episode about how the American Christmas music canon more or less ends in 1963. One record that just got in under that wire was "Little Saint Nick", recorded by the Beach Boys in October 1963 and released in December: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' leader, was apparently inspired to write a Christmas song by Phil Spector -- Wilson turned up to at least one of the sessions for the Spector Christmas album, and had briefly played piano during a couple of takes of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", although he wasn't actually on the record itself, as Spector decided he wasn't a good enough player. The date the Beach Boys recorded their Christmas song, October the twentieth 1963, was actually a historic date for the group. We'll talk about this more in a few weeks' time when we next look at the Beach Boys in the main podcast, but they had gone through a bit of a lineup shuffle, and David Marks had played his last gig with the group the night before, while Al Jardine had rejoined the band shortly before that. That meant that this was the first session since their first single at which the Beach Boys were the classic five-person lineup of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine. There seems to be some confusion about what happened at that session, as they recorded two backing tracks. One of them became the "Little Saint Nick" that was a hit, but they also recorded a track that later became an album track called "Drive In": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In"] But there also exists a recording of that backing track, but with the lyrics to "Little Saint Nick": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In (Little Saint Nick version)"] I've seen conflicting accounts of how that track came to exist. Some say that they tried both backing tracks with the same lyrics at the original session, and that they then wrote the "Drive In" lyrics for the track that didn't make the cut as "Little Saint Nick", while others say that they actually sung the "Little Saint Nick" lyrics to the "Drive In" track as a joke a few months later, long after the original "Little Saint Nick" had already come out. Whichever is the truth, the version of "Little Saint Nick" that eventually came out as a single was this one, which became one of the last holiday classics in the US Christmas canon: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] "Little Saint Nick" is very clearly modelled on an earlier hit by the group, "Little Deuce Coupe", and so it makes sense to me that the track that was chosen was the originally intended one, as musically that's quite close to the earlier song. "Little Saint Nick" was only a moderate success on the main chart, but it made number three on Billboard's Christmas Singles chart, which was enough of a success that the group decided the next year to record a full Christmas album. That album included a remixed version of "Little Saint Nick", with the backing track stripped down to sound more like the rest of the album's first side, which was rush-recorded with few overdubs. That album was recorded in a style that the Beach Boys did quite a bit at that time, with a side for "the kids" -- uptempo original songs -- and a side for "the adults", with orchestral versions of more traditional Christmas songs, arranged by the Four Freshmen's arranger Dick Reynolds, including a gorgeous version of "We Three Kings": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "We Three Kings"] The Beach Boys would have another attempt at making a Christmas album, in 1977, which went unreleased at the time -- mostly because much of it is truly terrible. However, there were a couple of worthwhile tracks on the album -- Brian Wilson's "Winter Symphony": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Winter Symphony"] And his brother Dennis' "Morning Christmas": [Excerpt: Dennis Wilson, "Morning Christmas"] Much of that album has since been released, with their 1964 Christmas album, on the compilation "Ultimate Christmas". Both Brian Wilson and Mike Love have since released solo Christmas albums. Both are patchy affairs, but Wilson's has a lovely version of "Joy to the World" as a bonus track: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Joy to the World"] And it has a few other genuinely nice tracks, while the highlight of Love's is rather less impressive -- a reworking of "Shortenin' Bread" titled "Reason For the Season": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Reason for the Season"] Both albums also include remakes of "Little Saint Nick", the one Beach Boys Christmas song that has really entered the consciousness of the general public. And while this podcast episode might have ended up being too late for you to still be hearing that one on the radio, I'm sure you'll start hearing it again, for the fifty-eighth straight year, come the last week of November 2021. Because some things, at least, stay the same no matter what's happening in the rest of the world. ... Read more

27 Dec 2022

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27 Dec 2022


#201

Episode 160: “Flowers in the Rain” by the Move

Episode 160 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flowers in the Rain" by the Move, their transition into ELO, and the career of Roy Wood. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on ["The Chipmunk Song" by Canned Heat] (https://www.patreon.com/posts/76255150) . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at  [http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust] (http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust)  and  [http://sitcomclub.com/] (http://sitcomclub.com/) Note I say "And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record." -- I should point out that after Martin's theme fades, Blackburn talks over a brief snatch of a piece by Johnny Dankworth. Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I’ve decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here’s [part one] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-160a-flowers-in-the-rain-part-one/) and [part two] (https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-160b-flowers-in-the-rain-part-2/) . There are not many books about Roy Wood, and I referred to both of the two that seem to exist -- [this biography] (https://amzn.to/3hJAnp2) by John van der Kiste, and [this album guide] (https://amzn.to/3HYMfOK) by James R Turner.  I also referred to [this biography of Jeff Lynne] (https://amzn.to/3Vk4KAh) by van der Kiste, [The Electric Light Orchestra Story] (https://amzn.to/3BVPEde) by Bev Bevan, and  [Mr Big] (https://amzn.to/3HVdXMg) by Don Arden with Mick Wall.  Most of the more comprehensive compilations of the Move's material are out of print, but [this single-CD-plus-DVD anthology] (https://amzn.to/3FODnbU) is the best compilation that's in print. [This] (https://amzn.to/3WydOlS) is the one collection of Wood's solo and Wizzard hits that seems currently in print, and for those who want to investigate further, [this cheap box set] (https://amzn.to/3POIihl) has the last Move album, the first ELO album, the first Wizzard album, Wood's solo Boulders, and a later Wood solo album, for the price of a single CD. Transcript Before I start, a brief note. This episode deals with organised crime, and so contains some mild descriptions of violence, and also has some mention of mental illness and drug use, though not much of any of those things. And it's probably also important to warn people that towards the end there's some Christmas music, including excerpts of a song that is inescapable at this time of year in the UK, so those who work in retail environments and the like may want to listen to this later, at a point when they're not totally sick of hearing Christmas records. Most of the time, the identity of the party in government doesn't make that much of a difference to people's everyday lives.  At least in Britain, there tends to be a consensus ideology within the limits of which governments of both main parties tend to work. They will make a difference at the margins, and be more or less competent, and more or less conservative or left-wing, more or less liberal or authoritarian, but life will, broadly speaking, continue along much as before for most people. Some will be a little better or worse off, but in general steering the ship of state is a matter of a lot of tiny incremental changes, not of sudden u-turns. But there have been a handful of governments that have made big, noticeable, changes to the structure of society, reforms that for better or worse affect the lives of every person in the country. Since the end of the Second World War there have been two UK governments that made economic changes of this nature. The Labour government under Clement Atlee which came into power in 1945, and which dramatically expanded the welfare state, introduced the National Health Service, and nationalised huge swathes of major industries, created the post-war social democratic consensus which would be kept to with only minor changes by successive governments of both major parties for decades. The next government to make changes to the economy of such a radical nature was the Conservative government which came to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which started the process of unravelling that social democratic consensus and replacing it with a far more hypercapitalist economic paradigm, which would last for the next several decades. It's entirely possible that the current Conservative government, in leaving the EU, has made a similarly huge change, but we won't know that until we have enough distance from the event to know what long-term changes it's caused. Those are economic changes. Arguably at least as impactful was the Labour government led by Harold Wilson that came to power in 1964, which did not do much to alter the economic consensus, but revolutionised the social order at least as much. Largely because of the influence of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary for much of that time, between 1964 and the end of the sixties, Britain abolished the death penalty for murder, decriminalised some sex acts between men in private, abolished corporal punishment in prisons, legalised abortion in certain circumstances, and got rid of censorship in the theatre. They also vastly increased spending on education, and made many other changes. By the end of their term, Britain had gone from being a country with laws reflecting a largely conservative, authoritarian, worldview to one whose laws were some of the most liberal in Europe, and society had started changing to match. There were exceptions, though, and that government did make some changes that were illiberal. They brought in increased restrictions on immigration, starting a worrying trend that continues to this day of governments getting ever crueler to immigrants, and they added LSD to the list of illegal drugs. And they brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, banning the pirate stations. We've mentioned pirate radio stations very briefly, but never properly explained them. In Britain, at this point, there was a legal monopoly on broadcasting. Only the BBC could run a radio station in the UK, and thanks to agreements with the Musicians' Union, the BBC could only play a very small amount of recorded music, with everything else having to be live performances or spoken word. And because it had a legal obligation to provide something for everyone, that meant the tiny amount of recorded music that was played on the radio had to cover all genres, meaning that even while Britain was going through the most important changes in its musical history, pop records were limited to an hour or two a week on British radio. Obviously, that wasn't going to last while there was money to be made, and the record companies in particular wanted to have somewhere to showcase their latest releases. At the start of the sixties, Radio Luxembourg had become popular, broadcasting from continental Europe but largely playing shows that had been pre-recorded in London. But of course, that was far enough away that it made listening to the transmissions difficult. But a solution presented itself: [Excerpt: The Fortunes, "Caroline"] Radio Caroline still continues to this day, largely as an Internet-based radio station, but in the mid-sixties it was something rather different. It was one of a handful of radio stations -- the pirate stations -- that broadcast from ships in international waters. The ships would stay three miles off the coast of Britain, close enough for their broadcasts to be clearly heard in much of the country, but outside Britain's territorial waters. They soon became hugely popular, with Radio Caroline and Radio London the two most popular, and introduced DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett, and John Peel to the airwaves of Britain. The stations ran on bribery and advertising, and if you wanted a record to get into the charts one of the things you had to do was bribe one of the big pirate stations to playlist it, and with this corruption came violence, which came to a head when as we heard in the episode on “Here Comes the Night”, in 1966 Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-wing politician and one of the directors of Radio Caroline, got a gang of people to board an abandoned sea fort from which a rival station was broadcasting and retrieve some equipment he claimed belonged to him. The next day, Reginald Calvert, the owner of the rival station, went to Smedley's home to confront him, and Smedley shot him dead, claiming self-defence. The jury in Smedley's subsequent trial took only a minute to find him not guilty and award him two hundred and fifty guineas to cover his costs. This was the last straw for the government, which was already concerned that the pirates' transmitters were interfering with emergency services transmissions, and that proper royalties weren't being paid for the music broadcast (though since much of the music was only on there because of payola, this seems a little bit of a moot point).  They introduced legislation which banned anyone in the UK from supplying the pirate ships with records or other supplies, or advertising on the stations. They couldn't do anything about the ships themselves, because they were outside British jurisdiction, but they could make sure that nobody could associate with them while remaining in the UK. The BBC was to regain its monopoly (though in later years some commercial radio stations were allowed to operate). But as well as the stick, they needed the carrot. The pirate stations *had* been filling a real need, and the biggest of them were getting millions of listeners every day. So the arrangements with the Musicians' Union and the record labels were changed, and certain BBC stations were now allowed to play a lot more recorded music per day. I haven't been able to find accurate figures anywhere -- a lot of these things were confidential agreements -- but it seems to have been that the so-called "needle time" rules were substantially relaxed, allowing the BBC to separate what had previously been the Light Programme -- a single radio station that played all kinds of popular music, much of it live performances -- into two radio stations that were each allowed to play as much as twelve hours of recorded music per day, which along with live performances and between-track commentary from DJs was enough to allow a full broadcast schedule. One of these stations, Radio 2, was aimed at older listeners, and to start with mostly had programmes of what we would now refer to as Muzak, mixed in with the pop music of an older generation -- crooners and performers like Englebert Humperdinck. But another, Radio 1, was aimed at a younger audience and explicitly modelled on the pirate stations, and featured many of the DJs who had made their names on those stations. And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record. At different times Blackburn has said either that he was just desperately reaching for whatever record came to hand or that he made a deliberate choice because the record he chose had such a striking opening that it would be the perfect way to start a new station: [Excerpt: Tony Blackburn first radio show into "Flowers in the Rain" by the Move] You may remember me talking in the episode on "Here Comes the Night" about how in 1964 Dick Rowe of Decca, the manager Larry Page, and the publicist and co-owner of Radio Caroline Phil Solomon were all trying to promote something called Brumbeat as the answer to Merseybeat – Brummies, for those who don't know, are people from Birmingham. Brumbeat never took off the way Merseybeat did, but several bands did get a chance to make records, among them Gerry Levene and the Avengers: [Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"] That was the only single the Avengers made, and the B-side wasn't even them playing, but a bunch of session musicians under the direction of Bert Berns, and the group split up soon afterwards, but several of the members would go on to have rather important careers. According to some sources, one of their early drummers was John Bohnam, who you can be pretty sure will be turning up later in the story, while the drummer on that track was Graeme Edge, who would later go on to co-found the Moody Blues.  But today it's the guitarist we'll be looking at. Roy Wood had started playing music when he was very young -- he'd had drum lessons when he was five years old, the only formal musical tuition he ever had, and he'd played harmonica around working men's clubs as a kid. And as a small child he'd loved classical music, particularly Tchaikovsky and Elgar. But it wasn't until he was twelve that he decided that he wanted to be a guitarist. He went to see the Shadows play live, and was inspired by the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, which he later described as sounding "like it had been dipped in Dettol or something": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] He started begging his parents for a guitar, and got one for his thirteenth birthday -- and by the time he was fourteen he was already in a band, the Falcons, whose members were otherwise eighteen to twenty years old, but who needed a lead guitarist who could play like Marvin. Wood had picked up the guitar almost preternaturally quickly, as he would later pick up every instrument he turned his hand to, and he'd also got the equipment. His friend Jeff Lynne later said "I first saw Roy playing in a church hall in Birmingham and I think his group was called the Falcons. And I could tell he was dead posh because he had a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier. The business at the time. I mean, if you've got those, that's it, you're made." It was in the Falcons that Wood had first started trying to write songs, at first instrumentals in the style of the Shadows, but then after the Beatles hit the charts he realised it was possible for band members to write their own material, and started hesitantly trying to write a few actual songs. Wood had moved on from the Falcons to Gerry Levene's band, one of the biggest local bands in Birmingham, when he was sixteen, which is also when he left formal education, dropping out from art school -- he's later said that he wasn't expelled as such, but that he and the school came to a mutual agreement that he wouldn't go back there. And when Gerry Levene and the Avengers fell apart after their one chance at success hadn't worked out, he moved on again to an even bigger band. Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders had had two singles out already, both produced by Cliff Richard's producer Norrie Paramor, and while they hadn't charted they were clearly going places. They needed a new guitarist, and Wood was by far the best of the dozen or so people who auditioned, even though Sheridan was very hesitant at first -- the Night Riders were playing cabaret, and all dressed smartly at all times, and this sixteen-year-old guitarist had turned up wearing clothes made by his sister and ludicrous pointy shoes. He was the odd man out, but he was so good that none of the other players could hold a candle to him, and he was in the Night Riders by the time of their third single, "What a Sweet Thing That Was": [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, "What a Sweet Thing That Was"] Sheridan later said "Roy was and still is, in my opinion, an unbelievable talent. As stubborn as a mule and a complete extrovert. Roy changed the group by getting us into harmonies and made us realize there was better material around with more than three chords to play. This was our turning point and we became a group's group and a bigger name." -- though there are few other people who would describe Wood as extroverted, most people describing him as painfully shy off-stage. "What a  Sweet Thing That Was" didn't have any success, and nor did its follow-up, "Here I Stand", which came out in January 1965. But by that point, Wood had got enough of a reputation that he was already starting to guest on records by other bands on the Birmingham scene, like "Pretty Things" by Danny King and the Mayfair Set: [Excerpt: Danny King and the Mayfair Set, "Pretty Things"] After their fourth single was a flop, Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders changed their name to Mike Sheridan's Lot, and the B-side of their first single under the new name was a Roy Wood song, the first time one of his songs was recorded. Unfortunately the song, modelled on "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones, didn't come off very well, and Sheridan blamed himself for what everyone was agreed was a lousy sounding record: [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan's Lot, "Make Them Understand"] Mike Sheridan's Lot put out one final single, but the writing was on the wall for the group. Wood left, and soon after so did Sheridan himself. The remaining members regrouped under the name The Idle Race, with Wood's friend Jeff Lynne as their new singer and guitarist. But Wood wouldn't remain without a band for long. He'd recently started hanging out with another band, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, who had also released a couple of singles, on Pye: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "What's the Matter Baby"] But like almost every band from Birmingham up to this point, the Vikings' records had done very little, and their drummer had quit, and been replaced by Bev Bevan, who had been in yet another band that had gone nowhere, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, who had released one single under the name of their lead singer Nicky James, featuring the Breakaways, the girl group who would later sing on "Hey Joe", on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Nicky James, "My Colour is Blue"] Bevan had joined Carl Wayne's group, and they'd recorded one track together, a cover version of "My Girl", which was only released in the US, and which sank without a trace: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "My Girl"] It was around this time that Wood started hanging around with the Vikings, and they would all complain about how if you were playing the Birmingham circuit you were stuck just playing cover versions, and couldn't do anything more interesting.  They were also becoming more acutely aware of how successful they *could* have been, because one of the Brumbeat bands had become really big. The Moody Blues, a supergroup of players from the best bands in Birmingham who featured Bev Bevan's old bandmate Denny Laine and Wood's old colleague Graeme Edge, had just hit number one with their version of "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] So they knew the potential for success was there, but they were all feeling trapped. But then Ace Kefford, the bass player for the Vikings, went to see Davy Jones and the Lower Third playing a gig: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] Also at the gig was Trevor Burton, the guitarist for Danny King and the Mayfair Set. The two of them got chatting to Davy Jones after the gig, and eventually the future David Bowie told them that the two of them should form their own band if they were feeling constricted in their current groups. They decided to do just that, and they persuaded Carl Wayne from Kefford's band to join them, and got in Wood.  Now they just needed a drummer. Their first choice was John Bonham, the former drummer for Gerry Levene and the Avengers who was now drumming in a band with Kefford's uncle and Nicky James from the Diplomats. But Bonham and Wayne didn't get on, and so Bonham decided to remain in the group he was in, and instead they turned to Bev Bevan, the Vikings' new drummer.  (Of the other two members of the Vikings, one went on to join Mike Sheridan's Lot in place of Wood, before leaving at the same time as Sheridan and being replaced by Lynne, while the other went on to join Mike Sheridan's New Lot, the group Sheridan formed after leaving his old group. The Birmingham beat group scene seems to have only had about as many people as there were bands, with everyone ending up a member of twenty different groups). The new group called themselves the Move, because they were all moving on from other groups, and it was a big move for all of them. Many people advised them not to get together, saying they were better off where they were, or taking on offers they'd got from more successful groups -- Carl Wayne had had an offer from a group called the Spectres, who would later become famous as Status Quo, while Wood had been tempted by Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a group who at the time were signed to Immediate Records, and who did Beach Boys soundalikes and covers: [Excerpt: Tony Rivers and the Castaways, "Girl Don't Tell Me"] Wood was a huge fan of the Beach Boys and would have fit in with Rivers, but decided he'd rather try something truly new. After their first gig, most of the people who had warned against the group changed their minds. Bevan's best friend, Bobby Davis, told Bevan that while he'd disliked all the other groups Bevan had played in, he liked this one. (Davis would later become a famous comedian, and have a top five single himself in the seventies, produced by Jeff Lynne and with Bevan on the drums, under his stage name Jasper Carrott): [Excerpt: Jasper Carrott, "Funky Moped"] Most of their early sets were cover versions, usually of soul and Motown songs, but reworked in the group's unique style. All five of the band could sing, four of them well enough to be lead vocalists in their own right (Bevan would add occasional harmonies or sing novelty numbers) and so they became known for their harmonies -- Wood talked at the time about how he wanted the band to have Beach Boys harmonies but over instruments that sounded like the Who. And while they were mostly doing cover versions live, Wood was busily writing songs. Their first recording session was for local radio, and at that session they did cover versions of songs by Brenda Lee, the Isley Brothers, the Orlons, the Marvelettes, and Betty Everett, but they also performed four songs written by Wood, with each member of the front line taking a lead vocal, like this one with Kefford singing: [Excerpt: The Move, "You're the One I Need"] The group were soon signed by Tony Secunda, the manager of the Moody Blues, who set about trying to get the group as much publicity as possible. While Carl Wayne, as the only member who didn't play an instrument, ended up the lead singer on most of the group's early records, Secunda started promoting Kefford, who was younger and more conventionally attractive than Wayne, and who had originally put the group together, as the face of the group, while Wood was doing most of the heavy lifting with the music. Wood quickly came to dislike performing live, and to wish he could take the same option as Brian Wilson and stay home and write songs and make records while the other four went out and performed, so Kefford and Wayne taking the spotlight from him didn't bother him at the time, but it set the group up for constant conflicts about who was actually the leader of the group. Wood was also uncomfortable with the image that Secunda set up for the group. Secunda decided that the group needed to be promoted as "bad boys", and so he got them to dress up as 1930s gangsters, and got them to do things like smash busts of Hitler, or the Rhodesian dictator Ian Smith, on stage. He got them to smash TVs on stage too, and in one publicity stunt he got them to smash up a car, while strippers took their clothes off nearby -- claiming that this was to show that people were more interested in violence than in sex. Wood, who was a very quiet, unassuming, introvert, didn't like this sort of thing, but went along with it. Secunda got the group a regular slot at the Marquee club, which lasted several months until, in one of Secunda's ideas for publicity, Carl Wayne let off smoke bombs on stage which set fire to the stage. The manager came up to try to stop the fire, and Wayne tossed the manager's wig into the flames, and the group were banned from the club (though the ban was later lifted). In another publicity stunt, at the time of the 1966 General Election, the group were photographed with "Vote Tory" posters, and issued an invitation to Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and a keen amateur musician, to join them on stage on keyboards. Sir Edward didn't respond to the invitation. All this publicity led to record company interest. Joe Boyd tried to sign the group to Elektra Records, but much as with The Pink Floyd around the same time, Jac Holzman wasn't interested. Instead they signed with a new production company set up by Denny Cordell, the producer of the Moody Blues' hits. The contract they signed was written on the back of a nude model, as yet another of Secunda's publicity schemes. The group's first single, "Night of Fear" was written by Wood and an early sign of his interest in incorporating classical music into rock: [Excerpt: The Move, "Night of Fear"] Secunda claimed in the publicity that that song was inspired by taking bad acid and having a bad trip, but in truth Wood was more inspired by brown ale than by brown acid -- he and Bev Bevan would never do any drugs other than alcohol. Wayne did take acid once, but didn't like it, though Burton and Kefford would become regular users of most drugs that were going. In truth, the song was not about anything more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected sound and then being unable to get back to sleep because you're scared of what might be out there. The track reached number two on the charts in the UK, being kept off the top by "I'm a