A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 105: “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Episode 105 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Green Onions”, and how a company started by a Western Swing fiddle player ended up making the most important soul records of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music and 500 songs By Andrew Hockey Episode 105 Green onions By Booker T and the MGs And now we come to the end of the backfilling portion of the story Since Telstar, we've been looking at records from 1962 that came out just before Love Me Do.

We've essentially been in an extended flashback. This is the last of those flashback episodes, and from next week on, we're moving forward into 1963. Today we're going to look at a record by a group of musicians who would be as important to the development of music in the 1960s as any, and at the early years of Stax Records, a label that would become as important as chess, Motown or Sun. Today we're looking at Green Onions by Buccottie and the MGs, and how a white-quit-quist. country fiddle player accidentally kick-started the most important label in soul music. Our story starts in Memphis, with Jim Stewart, a part-time fiddle player. Stewart was in a Western swing band and was hugely influenced by Bob Wills,

but he wasn't making any real money from music. Instead, he was working a day job at a bank, but he was still interested in music and wanted to be involved in the industry. One of the gigs he'd had was in the house. band at a venue where Elvis sometimes played in his early years, and he'd seen how Elvis had gone from an obscure local boy all the way to the biggest star in the world. He knew he couldn't do that himself, but he was irresistibly attracted to any field where that was possible. He found his way into the industry and into music history as a result of a tip from his barber. The barber in question,

Irwin Ellis, was another country fiddle player, but he owned his business. his own record label, Irwin Records. Erwin Records was a tiny label. It was so tiny that its first release, by Alice himself, seems not to exist anywhere. Even on compilations of Irwin Records material, it's not present, which is a shame, as it would be interesting from a historical perspective to hear Alice's own playing. But while Alice was unsuccessful both as a fiddle player and as a record company owner, he did manage to release a handful of Rockabilly classics on Irwin records, like Hoyt Jackson's Einy Meeny Mine Mo. And Boppin Wigwam Willey by Ray Scott, who had written Flying Sources Rock and Roll

for Billy Lee Riley, and who was backed by Riley's Little Green Men on this single. Ellis's label wasn't hugely successful but he made some decent money from it and he explained the realities of the music industry to Stuart as Stuart was sat in his barber's chair. He told Stuart that you didn't make money from the records themselves. Small labels didn't sell much, but that he was making some good money from their songs.

The formula for success in the music business, Alice explained, was that when you got a new artist through the door, you told them they could only record originals, not cover versions, and then you made sure they signed the publishing over to you. If you sold a record, you were just selling a bit of plastic, and you'd already paid to make the bit of plastic. There was no real money in that. But if you owned the song,

every time that record was played on the radio, you got a bit of money with no extra outlay. And if you owned enough songs, then some of them may get covered by a big star, and then you'd get some real money. Hoyt Jackson, Ellis' biggest act, hadn't had any hits himself, but he'd written It's a Little More Like Heaven Where You Are. Hank Lachlan had recorded a cover version of it, which had gone to number three on the country charts.

And Johnny Cash had rewritten it a bit, as you're the nearest thing to happen, and had also had a top five country hit with it. Ellis explained to Stuart that he was still getting checks every few months because he owned the publishing for this song that someone else had written and wrote to him. If you owned the publishing for a song that became a hit, then you had a steady source of income without having to lift a finger. and people would just give you the publishing on their songs if you agreed to put a record of them out.

For someone like Stuart who worked in a bank and knew a little about finance, that sounded just about perfect. He pulled together a singing DJ, a piano player and a rhythm guitarist he knew, and they pulled their savings and raised a thousand dollars to put out a record. Stuart wrote a song, the only song he'd ever write. Fred Biler, the DJ, sang it, and they hired Alice and his tape recorder to record it in Jim's wife's uncle's garage. They came up with the name Satellite Records for their label. Nobody liked it, but they couldn't think of anything better, and satellites were in the news with the recent launch of Sputnik.

Blue Roses by Fred Beiler came out to pretty much no sales or airplay. The next record was more interesting. Poppin High School Baby by Don Willis is a prime slice of Memphis rockabilly. though one with so much slapback echo that even Joan Meek might have said Hang on, isn't that a bit much? That also didn't sell. Stuart and his partners knew nothing about the music business.

They didn't know how to get the records distributed to shops and they had no money left. And then Irwin Ellis moved away and took his tape recorder with him and Stuart's wife Sunkel wanted to use his garage again and so wouldn't let them record there anymore. It looked like that would be the end of satellite records. but then three things changed everything for Jim Stewart and for music history. The first of these was that Stuart's new barber was also interested in music.

He had a daughter who he thought could sing, and he had a large storage space he wasn't using, in Brunswick on the outskirts of the city. If they'd record his daughter, they could use the storage space as a studio. The second was Chips Momin. Chips was a teenage guitarist who had been playing a friend's guitar at a drugstore in Memphis, just hanging round after work when Warren Smith walked in. Smith was a Sun Records rockabilly artist

who'd had a minor hit with rock and roll Ruby. Smith liked Momon's playing and offered him a job. Momon's initial response was, Doing What? Momon had joined Smith's band on guitar, then played with Johnny and Dorsey Burnett. He went with the Burnett's to California, where he was a session player for a time,

though I'd never been able to find a list of any of the records he played on, just people saying he played at Gold Star Studios. He'd then joined Jean Vincent's Bluecaps, before being in an accident which had led him to come back to Memphis. He'd played guitar on the Don Willis session, and he'd essentially produced it, applying some of the techniques he'd learned in Californian studios. He was young, he was eager to make records,

and he knew what he was doing. And the third event was that Stuart managed to persuade his sister, Estelle Axton, to buy out his business partners. Estelle was a naturally business-minded person, who also had a yearning to do something involving music, and had been doing things in little ways. For example, the people where she worked all liked music but found they were too busy to go to the record shop.

So Estelle would make a list of records they liked. Go to one of the wholesalers that distributed music to record shops. buy records there for 76 cents and sell them to her colleagues for a dollar. Estelle persuaded her husband, against his better judgment, to remortgage their house, and she used the money to buy recording equipment.

Moehmann helped them set it up in the Barber's storage space, and satellite records started up again, restarting their numbering as if from scratch, with what they were now considering their first real release, a song that Moeman had co-written, sung by a black vocal group, The Valtones. The record was pretty much in the style of the white pop semi-doo-wop that was charting at the time, but the singers were black, and so it had to be promoted as R&B,

and Jim Stewart made visits to black DJs like Al Bell and Rufus Thomas, and managed to get the record summer airplay. It was popular enough that the record got picked up for distribution by Mercury, and actually brought satellite a small profit. But the label still wasn't doing well, and they were finding it difficult to persuade musicians to track all the way out to Brunswick. And the studio space was bad in other ways.

It was right near a train track and the noise of the trains would disrupt the sessions. And while it was free, at some point they would actually have to make a record featuring Stuart's Barber's daughter, which nobody actually fancied doing. So they decided to move studios again, and in doing so they were inspired by another Memphis record label.

High records had started around the same time as satellite, and it had had a few big hits, most notably Smokey Part 2 by the Bill Black combo, the group that Elvis's former bass player had formed when Elvis had joined the army. For their studio, Hay used an old cinema. A lot of cinemas were closing down in the late 50s due to the combination of television and the drive-in,

making indoor cinemas less appealing, and because white flight to the suburbs went that people with money no longer lived in walking distance of cinemas the way they used to. The satellite team found an old cinema on East Maclemore Avenue, much closer to the centre of Memphis and easier for musicians to get to. That cinema had stopped showing films a year or two earlier, and there had been a brief period where it had been used for country music performances.

But the area was becoming increasingly black, as white people moved away. And while plenty of black people liked country music, they weren't exactly welcomed to the performances in segregated 1950s Memphis, and so the building was abandoned. and available cheap. Meanwhile, Estelle's son Charles was trying to get into the music business too. Before I go any further in talking about him,

I should say that I've had to depart from my normal policy when talking about him. Normally, I refer to people by the name they chose to go by, but in his case, he was known by a nickname which was harmless in that time and place, but later became an extremely offensive racist slur in the UK, used against people of Pakistani descent. the word didn't have those connotations in the US at the time,

and he died before its use as a slur became widely known over there, but I'm just going to call him Charles. And speaking of words which might be considered racial slurs, the band that Charles joined, an all-white group who loved to play R&B, was called the Royal Spades. This was supposedly because of their love of playing cards, but there's more than a suspicion that the racial connotations of the term

were used deliberately, and that these white teenage boys were giggling at their naughty racial transgressiveness. The group had originally just been a guitar-based drum band, but Charles Axton had approached them and suggested they should get a horn section, offering his services as a tenor player. They'd laughed when he'd told them that he'd only been playing a couple of weeks, but once he explained that his mother and uncle owned a record label, he was in the group, and they'd expanded to have a full horn section.

The group was led by guitarist Steve Cropper, and also included his friend, the bass player Duck Dunn, and Cropper and Charles Axton helped with the refurbishing of the cinema into a recording studio. The cinema had another advantage too. As well as the auditorium, which became the studio, it had a lobby and concession stand. Estelle Axton turned that into a record shop, which she ran herself, with Cropa often helping out behind the counter. She instituted a policy that, unlike other record shops,

people could hang around all day listening to music without necessarily buying anything. She also brought in a loyalty card scheme, buy nine records and get a tenth record for free, which allowed her to track what individual customers were buying. She soon became so knowledgeable about what was selling to the black teenagers of the area that she boasted that if you came into the shop with $20, she'd have sold you $19 worth of records before you left. She'd leave you with a dollar so you could pay for your transport home, home to make sure you could come back with more money. By having a record shop in the record studio

itself, they knew what was selling and could make more music that sounded like that. By having a crowd around all day listening to music, they could put the new recordings on and gorge the response before pressing a single copy. Satellite records suddenly had a market research department, and they soon had an ally in getting them airplay. Rufus Thomas was the most important man in Black Entertainment in Memphis. He was a popular DJ and comedian. He was the compare at almost every Chitlin Circuit Show in the area, and he was also a popular singer. He'd been the one to record the first hit on Sun Records, Bearcat, the answer record to Handog we talked about way back in episode 15.

That's me, don't you woman? Well, you ain't nothing but a bear cat. Rufxed at my door You ain't nothing but a bell to And scratchin at my door You can purr a pretty kiddie, But I ain't gonna rub you no more Rufus Thomas knew Jim Stewart From when Stewart had been promoting the Veltone single

And so he came into the newly open studio And suggested he cut a few tracks If you've got a record label And a DJ wants to make a record with you that's a godsend. You're guaranteed airplay, not only for that record, but for a few of your others. And if that DJ also happens to be a genuine talent who'd made hit records before, you jump at the chance.

Thomas also brought in his daughter Carla, who happened to have a nostalgic voice. For the first session in the new studio, they recorded a song thatufus had written, because I love you, with a few musicians that he knew, including a bass player called Wilbur Steinberg, and with Steve Cropa sitting in on guitar and Chip's moment producing. Also in the studio was David Porter, a teenager who sang in a band with Bob Talley, the trumpet player on the session.

Porter was skipping school so he could be in a real recording studio, even though he wasn't going to be singing on the session. When they started playing the song, Talley decided that it would sound good with a baritone sax on it. Nobody in the studio played saxophone, but then Porter remembered one of his classmates at Bucatty, Washington High. school. This classmate was also called Buckety, Bucketty Jones, and he could play everything. He played oboe, sax, trombone, double bass, guitar and keyboards, and played them all to a

professional standard. Porter popped over to the school, walked into the classroom Jones was in, told the teacher that another teacher wanted to see Jones, pulled him out of the class, and told him he was going to make a record. They borrowed a baritone sax from the school's music room, went back to the studio, and Jones played on Because I Love You by Rufus and Carla Thomas. Because I Love You became a local hit, and soon Jim Stewart got a call from Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, offering to start distributing it and any future records by Rufus and Carla Thomas. Stuart didn't really know anything about the business, but when Wexler explained to Stuart that he was the producer of What Did I Say by Ray Charles,

Stuart knew that that was someone he needed to work with. He'd recently had a sort of damascene conversion after hearing that record, and was now fully committed to his company's new R&B style. For a $5,000 advance, Atlantic ended up with the rights to press and distribute all future masters from satellite. The next single from the label was a Carla Thomas solo record. Gee, where's look at his eyes. For that session, they booked in some string players,

and Bob Talley was meant to write an arrangement for them. However, he didn't turn up to the session, and when Stuart went round to his house to find him, he discovered that Talley hadn't written the arrangement, and had been up all night playing at a gig, and was in no fit state to write one. Stuart had to make the string players play from a head arrangement, something string players normally never do,

and ended up giving them directions like, just play doughnuts, meaning semi-breeves or hole notes, which are drawn as ovals with the hole in the middle, like a donut. Despite this, G-Wiz went to number five on the R&B charts and 10 on the pop charts. Satellite Records had a real hit. Satellite was starting to build up a whole team of people they could call on. Steve Cropper was working in the record shop, so he was available whenever they needed a guitar part playing or a second keyboard adding. David Porter was working at Big Star, the grocery store across the road, and he turned out to be a talented songwriter and backing vocalist. And of course there was the band that Cropa and Charles Axton were in,

which had now been renamed to the Marquise. A pun on Marquis, as in the noble title, and keys as in keyboards, as Estelle Axton thought, entirely correctly, that their original name was inappropriate. They also had a pool of black session players they could call on, mostly older people who'd been brought to them by Rufus Thomas, and there were always eager teenagers turning up,

wanting to do anything they could in order to make a record. It was the Marquise who finally gave satellite the distinctive sound they were looking for, or at least it was under the Marquis name that the record was released. An instrumental, last night, was recorded at several sessions run by moment, often with different line-ups of musicians. The Marquise at this point consisted of Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Charles Axton, Wayne Jackson, Terry Johnson, Smoochie Smith and Donnex. but the line-up on the finished recording had Smith on keyboards,

Axton on Sax, and Jackson on trumpet, with some sources saying that Crop had provided the second keyboard part, while others say he only played on outtakes, not on the final version. The other four musicians were black session players, Louis Steinberg, Wilbur's brother, on bass, Gilbert Capels and Floyd Newman on saxes, and Curtis Green on drums. Floyd Newman also did the spoken,

ooh, last night, that punctuated the record. Jim Stewart and Chip's moment were both convinced that would be a flop, as was Jerry Wexler when he heard it. But Estelle Axton believed in its potential, and also believed in her son, who Stewart had little time for. Jim Stewart didn't want his useless nephews band on his label at all if he could help it, but Estelle Axton wanted her son to have a hit. She got a test pressing to a DJ, who started playing it,

and people started coming into the shop, asked. for the record. Eventually, Stuart gave in to his sister's pressure and agreed to release the record. There was only one problem. When they pulled the tape out, they found that the first section of the track had somehow been erased. They had to hunt through the rubbish, looking through discarded bits of tape, until they found another take of the song that had a usable beginning they could splice in. They did a very good job. I think I can hear the splice, but if it's where I think it is, it's about the cleanest editing job on analogue tape I've ever heard. If I'm right, the edit comes right in the middle of this passage.

Did you hear it? The song's authorship has been debated over the years, because the horn part and the keyboard part were written separately. Capels and Newman, the session sax players, had come up with the horn part, and so always said that they should get solo composition credit. Smoochie Smith had separately written the keyboard part, which came from something he'd been working on on his own. so he got credit too.

Chip's moment had suggested combining the keyboard and horn lines, and so he got songwriting credit as well, and Charles Axton didn't contribute anything to the song other than playing on the record, but because his family owned the record label, he got credit as well. The record became a big hit, and there are a couple of hypotheses as to why.

Steve Cropper always argued that it was because you could dance the twist to it, and so it wrote the twist craze, while others have pointed out that it was, one point in the record they leave a gap instead of saying, ooh, last night, as they do the rest of the way through. That gap allowed DJs to do the interjection themselves, which encouraged them to play it a lot. It made number three on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it led to satellite records coming to the attention of another label, also called satellite, in California, who offered to sell the Memphis label the rights to use

the name. Jim Stewart had never liked satellite as a name anyway, and so they quickly reissue. the record with a new label, named after the first letters of Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton's surnames. Stax Records was born. The Marquise immediately hit the road to promote the single, which brought resembment from the Black Session players, some of whom claimed that during the session it hadn't even been intended as a Marquis record, and who were annoyed that even though the record was primarily their work, they weren't getting the recognition, and a bunch of white boys were. Cropa soon got tired of the tour, quit the group and came back to Memphis. He was annoyed partly because the other band members, being teenage boys, many of them away from

home for the first time, acted like wild animals, and partly because Cropa and Charles Axton both believed themselves to be the band's leader, and that the other should obey them. Cropper went back to working in the record shop and playing on sessions at Stacks. The second Marquis single was recorded by the studio musicians while the group were out of on tour. The first they even knew about it was when they saw it in the shop. That was much less successful, but the label was still interested in making instrumentals. They started a subsidiary label, Volt. If you put records out with two different label names, it was more likely that radio stations would play more of your records, because it wouldn't

seem like they were playing one label too much. And the first single on it was an instrumental that Chip's Momon wrote, Burnt Biscuits, by a group. consisting of Moemann, Rufus Thomas' son Mavelle, Louis Steinberg and Howard Grimes. That wasn't a hit, though Moemann thought it had the potential to become as big as last night. It was released under the name The Triumphs after the sports car Moemann drove. Shortly after that, Momon produced what would be the last classic record he'd make for Stacks, when he produced You Don't Miss Your Water, by a new singer William Bell, who had previously been one of the backing vocal is sonjee.

That track had Mavelle Thomas on piano, Louis Steinberg on bass, Ron Capone on drums, and Buccahty Jones on organ. By this point, Booker T was being called on a lot to play keyboards, as Floyd Newman recommended him as a reliable piano player, in the hopes that if Jones was on keyboards, he wouldn't be playing baritone sax, so Newman would get more of those gigs. That was a great record, one of the defining records of the new country-sonses. soul genre, along with Arthur Alexander's records, but it would be the last thing Moeman would do at Stacks. He'd not been getting on with the Stell Axton, and he also claims that he had been promised a third of the company, but Jim Stewart changed his mind and refused to cut him in.

Everyone has a different story about what happened, but the upshot was that Moeman left a company, went to Nashville for a while, and then founded his own studio, American, in another part of Memphis. Moeman would become responsible for writing and producing a whole string of soul, country and rock classics, and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him in the next couple of years. After Moemann left, the label floundered a little bit for a few months. Jim Stewart and Steve Cropper split the production duties that Moeman had had between them. Stuart had already produced several records for Carla Thomas, and Cropper was a great musician who had been spending every second he could learning how to make records. So they could cope, but they released a mixture of

really good soul records that failed to hit the charts, and truly dire novelty country songs like the Three Dogwoods by Nick Charles, a song from the perspective of the tree that became the cross on which Jesus was crucified. That was co-written by Cropper, which shows that even the man who co-wrote in the Midnight Tower, Doc of the Bay, and Knock on Wood at his off days. The record that would prove Stax to be capable of doing great things without Chip's moment came about by accident.

Stacks was still not exclusively a sole label, and it was cutting the odd country and rockabilly record, and one of the people who was going to use the studio was Billy Lee Riley. You might remember Riley from a year ago when he looked at his Flying Sources Rock and Role. Riley was running his own label at the time and doing various bits of session work

and singing for other people. No one's quite sure what he was using the studio for in early 1962. Some say he was cutting a jingle, some say he cut a few actual tracks but that they were awful, and others that he turned up too drunk to record. Either way, the session ended early

and the musicians were at a loose end. The musicians on this session were three of the regular Stax musicians, Steve Cropper, who had just turned 20 on guitar, Booker T. Jones, who was still a teenager on organ, and Louis Steinberg, a decade older than either, on bass. The fourth musician was Al Jackson, who, like Steinberg, was an older black man

who had cut his teeth playing jazz and R&B throughout the 50s. Booker had played with Jackson in Willie Mitchell's band, and had insisted to everyone at Stacks that they needed to get this man in, as he was the best drummer Jones had ever heard. Jackson was making money from gigging and didn't want to waste his time playing sessions, which he thought would not be as lucrative as his regular gigs with Willie Mitchell. Eventually, Stax agreed to take him on on a salary,

rather than just paying him one-off session fees, and so he became the first musician employed by Stax as a full-time player. Cropper was already on salary, but that was for his production work and his work at the record shop. As the session had ended rather disappointingly, the four were noodling on some blues, as they had nothing better to do. Jim Stewart clicked on the talk back from the control room to tell them to go home, but then heard what they were playing,

and told them to start it again so he could get it down on tape. Stuart was happy with that track, but singles needed two sides, and so they needed to come up with something else. Cropper remembered a little musical lick he'd heard on the radio one day when he'd been driving with Booker. They'd both been fascinated by that lick, but neither could remember anything else about the song, and to this day no one's figured out what the song they'd heard was. They started noodling around with that lick and shaved it into a 12-bar instrumental.

That was even better than the other track, and they needed a funky name to go with such a funky track. Louis Steinberg thought that onions were the funniest thing he could think of, and so the track became Green Onions. As the last instrumental they'd released with food as a title, Burnt Biscuits, had been by the triumphs. They thought the group name should be another sports car name, and so it came out as by Booker T and the MGs. They later said that M.G. stood either for Memphis Group,

or for mixed group, because they had both black and white members, but the original idea was definitely the car. They just didn't want to have a trademark lawsuit on their hands. Green onions went to number one on the R&B charts, and number three on the pop charts, and became the biggest thing Stax had ever recorded. That core group became the Stacks house band, playing on every session from that point on. If they recorded an instrumental on their own, it went out as by Bucketty and the MGs.

If they recorded an instrumental with home players, it went out as by the marquees, and they also played backing all the singers who came through the door of Stax, and there would be a lot of them over the next few years. There were a couple of changes. Booker T actually went off to university soon after recording Green Onions. so for a couple of years he could only play on weekends and during holidays. On weekdays, the studio used another keyboard player, again suggested by Floyd Newman,

who had hired a young man for his bar band when the young man could only play piano with one hand, just because he seemed to have a feel for the music. Luckily, Isaac Hayes had soon learned to play with both hands, and he fit right in while Booker was away at university. The other change came a couple of years later, when after the MGs had had a few hits, Louis Steinberg was replaced by Duck Dunn.

Steinberg always claimed that the main reason he was dropped from the MGs was because he was black and Steve Cropper wanted another white man. Cropper has always said it was because Duck Dunn had a hard-of-edged style that fit their music better than Steinberg's Lucifiel, but also that Dunn had been his best friend for years and he wanted to play more with him. The two remaining black members of the MGs have never commented publicly, as far as I can tell, on the change.

but whether with Jones or Hayes Steinberg or Dunn the MGs would be the foundation of Stax's records for the rest of the 60s as well as producing a string of instrumental hits and it was those instrumental hits that led to the arrival of the person who would make Stax a legendary

label. Joe Galkin, a record promoter to whom Jim Stewart owed a favour, was managing a local guitarist, Johnny Jenkins, and brought him into the studio to see if Stax could get him an instrumental hit, since they'd had a few of those. Jenkins did eventually release a single on Stacks, but it wasn't particularly special and didn't have any success. The day of Jenkins's first session was a flop. They'd not been able to get anything decent recorded, and the musicians started to pack up.

But Galkin had made a deal with the singer in Jenkins's band. If he'd drive Jenkins to the studio, since Jenkins couldn't drive, he'd try to get a record cut with him as well. Nobody was interested, but Galkin wore Jim Stewart down, and he agreed to listen to this person who he just thought of as Johnny Jenkins' driver. After hearing him, Steve Cropper ran out to get Louis Steinberg, who was packing his bass away,

and tell him to bring it back into the studio. Cropper played piano, Jenkins stayed on guitar, and Bucker, Al, and Louis played their normal instruments. Jim Stewart wasn't particularly impressed with the result, but he owed Galkin a favour, so he released the record. A fun but unoriginal little Richard sound.

like. But soon DJs flipped the record and it was the B-side that became the hit. Otis Redding would never again be thought of as just Johnny Jenkins's driver and Stacks Records was about to hit the big time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon Backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on he is so fine by the shipwants visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month a book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers is now available search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the

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