Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Andrew Hickey

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Andrew Hickey hosts the highly acclaimed podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Using a single song as the centerpiece for each episode, Hickey is attempting to chart the history of rock from the beginnings of amplified guitars to modern music, with the 500th episode to draw from the year 1999. In addition to the podcast, Hickey has published more than twenty books on various subjects, ranging from novels about the occult to reference books on the 1960s series, ‘Doctor Who.’ ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Get a free box of Dry Roasted Namibian Sea Salt Macadamias + 20% off Your Order With Code TETRA Use code TETRA for 20% off at checkout. ------- LMNT Electrolytes  https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with your order.

Tectrogrammerton. I've been listening to your voice for so long, so often I had no idea what image to put to it so I'm happy to see a friendly, a friendly vizage. It's funny actually, one previous time I did a video call with a producer who'd been listening to the podcast on what to do a TV series based on it and he said the third thing that he said was, I never realized you had a mixed Rubin beard. Ah, nice. Did anything become of that project? Well, it's on the backburn a while other things happen. So, you know, it's a no.

Oh, good to know because I feel like that's a smart idea and I hope that it happens. Yeah. How many years into the series are you now? It's coming up to five years. It's about many years into the series are you now? It's coming up to five years. It's about four years and eight months, something like that. I started in October 2018, like actually on my 40th birthday. So, and the original plan was it would finish on my 50th birthday doing one a week, but then the episode's got bigger and so that's not happening. So from its inception, you've viewed it as a 10-year project. Yeah, well, it's 500 songs. The original, the original plan was to do an episode a week, but then as the episodes have got longer, and as I've had various life

things in the way, you know, I started this pre-COVID and pre-insight of the last few years. So if the original plan was to do an episode of we get it done in ten years, but as it is, it's going to end up taking more like twenty, I think. So it's a real benefit to society and musical history, this project, and it's a beautiful way to take in the information. And I'm learning so much from it, so it's very enjoyable. Thank you. Thanks. It's very good of you to say. The intention was always to do something worthwhile. You know, I have this idea in my head of it being my equivalent to those big on-theum gathering books that academics in the 18th through early 20th century would write.

You know, on the origin of the species or das capital or decline and fall of the Roman Empire, those kind of things where they just do this massive, massive big project that takes them a decade and covers everything. And in my ego, that's sort of what I'm thinking of it as, but basically, I want it to be something that is helpful to the world. And that sounds like a massively egotistical, a massively big-headed thing to say. But I just, it is meant to be of use to people, you know? I think it really is.

And the difference between those tombs that you refer to is because of the way that it's being delivered on a weekly, semi-weekly basis in digestible chunks, it's almost like we're where we have our hands held through the process. Yeah, and it's much more digestible than the 3,000-page book. Yeah, hello, some of the recent episodes have been almost indigestible by themselves. They're so long, but you know, I want to ask about that because the the earlier episode

seemed to be shorter and the episode seemed to be getting longer and longer and only to my ears only better because it seems like there's much more information in them now. Where's before now I might go back and listen to an early episode and I feel like always barely starting story in it ends. Yeah, yeah. My original intention was to keep everything to be about half an hour per episode. Mostly because I'm ADHD, I don't have a great attention span myself. And I don't a bit like the old average Hitchcock thing. The length of a film should be proportional to the endurance of the human bladder.

I don't want people to be bored by what I'm doing. I don't want to go into huge, massive, long, long episodes, but I've had to recently. And the reason for that is, the stuff I started with, there's basically little or no information out there about it, about any of these people. You know, there's like one book about Sister Rosetta Tharp, there's like one book about the ink spots, there are no books at all about Jesse Belvin, there was one book about Vince Taylor, but it's in French, you know, and so if you put together a half hour podcast on those people, that is often covering all the information that exists on those people, like literally the Jesse Belvin episode, that's like half an hour, and Jesse's Belvin's niece posted in the comments of that episode that she had been waiting 60 years for somebody

to do her uncle justice like that, because that was all the information that exists on that man. Whereas when you cover, say, the Beatles, there are so many books on just the Beatles out there that you can literally spend your entire life reading them and still not have all the information. And the thing is when you're covering somebody like that, you have to tell multiple stories. You have to cover the information that you would have to cover if somebody had never actually heard of the Beatles. Because the whole point of this is if it's to be a history and to guide people through things. And I found early on that there are people out there who haven't heard of even the major big act, you know, either the Hank Williams

episode, there were people and musicians and you who had never heard of Hank Williams. So you have to cover all the basic stuff that you would expect, definitely knows. You also have to cover all the stuff that the people who know everything about that band expect to have in. Then you have to put in something that is interesting and new for those people, so that they're not going to get bored by just hearing the same thing over again. And then you often have to tell something different, which is what you're actually the point of the episode itself, you know. And so you have to fit in all these things.

And there is a much greater audience expectation also for the later episodes. I did an episode on Jefferson Airplane that was 90 minutes long. And half of it was complaints that I hadn't covered one medium sized hit by Jefferson Starship from the mid 70s in the episode. But there being that much more information out there and that many more people knowing parts of that information that you have to cover more. Now that's going to change again as we get further on because at the moment I'm in the most over-signified part of rock history and currently doing episode set in 1968 and

67s through about 72 that's so-called classic rock era. Every single band has 20 to 50 bucks written about them and tons of journalism from that era and documentaries made about them and biopics and all this kind of stuff. By the late 70s, the information is fragmented a lot more. So people have a few of expectations, but this period, the sort of rolling stone, 500 greatest albums of all time period, I mean, at the moment. There's so much information that needs to be encapsulated to do the job for PLE. That sometimes you end up with a three hour episode, and that's just the way it is, yeah. I noticed at the beginning of the, whatever started in 68, I can't remember which episode it was, you talked about how the themes, in the warning at the beginning of the episode, you said the themes now for the next 30 episodes or so

are going to get darker. Yeah, more to be upset about. And it's interesting that that warning comes right at what we consider maybe the greatest golden era of music. Yeah, but connections are interesting. Yeah, well, the thing is one of the reasons we consider the greatest golden era of music is you've got you've got all these people who were I'm a fellow Gized and put part of these they were mythologized It's because a lot of them died very young a lot of them were doing a lot of drugs. There were a lot of things You know in the next 30 episodes of whatever I've got a covered the Manson murders I've got a cover out among you know there was some big

Horrible things that happened, but they tie in so intimately to this story. And I think part of the reason that that era is so mythologised is because of the tragedy that's accompanied it, because you know, if Jimmy Hendrix or Brian Jones or whoever had lived to be 80, they would have made some terrible records, they would have, you know, they would have done some terrible records. They would have, you know, they would have done some things that destroyed the reputation. You only have to compare the reputations of Brian Jones with Eric Clapton, you know. You look at the way people talk about Clapton now, and it's all, he's a racist, tired old man, he should shut up and go away. And people would be

saying that about Hendrix, they would be saying that about Brian Jones, they'd be saying it to, well, probably not racist in Hendrix's case, but you know what I mean. Maybe they would be saying that about Hendrix, that would be saying that about Brian Jones, that would be saying it to, well, probably not racist in Hendrix's case, but you know what I mean? Maybe they would be saying this. We can't say. And so the fact that a lot of these people died young, aided in there becoming mythological, aided in them, not doing a terrible Christmas album

in the mid 80s or whatever, you know. And so I think that ties together a lot as well. Although one of the other things I try and show in the in the series is that while there are peaks and troughs in music history, there is always good music being made. There was good music being made in 1960, which is a year that's generally considered dreadful. And if you pick up the highlights from any earver, you're going to find some great stuff there. One of the things I love about the episodes

is that they give us a backstory that may not be obvious. Example, I learned a tremendous amount about the geography of the United Kingdom from the animals episode. Yeah. I didn't know any of that. And it plays into the story, it's fantastic.

Cause I'm getting to learn all interesting things about different aspects completely unexpected. Yeah. How do you decide which thread to pull? Because there are so many different angles you can come into these stories from. And do you choose which ones you're gonna use? And are there some that you discard, even though there may be potential good stories? Oh absolutely yes, I tend to plot out

not an exhaustive detail but every what was originally a one-year chunk every 50 episodes which I also package, slightly rewrite the scripts and put them out as books and their 50 episode books and I try and create a narrative arc over those 50 episodes with the beginning and end and I plot that out as a chunk. You know, I always knew that I was going to start coughing Vietnam with the last train to Clarksville episode, for example. And there were always three or four options as to how I can tell a story. There were always one song that can be substituted in for another. And often I'll get some pushback from listeners because they don't see the bigger picture. Like I had some complaints about covering, I thought the law at all, the Bobby Fuller

4 track, because people were saying that's that's only a minor thing. The Bobby Fuller 4 weren't important, but I was laying down stuff that plays out along the next 20 episodes in that about the influence of the Mafia on the recording industry about the growth of the LA music scene about the influence of Hollywood in the LA music scene and so on and the Bobby Fuller first of is what is being an interesting story in its own right and the precursor to all the early deaths we see coming up later is a way I can get all that information in one episode. So yes, I'm planning out always, I know exactly where the service is going to end on episode 500. I know a few milestones I've got to get to get there and I plan out an Vark over the 50 episodes, chunks.

At the beginning of each 50, do you decide on all 50? Or how many do you decide? So you decide 50 songs at a time, typically. Yes. To get to 510 sets of 50. Yes. When I started doing this right at the beginning, I made a list of 200 songs that I knew needed to be on

then a matter of what. I first made a list of the ones that I needed to tell the story. Then I looked at things like the Rolling Stone list of 500 greatest singles, the Rock and Roll Hall or Fame list, those kind of things, not to copy those lists, the majority of those aren't in there. But to understand that I know why I'm not covering stuff that I'm not covering and to understand that to make sure I haven't missed anything obviously. You don't want to get to 1970 and I've somebody say, hang on, you didn't do an episode on the Rolling Stones. So I put together a list of about 200 songs that I knew needed to be in there. Then at the 50th episode

mark, the 100th episode mark, the 150th episode mark, I've then plotted out the next 50 episodes as a group with the beginning and end and like little resonances to make the 50 episode archetypes together like episode 51 was the episode on the million dollar quartet. Episode 100 was the first episode on the Beatles, the Fab Four, so it's four sums at either end. Episode 101 was on Tellstar, episode 150 was on All In The Dysluff, which was a satellite broadcast, and so you know that creating these little things where if you go back 50 episodes and oh yes he was laying attract to this and I will put together the 50 episodes list just before I start writing the script for episode 50 or 100 or 150 or whichever.

So I know where I'm going. Now I will occasionally change that, but it's usually only a matter of shuffling around a tiny bit as I realize that the chronology of the story I'm tying works better with if I covered this episode before that one or you know that kind of little detail but it's generally a very fixed 50 episode list and then while I'm doing those 50 episodes I'm making notes for the next 50 you know I'm noting okay like I said in the last episode on the temptations that I'm going to finish their story so I know that at some points after episode 200 I have to do it I have to do a final temptations episode, which will probably be popper was a rolling stone. And that kind of thing. You mentioned the feedback that you get.

How much does the feedback that you get impact the future episodes? Not at all. Great. Good news. It can affect, to an extent, how much information I put in a story, but I know that there are episodes I am going to be doing that people will hate. I mean, I want to say what it is now because I have a policy of not saying what episodes come when, but I will say that episode 184, I expect the audience to go utterly mad about

that one, like furious wanting to kill me mad, that I have covered that song at all. So I say that now. The only thing it does is it has, like I say, it has made me make some of the episodes longer because I've realised that people have an expectation for more of information on certain bands or because I realise that people don't have the information that I assume was general background knowledge for everybody, so I have to put that in. But it hasn't affected the story, I'm telling you, it hasn't affected the songs I'm choosing, it hasn't affected the artist I'm choosing one I own. And what it sometimes does is I fund the

podcast by having a Patreon and people support that and they're, I create a bonus episode which they started as being 10 minutes, they're now often more like half an hour. And if I get a sense that a lot of people are expecting an episode on some band that I'm just, that is just not going to turn up, I will do a Patreon bonus episode on that band. They're short of the take less time, they take less effort and they're not part of the main narrative but they're shorter, they take less time, they take less effort, and they're not part of the main narrative, but they're often quite interesting. And so I will have people ask me, why haven't you done an episode on Frankie Valley? And it'll be like, yeah, Frankie Valley is not part of this story, but I can do a bonus episode on Frankie Valley, you know, that kind of thing. But as far as the effect, and the main narrative that you get, if

you just listen to the main podcast or by the books based on the podcast, no feedback has affected what I'm doing there at all. And it won't. Great. That's very good news. How much of the information in the podcast did you know before starting the project? Much of it, but no, no only at all. I wouldn't have started the project if I

wasn't fairly sure of my knowledge. I'm autistic and I'm also hyper-lexic, which means I read a lot and I have special interests and I learned to be very, very young. So literally from the age of seven, I was reading like biographies of Bill Haley, I was reading books on the history of popular music. I was reading it and so I have a lot of this information in me but at the same time the artist that I am an expert on, the artists where I know the greatest hits and the handful of artists where I know that person made that record that's important, don't really know anything else about that person, need to learn that. And even for the people who and need to learn that. And even for the people who I'm sort of expert on, I need to sometimes figure out the connections between them and author artists and those can sometimes be surprising.

Like, to take the episode on all you need is Love by the Beatles, which covers the bigger than Jesus thing. I didn't realise until I did sort of deep dive into the Beatles in 6667 that the teen magazine that published The Bigger Than Jesus quote was edited by Danny Field who went on to be the remonstered a song about it. I mean, weren't we thinking Poppy was best friends with Jim Marathon or all these kind of things. I hadn't realized that that connection there until I did a very deep dive on the Beatles in 66, even though I've read a hundred books on the Beatles by that point already. So I tend to, as a sort of rule of thumb, I tend to read about four books per episode on top of the knowledge I already have and take notes of those. And again,

it varies from episode to episodes, some episodes like the second monkeys one, I could basically write on autopilot without having to check anything out at all, whereas the grateful dead one I just did, I had to read, I think, something like 25 books to get that one done, you know, and it just depends on the length of the episode and on the, because sometimes you will know that you'll have to do a lot of digging to find a little detail that you know is there. I know this must connect to that. I know it. You can feel the patterns in the history, if you like. And then you have to go digging, digging, digging, digging till you find what the actual connection is. And that kind of thing, I often don't know in advance. But as far as Johnny Otis produced Big Mama Thornton,

and John Hammond discovered Bob Dylan, those kind of stories, I know all that stuff better than I know about my siblings life. The most recent, the Grateful Dead episode is the first episode that thus far I found impenetrable. I've listened to maybe the first seven or ten minutes. I was so disconnected from what was being said that I don't even know my way in, so I have to give it more time because I know that eventually that'll change. But I just want to share that that first, for whatever reason, it's like a world that it's difficult to access. It is a very difficult and inaccessible episode and it was a difficult and inaccessible episode for me to write and there are reasons that become clear as you listen to it, why it's so difficult.

I expected that episode to get an entirely negative reaction from everybody. I had a negative reaction to it while I was writing it. It was a difficult episode. It's not an enjoyable episode for me in any way, but the overwhelming feedback seems have been that by the time you get to the end, it works for people, which I'm honestly surprised by. It's a very, very experimental episode. I would not be surprised at all if people hadn't liked it.

I would not be surprised if you find it an unlisted one. I found it an almost unrightable one. The episode's going forward will not be like that. That one is a very much a special case for reasons that get explained in the course of the episode. But yes, it's a departure and that's not the new normal for the story, you know. I love the idea that in the context of a series

that there can be aberrations and that a story can be told in a different way. And even if it's difficult or challenging in a new way, I think it adds to the overall gravitas of the work. Yeah, there are experiments in storytelling in the podcast. The majority of it, as you know, is fairly meat and potatoes, but I do do things like the episode on good vibrations where that starts off by talking about the Greek myth of Orpheus and then goes into talking about the invention of the Theraman and those kind of

things. And I have to make this interesting for myself as well as for the listeners and you have to stretch and you have grow, and you have to try different things. And sometimes those different things don't work. Now, happily, with the grateful dead episode, most people seem to think it has worked, and they actually seem to think it worked far better than I do. I don't have to distance from myself. I just look at it and see this six week period

it took me where I was working 10 hours a day, every day, for six weeks to get that thing done, and it felt like it was never going to be ended. So I couldn't physically keep doing that as a regular thing. You know, I literally die. But there will be other occasions further down the line, where I try other kinds of narrative experimentation, where I try to try other things. I might do a super compressed episode where it's only 10, only 10 minutes long, but it tries to tell the entire story in that time. The bulk of it will always still be these half hour to two and a half hour long, fairly straightforward narratives, because it's good that the Beatles' White Half

mass revolution, the Monione, but if the revolution revolution the manion, I've been the only thing the Beatles have ever put out, they wouldn't have been, you know, you have to have, I want to hold your hand as well, you know. You mentioned that the second monkeys episode you could have written in your sleep, what's your connection to the monkeys? I was in monkeys fandom, which sounds like a strange thing to say, but one of the things I'm trying to do in the podcast is talk about how a lot of bands that the sort of physical Mae'n gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaith and I've been connected to Monkeys fandom quite a bit and so and I'd read all the books on the band and luckily for me in that respect the Monkeys don't have a vast lich to behind them like the Beatles are doing or something like that. There's maybe 15 books in total on them so I'd read all those already so

I had the entire narrative all already there in my head and I could just go, bam, bam, bam, bam, done. You know, I pull out a book to check it, check a day to put that, that's about it with that one, you know. Tell me about your monkey book. I love the monkeys, by the way. Oh, cool. Most of the best people do. My monkey book is called Monkey Music and it's just a song by song analysis, a discographical thing of the entire monkeys catalogue. It's not like the kind of thing I do with 500 songs. I feel a bit awkward about recommending anything I wrote before the start of 500 songs to be honest, because I think my own writing has

got so much better since then that I sort of semi ashamed about anything I did before that, but it's a track by track guide to the entire record it out put to the monkeys all the All the outtakes all the live recordings all things like the Dolan's Jones Boyson Heart album from the 70s or the soundtrack album of the point that Mickey Dolan's and David Jones did in the 70s. Those kind of things have all discussed in there and there are very few books out there that treat the monkeys music as music, as opposed to a sort of cultural phenomenon that could be written off. So I saw the need to do one. I did it myself. That meant that I had all the narrative material already in my head from that, you know. It feels like also the your ability to deliver the message in the podcast has gotten better

and better. If you listen to the early episodes, they tend to be red slower. The new ones feel like you're talking to us and it feels confident and very clear dissemination of information. I'm glad you think so. The reason for the slowess in the early episodes is be sort of overcompensating. I'm aware that my accent is not always the most comfortable to Americans.

And also I'm a very, very fast thinker. Like I'm still speaking now much more slowly than I think. If I was talking normally, I'd be talking to you and I wouldn't be able to understand the word I'm saying. So when I started it was I'm going to read it very slowly and very clearly so everybody can understand every word. And as I've got more use to what the audience can accept from me, as I've got more use to how the audience react to my accent, I can do this thing that I'm doing now which which is sort of half way between my normal, very strongly accented gable and the podcast voice I was doing at the beginning. And also, you can't keep this up if you're talking for three and a half hours. If nothing else, it would make the episode

seven hours. So I've got more of a tune to what my listeners can cope with. And also, I think my listeners have got more of a tune to my voice as well, but I am very, I'm very aware that I've spent a lot of time in the US and people have great difficulty understanding a Northern English accent in this, in the States. So it was my effort to accommodate them and I'm still doing that a little but nowhere near as much, you know. Yeah, I also think I have become more comfortable doing it because you get positive feedback, you get people saying nice things, maybe I'm actually okay at this. It's fantastic. I'm very happy you're doing it. Thank you.

The monkeys are viewed in the mainstream in somewhat of a negative way, as you mentioned, or other. Interestingly, the band on their records were often the wrecking crew. The same people who played on the birds, the same people who played on Simon and Carfunkle. That's actually one of the myths about them. The wrecking crew did play on some monkeys records. Mostly, actually, album tracks produced by Magnesmith. The early monkey singles, the band on that was actually a band called The Candy Store Profits, which was Boyce and Hearts band that they played with.

One of the things I'm trying to debunk in the background is this belief that the wrecking crew were the be-all and end-all of 60s session musicians, because one of the things we found in looking at music history is that you have these periods of overcorrection, and there was a period where for a long time the wrecking crew weren't credited for anything at all, and then there's become this period where the wrecking crew were credited for every single record that came out in the states in the 60s, and partly that's because Cavalcade, the bass player and a lot of those records is her recollection does not always match the recollection of anybody else or the documentation put it that way.

So she will say that they played on Simon and Garfunkel records like I am a rock or home with bound or sounds of sounds, but then you look at the actual documentation and a lot of these were recorded in New York by New York players, not by the wrecking crew. But yeah, it's definitely true that a lot of bands were using session musicians. You know, one record that the wrecking crew did play on, freak out by the mothers of invention. That's a wrecking crew recording with some extra guitar by Zapper and I think Verstrad and Jimmy Carb lack of on there as well. But the vast majority of the instrumentation on that is the wrecking crew. But you would never ever get people saying, fact Zapper was a manufactured team pop thing. You know, it's just absurd. And the monkeys did of course end up playing on a lot of the

own recordings. Everything after the first, well not everything after the first two albums, but the third and fourth album, the instrumentation is primarily the monkeys on that. But also, there was this idea that the only valid way to make music is to create a self-contained band that does everything, which there were all sorts of assumptions baked into that, all sorts of assumptions. Some of them very class system racist and sexist and so on, because if you look at the vast majority of black artists in the history, haven't been self-contained bands. So the vast majority of women artists in history haven't never been self-contained bands, they've been people who've used these other ways. The idea that if you hire a guitar player to play on your track, that that makes the track invalid. It's nonsensical.

It makes sense if you then lay claim to the guitar player's part, but that isn't what was happening. Yeah. It almost seems like the opposite is true, is that the standard was for sessions, players to play on records. And the exceptions were the Beatles. And even then, George Martin was playing along. Yeah, yeah. The Beatles had George Martin, they had a lot of orchestral players. They had Andy White playing drums on the first record. Now it is true that most British bands of the time,

largely played their own instruments, often with the exception of drums. You would often have Bobby Graham or somebody getting going into the studio to replace a drummer Which is why George Martin thought that thought that was perfectly okay to do for the Beatles first single but It the American bands yeah Pretty much every record that came out in the States up to about sort of 67ish. The Beach Boys, we were using session musicians though again also, that's one of those things where it's gone. The myth is grown to the point that says they never played on their records. They played on most of their records early on, but they soon got in session musicians to cover for them. The birds first couple of records,

lots of session players on those, and obviously you've got all the vocal groups, Simon and Garfunka, Gimamas and Poppers, those kind of people who had won acoustic guitar player in the band, they weren't playing all those instruments obviously, to where always self-contained bands, but weirdly, some of the self-contained bands who did play on their own records, like the association, they get thought of as a sort of manufactured pop band, their entire first album, they played everything on it themselves, but because it's this sort of sweet orchestrated pop thing, the assumption is just that they were a manufactured group. And I am not going to sit there and say that Motown Records and Stacks Records

were somehow artistically inferior to, you know, some mediocre jam band from San Francisco, just because the mediocre jam band, New York, New York, to play the guitar and the temptations didn't, you know, it's an a historical perspective that's been put back on a lot of these things to the detriment of understanding the music. And I think in the day, I don't think there was any expectation that the artist played anything. No, no. If you read the autobiography of Howard Kaelin from the Turtles,

he talks about how the fact that the Turtles played on their own records was because the record company were cheap skates and paid for such musicians. So that was the way it was thought of. Playing on your own records was a sign that your record label weren't interested in funding you, you know, it wasn't and the thing that needs to be remembered is that the method of production was so different back then. You would go into a studio for one four-hour session, you would be expected to cut four complete tracks in that time.

Now, your average rock band musician is not Earl Palmer, is not Hal Blaine, is not Cavalke, is not Tommy Tidesco, they will take a couple of dozen takes to get a part down, not because they couldn't play it on stage, but just because they are not inhumanly perfect, and you have to be inhumanly perfect to do an entire take as no layering, no multi-tracking, everybody playing it once, I take

that was perfect, you have to do four of them in a four hour session, you are going to hire professionals who can do the job, that's just common sense, it's not a matter of them not being able to do it, it's a matter of we've got half an hour left to cut this track in, you know, you can't do 20 takes in that time, you know. And that's a reality that pretty much ended by the late 60s and you're getting to these things where people are spending, you know, six months to a year to five years to make an album. And then yes, you can try stuff in the studio, you can learn the parts in the studio, you can make your mistakes. And you notice that the Beatles start stretching can learn the parts in the studio, you can make your mistakes.

And you notice that the Beatles start stretching out as the 60s go on, spending more and more time in the studio. That's because the first couple of albums, they're playing their live set, they're playing stuff that they've played live a million times. You can go in and record 10 tracks in 10 hours, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. If you've played them three times an night every night for the past two years, you can't do that if it's a new song, but the session musicians could, and that's why they existed. And what's that pressure was off? Yes, people stopped having professional session players play everything, but that isn't an artistic thing. That's a financial thing as much as anything else.

It's also a very particular skill set. Playing in the studio is different than playing for a general audience, just a different, it's a different animal. And with studio time being so scarce, especially at that period of time, these artists would have, you know, maybe several hours in a year to ever be in a recording studio and to expect them to be able to deliver the way someone who spends their entire life in a recording studio recording, it's just a different animal. Absolutely, it's a totally different thing. And this kind of thing is what I hope to get a fuss by doing a chronological history of the music or a very close to chronological history. It's to show how these things develop, to show how these things changed, to show how the assumptions changed, the technologies change, and as a result, what was normal

in the studio changed, as a result, the sound of records changed, as a result, the expectations of records changed, you know, you don't really get the rock band as a thing until 1967, as a sort of cultural phenomenon, there are bands that we would now consider rock bands before that, but there was no sort of default idea of a rock band. Now if you think rock band, you think one or two guitars, bass drums, mostly white men, electric guitars, maybe keyboards, maybe not. But 1964, that's sort of time. Well, there would be a rock and roll band or a pop band or a rhythm and blues band because it wouldn't be called rock bands until a bit later, but they might have a saxophone player, they might even have a whole horn section

because the whole idea of rock as a thing in itself hadn't properly congealed yet and there were many other options happening and many other possibilities happening. And those possibilities steadily closed off as the years and decades went on. And now people project back and they assume that the rolling stones in 1963 were trying to do the same kind of thing that the rolling stones in 2023 you're doing, you know, that there was a clear career path there that, you know, when they were playing on the ill-pie island, they were thinking, yeah, in 30 years' time, we're going to be playing Wembley Stadium, you know, there's a whole

a whole other world in terms of what people were doing, what people were trying to do, what people were thinking about then, that gets lost when you project these things back on people. directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of Omega-7, linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias, art healthy and bring boosting fats. Macadamias, paleo-friendly, chitol and plant-based. Macadamia's, Paleo friendly, Cheat-tool and plant-faced, Macadamia's, No wheat, No dairy,

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dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com slash Tetra. Do you think the reason for the archetype rock band in our imagination and anything varying from that is wrong is because the Beatles are the Beatles? If it weren't for the Beatles, would we have that same vision? We wouldn't, because I'm only sort of getting into this in the podcast at the moment, but most of the ideas we have about the rock band now basically come from ideas that were promoted by Rolling Stone magazine in the late 60s. And they had very very very clear ideas of what was cool and what wasn't and what was good music and what wasn't and I frankly disagree with a lot of their ideas but what they were doing was promoting very heavily people who had

switched from folk music to rock music after hearing the Beatles and it followed the Beatles line up pretty much exactly had gone for two guitars based drums. Before the Beatles hit America, the only bands that were two guitar based drums bands basically were surf bands, not just the beach boys but the safaris and dick dail and the deltones and all those kind of things. And the rest of the American music industry was much more varied and much wider. In Britain there were more two guitars based on bands because the shadows were so big, three Beatles and people sort of copied that model. But still you had your Manfred bands with people who could switch between Hammond organ and flute. And you had lots of Hammond players,

actually, lots and lots of bands with Saxon, Hammond organ, and they also died out in the late 60s when the American bands and start feeding back over to Britain. But the Beatles is the crucial thing where they define what is cool in the eyes of Rolling Stone magazine and the people who copied the Beatles in the States and that's where you get this very fixed idea of a rock band from, yeah. Let's look at the conversation between the United States and Britain music, what led to what and back and forth. From as early as you couldn't think of. Well, the conversation between the Britain and the States was rather one side of a long time because of a mutual ban that came into

in the 1930s between the two countries' musicians unions, which meant that, for example, when Ray Noble, the British band leader from the 30s, went over to the States, he had to hire an entire band of American musicians. It was just Renobel, the conductor and our bully, the singer who were allowed over. And actually the Glen Miller orchestra, Glen Miller was the Renobel's band leader in America. His group built up from that basically. But for a long time, this meant that you couldn't have band musicians moving back and forth between the two countries. Was that both directions or both both directions yet?

So if Glenn Miller and his orchestra wanted a play in the UK, he could not. No, no, they couldn't. There was a total ban on American musicians playing in Britain or British musicians playing in America. And this lasted until the late 50s, at which point you have people like Lonnie Dalligan had hit in the state. He was allowed to go over to America. The band was strictly from musicians, so it didn't affect singers. It's like Johnny Rake come over to Britain and perform, but he couldn't bring any musicians with him. And when Lonnie Dalligan went over to the States to perform, he did a few TV shows and stuff, he had to be backed by the Johnny Burnett feel, he wasn't allowed

to play his guitar, he was only allowed to sing. But this meant that the cultural transmission was basically one way, America influencing Britain and not the other way around, because you had Hollywood films coming over here and people would hear music in those. You had also the Armed Forces Network Radio in Western Europe. You had a lot of American service bases in Britain and also in Germany and so you could hear German radio from Britain. So people would hear American radio a lot, but Americans wouldn't hear British music. And so the influence was all very much one

way, but it was sort of a dilute influence and an influence without the proper cultural context, which meant that the British people were picking up a lot of weird ideas about what American music actually was. There's a line that I often quote which I think was Charles Sharma, he said it first, if I'm wrong, there Charles Charles Moby said it first. I can't if I'm wrong. There was somebody somebody said it, but I could I could line often. When both did these things, I'm a man. He means I'm a man. So don't call me boy honky. When the yard birds sing I'm a man. They mean I'm a groomed man now. Mommy. So you can't make me tidy my room. You know, British people were taking these American things without the context of the culture from which they came and building a new culture in their imagination from it. And early on in Britain, much of the early British rock and

roll was awful, just really, really bad. And weird, a lot of early British rock and roll was attempt at copying Bill Haley in the comments rather, or even like Bill Haley in the comments in my Taters like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys rather than copying Elvis or people like Bill Haley in the comments and with it is like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, rather than copying Elvis or people like that. In the late 50s though, you start to get the first little bits of two-way transmission because the musician's unions, I think it was 1956, it might have been a year or two later, but they came up with a one-in-one out system where an American musician could play Britain. A British musician was allowed to go over and play America. And the musician had to be somebody who played the same instrument.

So Louis Armstrong could come over and play Britain. But there was some random trumpet player from Devin who got to go and talk of America. Otherwise Louis Armstrong would be putting this trumpet player out of business, which of course is nonsense. He's Louis Armstrong. Yeah, trumpet players are not fungible, but that was the ruling. And so then you start getting people like Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran and so on coming over here. And what tends to happen is it tends to be the American artists who are slightly,

are slightly past their prime in the States. Still have some glamour in Britain as an American rock and roll hero. So you know, Jean Vincent, one hit wonder in the US, bebop a little than nothing else. Two years later he's coming to Britain and he's headlining and he's a massive star and he brings Eddie Cockvin over who again in the States was not a big star at the time. And just this phenomenon over here and they end up performing over here a lot and those particular performers tend to shape what British rock and roll becomes. And so you have a lot more influence of people like Eddie Cockvin and Gene Vincent and of the American

blues musicians that Chris Barber got to ring over, people like Muddy Waters, Sister Azetta Thar Potis, Span, they have an outsized influence in Britain because they're the ones that you can go and see. You know. Elvis isn't touring Britain because Elvis can make, well, also because the Colonel would be arrested for murder if he'd left America, but Elvis won't touring Britain because he could make enough money in America. But, you know, Gene Vincent was touring Britain, so Gene Vincent becomes this big massive thing over here because you can go and see him, but he's a proper American rock and roller. And then very slowly, very slowly, you start, you start getting British records being released in America, but they tend to be weird things like

Tellstar by the tornadoes. Yeah, and they're not part of a big thing. You do occasionally get Americans covering British records like Del Shannon covered the Beatles before the Beatles had a hit in the States, you know, because people of that era always on the lookout for a big hit song from somewhere, but they tend to be cover versions rather than but it tends to be cover versions rather than the records themselves. And it's only really when the Beatles hit America that the influence becomes too way in early 64. That's also the time when there becomes far more into connection between the two countries because suddenly a lot of American promoters

desperately want a lot of British musicians, which means that they have to, a lot of American musicians have to be able to play in Britain. So you get a lot more travel back and forth between the two countries, a lot more musicians from one country playing the other, as a result of that. And eventually, in like the mid-70s, the musician's union thing, they just say, fine, whatever you can play wherever. But that restriction and then the slight loose thing of that restriction is what leads to the feedback becoming too way rather than one way. And what were the biggest American influences on Britain and then the other way from your perspective?

Biggest American influences on Britain, early on the big big influencers were Bill Haley in the comments and also Buddy Holly was huge over here compared to how he was in the States. Eddie Cockfombs. And obviously, then people like Elvis and Little Richard were obviously big influences, even though neither of them toured Britain, Elvis Nevin, Little Richard, not until Aftereed stopped having hits. But also, the British folk music scene led to things like the Skiffle movement, which then led to the beat groups. And the folk music scene was very influenced by the early acoustic recordings of Muddy Waters and Lonnie Johnson and a lot

of these people who were pretty much unknown at the time in the States. And British rock music developed independently in different places. Deliverable scene was very, very different from the London scene. And the London scene was mostly influenced by like 1926, Dixieland Jazz and then by Muddy Waters, which have now, Muddy Waters has obviously become one of the bed rocks of rock and music, but that's sort of retrospective at the time he wasn't a rock and music person. And they were listening mostly to his acoustic things. And people like Leadbelly, Big Bill Roonsy,

those kind of people were very influential very early on. Cliff Richard, a Britain's first big rock and roll star, he was promoted as Britain's Elvis, but it was more like Britain's Vicki Nelson actually, in vocal style in the sound of his records. And he was very influenced by Vicki Nelson actually, but he was also covering My Bade by Willie Dixon on his first album, you know, which is not a thing you would have got from an American performer at that time. And this is in like 1957. I think it may be the first ever cover of that song. And it's been dubbed by Cliff Richard, the most white red person ever.

The closest American equivalent to Cliff Richard in the popular imaginary now would probably be Pat Boone. So you know, imagine Pat Boone doing the little little Walter Records, you know, it's that kind of disconnect. In America, there was really no influence at all from any British musicians. The one thing that did happen weirdly is the Johnny Otis song, William the Han Jive, which was a big hit in the 50s. That happened because one of Johnny Otis's previous records had been a massive hit in Britain. The three tons of joy his vocal group had toured Britain and they'd seen people doing hand jives, which was a British dance.

And they actually recorded William the Hang Jive for the British market in the hope that that would become another hit over here. And it wasn't, but it was a massive hit in the state. And but there was really tiny little British influencers like Johnny Cash's version of Rock Island line is very clearly copied from Lonnie Donnegan's version of Rock Island line rather than from Le Bellies. You know you could tell because he gets the train line one. He says that the Rock Island line goes down to New Orleans

which it doesn't but Lonnie Donnegan had misheard Muleen on the LeBelly record as New Orleans and Johnny Cash was copying Lonnie Donegan. But these tiny little influences, but there's no, as far as I can tell, 31964, there is no real major impact from British music on American music at all. It's all, apart from also both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon came over to Britain and again we're very involved in Britain's folk scene in sort of 1962-63 and so you have people like Martin Carthie teaching Paul Simon's Scarb affair those kind of things and indeed a lot of Dylan and Paul Simon's early work is very very very

heavily influenced by the British folk music tradition but even even that was, the British folk scene was very influenced by people like Ramblin Jack Elliott and Peggy Seagher, who were Americans who came over here. So, at best, there's a two way influence between Britain and America. But most of the time, it's a one way America influenced in Britain and not the other way around thing until 1964.

And then finally, it starts meshing and you start getting obviously the Beatles and the Stones and then a bit later the Who and the Kinks and all those bands becoming big in the States too. It seems like even the folk movement in the US was inspired by music from Ireland. So there seems to be a circle there. Yeah. So there seems to be a circle there. Yeah, that's more though, not so much Irish music, contemporary Irish musicians, it's more those songs had already come to America. A lot of appellation folk music is stuff where it was originally from Ireland or actually from Scotland and Northern England as well, not so much from the southern parts of England, but a lot of Northern English folk music, a lot of Scottish folk music, a lot of Irish folk music became appellation

folk music, but not so much a direct thing. There were obviously the other example like the Clancy Brothers for example, who were Irish musicians who moved to Greenwich Village, but for the most part they were playing music that was inspired by Irish music full of five generations back, you know, often with the place names changed. So places in Ireland would be places and can't Tokyo or wherever. A couple of the things that you mentioned from, I just want to share from the American perspective, it's a different perception. One is the idea of the gene Vincent to the world viewed as one hit wonders here, being accepted in England because they were there.

From the American people who take music seriously, we've always assumed that there's a cultural love of music in the UK that's different than in the US, which feels more disposable. And culture in general, not just music, but music as well. Same for all of the great jazz artists who end up spending more time in France than in the US.

It's not because they're any less good. They're not disposable. They just happen to be accepted there because there's a culture more welcoming to that material. I don't know that it's necessarily a more welcoming culture, although it is in some respect. A big part of it is that Britain, certainly, is a much more geographically compact place in the States. Britain is roughly the size of New Jersey or somewhere, but has 65 million people in it. So this means if you have 5,000 people

in Britain who really really like big build runesy, that's enough to do a small tour where you can play four or five things in five days. You have 20,000 people in the US who like big build runesy spread over 50 plus times the area. It's not financially viable to tour around. You've got your one big build runes you found there and then 200 miles away the next one, you know. Whereas in Britain, particularly in Britain's major cities, you would have enough people to fill a decent size venue in most of Britain's major cities for these people. I've come up to doing an episode on cream and one of the things that's talked about there is there was a package tour of American blues musicians and they only played one venue where it was the free trade

hall in Manchester and like 200 people from London travelled up to Manchester for that show where that Manchester is like Britain's second or third biggest city, compared to London. This is like somebody from New York travelling to Chicago in terms of American cities. Traveling from New York to Chicago to see a gig is not a decision you make lightly. Traveling from London to Manchester to see a gig, it's a bit difficult. You have to figure out some accommodation, but a couple of hundred miles you can do it. And so it means that subcultures in Britain pre-enternet, pre-wide spread communication, it was much easier for a subculture in Britain to build to a decent size and to be able to sustain itself and to be able to sustain musicians coming over.

Whereas that's been the case occasionally in America with other time we're talking about the 60s and so on. In each major American city, you would have a subculture, but there would not be any connection between the LA subculture and the New York subculture, you know, there would be very little travel between them just because of the sheer distances involved, whereas you read all the tar about, you know, Eric Burden travels from Newcastle to London to sitting with John Mayall kind of thing going on. And there's much more opportunity for personal connections to build up subcultures there. So I think that free internet, free easy communication, it was much easier to have an

underground in Britain, a sustainable one. I don't know so much about France and the jazz musicians. And also the other thing of course is that not to say that there is no racism in Britain because they're very, very, very much is, but the racism is of a different flavour in Britain and it's not so immediately obvious and certainly there was no legal segregation at the time in Britain. So American black musicians in particular coming over here would feel significantly less discriminated against a lot of the time than they were in the state. So it would feel like a more welcoming place for that reason.

Now of course there was all sorts of different races, but it wasn't the racism they were expecting. So it would feel like a more welcoming place in that way as well, which is why so many black American musicians became so big over here as well specifically, you know, far more so than the white ones, where you know, there are Gene Vincent's and Eddie Cochvins and so on became big over here, but in general most of the people that written to its heart that weren't really huge in the states were black, you know. LMNT. Element electrolytes.

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LMNT. Do you know much about the inspiration of Neapolitan melodies? Like songs like Volare. There are so many of these Italian songs that ended up getting rewritten in the US with English lyrics, but there are all these beautiful Italian melodies. Yeah. I haven't looked into that stuff very much. There's obviously, like you say, there's Vilario, there's things like it's now

I never, the Elvis track, which was originally a solo me, all that kind of stuff. A lot of the reason for that seems to have been copyright stuff, a lot of these things were songs where the melody was in the public domain, oh, where the people thought the melody was in the public domain or where the people thought the melody was in the public domain and they didn't look too closely. And so they'd slap a new set of lyrics on it and copyright it, people like Hugo and Luigi, the producers who did The Lion's Deep Tonight, did all that kind of thing. And obviously I haven't looked into this stuff in as much detail because it's the only tangentially connected rock music music but of course so many of the great

crew members of the 50s and early 60s, thanks to that Drisedin Martin's and so on, were of Italian ancestry and so that Italian culture is there very very strongly but it's not it's not something I've looked into all that deeply so I wouldn't want to say too much about it but yes the was a thing for that in the particularly around 1963, right before the Beatles hit America, that was very, very big among the general pop audience, have you read Vabdel and Snoop book? I started it.

I don't have that much time to get to any reading that isn't very, very, directly concerned with what I'm doing next. I started reading it. It's fascinating to me. Dylan is somebody who clearly has a huge appreciation of particularly late 50s, early 60s popular song. And do you know his most recent album, the one from last year, the year before?

It is absolutely packed with references to the songs of his youth. It'll just be throwing out things about pink pebble pushes and red cattle like in a black mustache and all these lines from sun records going in there. In a way you used to do with the Bible and it's now doing you know rockabilly songs and it's fascinating stuff actually one of his strongest albums in decades and the book seems to be very much along those lines. I mean, the fact that the funk cover is Eddie Cockford, Little Richard and Alice Leslie, the female Elvis Presley on the Australian tour where Little Richard decided to give up music.

That's not a photo that gets picked at random. And obviously he didn't do the cover design but I can guarantee that he had input into that from like I said I've not finished reading the book yet but it's always fascinating to read a songwriter talking about songwriting and particularly one who isn't just hitting the obvious notes you know he's not just talking about the people that everybody else talks about And I looked forward to finishing the book and having a proper opinion on it, but it's definitely, it's definitely interesting me.

The reason I bring it up is the person who told me about your podcasts about a year ago, I learned about your podcasts. And the person who told me about it said, this is Bob Dylan's favorite podcast. So I don't know if you've ever heard that before. And like, and like all things Dylan have no idea if it's true or not. I had not heard that. If it is then I just I just hope he hasn't been insulted by anything I've said about him. This is one of the things that bothers me actually. I have recently, in the last year of a so started hearing from musicians who, a lot of musicians who hear, listen to the podcast, nobody as big as Dylan yet, but I've heard from plenty of people who are possibly going to turn

up in the story at some point or who are tangential to the story or that kind of thing. who are tangential to the story or that kind of thing. You know, if I say the wrong thing and this person decides, you know, that's a flopping, flopping, if true. I had not heard that. So I don't know where your friend got that from. I wouldn't know if it's true or not.

What I would say is having listened to his theme time radio show and having read part of that book and so on, it wouldn't surprise me if he had listened at least to the early episodes, you know. It wouldn't surprise me. I'm fishing at the same pool as him in certainly in those 50s and early 60s episodes. I maybe did listen to it, he's given up by now, you know, who knows. But, um... Well, the reason I ask is because maybe your podcast influenced that book we don't know if so I would be very very proud You know, tell me about are there any influences on the podcast what motivated you to start? What are the threads that led to this?

the most you the first thing goes back like more than 20 years I did a music history course at university and like more than 20 years. I did a Music History course at university and I remember in where the very early lessons the lecturers playing a Karl Perkins track and then saying, don't worry, we don't expect you to actually listen to this stuff and enjoy it, you just have to know it exists. And I was like, well, I listened to Karl Perkins and enjoy it. And I was, what kind of music history course is it if you are not giving people the tools to appreciate this. And so in the back of my mind ever since then 20 other years was this thought maybe I could do something that would teach people how to appreciate, give people

the context so they could listen to Karl Perkins and appreciate it. So they could listen to Jesse Bellvin or whoever, because a lot of this music, yes, certainly the music I covered in the early years is from a very, very different culture and it's easy to see why somebody would just dismiss it, but it's so rewarding. I want to give people the context where they could appreciate it properly from that. Then I wrote a few books over the years, mostly while still working a day job. I did one called California Dreaming, which is sort of like a mini, mini version of what I do with this big podcast. It covers the LA music scene from 1960 through to 1970 and it covers all the different threads, so you have, you know, the beach boys and Phil Specter and Love and the Turtles and

it's much, much, much, much much much smaller scale than what I'm doing now but it showed me that that kind of thing can work and I originally plan to do a book series along the lines of my California Dreaming book, a history of rock music in 500 songs and it was going to be a much much smaller scale thing than I'm doing now, it's still going to cover 500 songs but it's going to be a much, much smaller scale thing that I'm doing now. It's still going to cover 500 songs, but it's going to be like a thousand words on each one, 10, 50,000 word books, you know, the shortest podcast episodes have done, have been like 3,000 words, so the most recent one was more like 30,000. So, you know, there is, but that was my original plan. I was going to do the same kind of thing, but then I lost some freelance work I was doing, so I had more time available to me

than I thought I thought I was going to. So I thought might as well do something big. But then also I heard a podcast called Cocaine and Rhyme Stones, which I don't like to make too much of a connection of it because a lot of people sort of lump me in on with that on social media and tag the bloca does Cocaine and Rhyme Stones in.

And I get the impression that he's rather sick of it, like I'm sort of trippy, you're tactful or something. But Cacayna Mines stones is a country music podcast. And what I got from that is he told stories the same way I tell stories, using the same kind of narrative tricks I had used in other non-music writing. I had written books on the books of TV criticism and comics criticism and stuff and I'd done this sort of interweaving narrative of things in that which I hadn't really

done in my music books until then. And here in Cacana and Rangeston, first of all, you can do that kind of writing that I've been doing in other media about music. And secondly, the podcast format really works for this because you can excerpt the music, you can do all that kind of stuff and so that maybe think okay, the idea I have for the series of books, if I do it as podcasts then it'll work better and my original thought was as much as anything else that the podcast would be promotional material for a series of books, you know, I was still thinking in my head books and I have put out books of the podcasting, but it turned out that the podcast became the big thing and it has become surprisingly popular, but I expected it to have a few listeners, but it has become surprisingly popular and I couldn't be more pleased about that because I genuinely think I'm doing excellent work, you know, not to sound bigot and not to sound arrogant, but I think I do what I do well.

And the potential for what it can do only reveal itself to me over the first few episodes, and then I got all into it far more. So even in the very earliest episodes, I'm doing the until-inking things. Basically, the entire first six episodes are all about the Carnegie Hall concerts of the 1930s, of 1938 and everything that comes from that. But I think you can hear very early on, I start to think hang on, there is potential here for something really special and it takes off. But yeah,

the initial things are the university popular music history course and then the university popular music history course and then cocaine and rhinestones. I love that in the doors episode, recent episode. I don't think the doors even form as a band until 40 minutes into the episode. Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. After a lot of that stuff, because a lot of the time, I did that with the doors one, I did that with the development on the grandma. I did a similar thing with the birds episode on 8 miles high. So somebody like the doors, there is this image of them in the popular consciousness. And that image is a very two-dimensional thing which

misses out so much of why they became who they were, what, what it was they did and so on. And the more interesting story is to see how these things grow from influences, from jazz, from influences, from influences, trans and dental meditation, from all these kind of things, and how all that plays into the story. You can do the, oh yeah Ray Manzerreck was walking down the beach and he met his old friend Jim Morrison, Jim said, I've got some songs for you, and you can start the story there, and it's an okay story. But if you start the story with the formation of Pacific Jazz Records in the early 50s, then it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, much more interesting. Yeah, to me at least. Yeah, me, me as well. I, the, the eight miles high episodes, incredible. And I sent it to many musician friends who send me back. This is so inspiring.

You know, seeing the roots, Hornet Coleman and, yeah, really John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar and how that played into getting to 8 miles high. In some ways that's an interesting one because it doesn't really seem to talk about the song at all. It's talking more about the influence of jazz and psychedelic Indian music to create this new sound. Yeah, yeah. And of course, sometimes that's the case. A lot of the early episodes, it's very much song focused and they've asked a lot of occasional, very song focused episodes. But with 8 miles high, obviously,

that hangs on that song because the, do, do, do, do, it comes from culture, it's in India and that kind of thing. But eight miles high is a point in a line. It's not the whole thing itself. And that's one of the big things that the whole series is. All of these songs are important, but they're not important in isolation. They're important because of how they connect one thing to another thing.

They're important because of their place in a much, much bigger network, a network of influence and of back and forth across generations and across continents and so on. And it's not just about the individual song, the individual record, it's not just about the individual genius composer. There are genius composers, there are genius performers,

but those geniuses come from somewhere and they influence other people, you know. A genius who sits alone in this room and it never interacts with anybody else, might as well not exist, you know. And so it's all about showing how, one of the things I say a lot, particularly in the early episodes, is there's no first anything. You can always trace a bit of music back to something earlier, but then also you can always move forward from there. I think when I talk about how the intro from Johnny B Good traces back to like 1912, I'm happy to start the one with the date there because this was a few years ago to that episode, not everything is front of brain. But I think something like eight miles high is more impressive in a way, when you realize

that it's not just come from nothing, that it's part of this big tradition and you can see how it's come from culture and being influenced by Ravi Shankar and I think that makes it more impressive that they're bringing these things into the folk rockidium in their case, you know. Where does your personal musical taste lie? you know. Where does your personal musical taste lie? I like about 80% of what I've covered in the podcast so far. I try not to talk too much about my personal musical tastes purely because what I try to do with the podcast is make every single episode seem like the best case for that record and that artist. And so if I say I don't like artist X but I do like artist Y, then people listening to it will listen knowing that I don't like

this band in the first place. So they look for negatives about the band in the episode. And so I try to keep my personal taste a little bit distanced from the podcast if you like. But at the same time, it is a fact I've written books on the beach boys, the monkeys, the kinks, so people can know that those are favourites of mine. I grew up listening to lots of old blues records. My dad was a hippie and listened to a lot sort of, Frank Zapp, a Captain B fart, those kind of things. My mum was listening more to David Bowie, Sam and Garfunkel and I grew up on all that stuff as well. And then I move backwards and forwards in my own appreciation.

I collected lots of bixiland records and swing records and stuff when I was a kid. But also I move forward and I've listened to lots of pumpkin post-punking indie music and stuff like that. There are genres that I'm not so keen on, but it's more that there are artists I'm not so keen on within those genres or genres I'm less familiar with. I'm not quite a musical omnivore, but my tastes are for particular genres, particular structures, particular things that don't quite map

on to genre. But like the next few gigs I'm going to, I'm going to go and see Steve Earl next week. I'm seeing Johnny Eccles from Love the Week after. I'm seeing Pulp in July. I'm seeing John Cale in August. I'm seeing Martin Karthi in October. I'm seeing there might be Jans in November. Those are some of the people I'm going to see live over the next few months, you know.

I have a particular love for, as you can probably tell from the episodes, for 1950s LA, R&B music, Richard Berry, as your Johnny Otis's Johnny Guitar, Watson, all those kind of people. I like New Orleans, piano, music, Fats Domino, Dr. John, those kind of people. But I'm missing out as much as I'm cooperating here. You know, I have such a deep love for so many forms of music. It's hard to neatly categorize, you know. Understood.

Have you found out that any of the stories that you've told in the podcast in past podcasts have turned out not to be true? Not so far. I live in fear of that. I expect it, I expect it to be the case. I wish that I'd been able to leave this podcast to Mark Lewis and I finished his Beatles trilogy of biographies. Because Lewis's first Beatles biography, which only covers up to love me do, rewrote their history so profoundly that I am sure that there were going to be things in his next two books where I go oh my god did I actually say that? Yeah, I am absolutely certain that

the Beatles history is going to be substantially rewritten over the next decade as Lewis and gets his other two books out. I usually try and be very clear about this but sometimes there are multiple versions of a story and I will tell the story that make the version of the story that makes the most narrative sense and there are other possibilities and I try and be very clear about that but sometimes there are multiple versions of a story, and I will tell the story that make the version of the story that makes the most narrative sense, and there are other possibilities. And I try and be very clear about that, but sometimes people will say, no, I really do think this other version of the story is what happened. But as far as I can recall, so far, there has been no case where I have said something, something of any substance that is actually definitely wrong. There have been times when I've mis-spoken up and there's been like an aside that it's been, if you look on the podcast website, there's

usually, on many of the episodes, there's a little of our to-section where it'll be like, you know, after that's Walker Shore Wisconsin, there's Worcisha, which people still pull me up about five years later even though I've put a note on that saying that. But there are things of that nature and obviously one expects that as there's more scholarship as you find out more, there will be things that turn out to be wrong. But so far, I've not said anything out right wrong on a real major scale. Tell me about Tread Jazz. Okay. Tread Jazz is a peculiarly British phenomenon of the 50s. Basically the kind of

person who I am, the rather nerdy scholarly music lovers who investigated musical history and found that the music they liked best was Dixielandange's of the 1920s. There were some of them who would very specifically say things like that Louis Armstrong ruined jazz music and everything after him is dreadful and they were trying particularly to emulate people like Sidney Bessier who were sort of pre-armed strong. And they had this very sort of, many of them had this sort of very rigid rules, rules bound idea as to what jazz should be. And it was music that was from New Orleans, up to, and including 1924 and no later, basically, this kind of thing.

And they would try and recreate that in a sort of scholarly, preservation kind of way, very much like folk musicians and so on. But this weirdly became a massively popular genre in Britain in the 50s. Massive, massive genre. One of those weird flukes where something's more or less inexplicable. But there were some people in the Trajazz movement who were a little less rigid and a little less rule bound than the others. Who yes, they liked playing traditional Dixieland jazz music but they liked other forms of music that were sort of related to that. A lot of them particularly loved blues, a lot a lot of them particularly loved drug band music and things like that. And

from the track bands playing some of this other music is where you get this skiffle balloon that came along in 1956 from records made 1954, but where people playing washboards and tea chess bases and so on, playing old lead belly songs, that comes out the Trabjaz room. And even more than that, a book called Chris Barber, who was the preeminent Trabjaz drum-bone player. He started bringing over American individual musicians to perform backed by him in his band. He brought over and what he wanted. He brought over his sister as a tharp. He brought over Sonny Terry and Varnie McGee.

He brought over Louis Jordan, all these kind of people and had them played backed by his band and tore Britain back by his band. And this is where the British blues boom comes from. This is where the Rolling Stones and Manfred Man and every British the Artbirds, all of those bands learned about this music because of the efforts of basically one man Chris Barber bringing over all his favourite performers to play with a bunch of Dixieland musicians who are playing trombones and cornex and stuff. Just wonderfully weird recordings of muddy waters playing

Huchi Kuchi man back by Dixiland Jazz Band. I think it really works actually. But that was a huge, huge cultural movement in Britain in. From about 1946 to about 1962, Richard Leicester's first film, the director, who obviously went on to direct hard days, and all these kind of things. His first film was at the cheapy,ikky called It's Trad Dad featuring all these Trad Jazz bands plus for some reason Chubby Chekker and Del Shannon as well.

It was the kind of teen fad way where you would have Cheepy films made of it, even though the people doing it were these, you know, people who were getting to pure, pure ass arguments over who played banjo on some track from 1923, you know. You referred to it, I believe, as a back to basics movement. And I want to talk about the back to back to basics as a recurrent theme because it seems like music continually gets. There's a new thing.

And then it gets built up and variations come and it grows and then maybe 10 years later there's this revolution where we go back to the basic version. Absolutely. And we're just getting to that in the podcast at the moment. We've just gone past Sergeant Peppinoli's kind of things and we're now getting to a point where all the British Blues bands start to become big again. It is a recurring thing and it seems to happen on every kind of scale. So in the course of the Beatles career, for example, you have them starting out with Love Me Do and then getting into

the big Sergeant Pepper kind of things and then going, no, we need to be a little four-piece band again and doing the get back sessions. You have it over longer periods, like I say, the Tragas movement was a back-to-basics movement in reaction to modern jazz, to Charlie Parker's and your John Coltrane's and so on, saying no, the real thing is these records from 1924. And punk is in many ways, this is the same kind of thing. It is absolutely, three chords and the truth. The Skiffle movement

was that. And it's something that happens over and over again. I think it happens within band's careers. It also happens generationally though I think. As people come along who, you know, if you're a 15 year old kid, you can't make sergeant pepper in your parents' garage, you know, you possibly could now with synthesizers and multi-tracking and so on, on a laptop. But you know, 1967, you can't make Sergeant Pepper, but you can play Louis-Louis, you know, so then you get, you know, the stooge's are whoever coming, coming out, and then not all the time, but a lot of these bands then become more

musically sophisticated, then want to grow, then want to expand their own horizons, then want to experiment. And then you get you get five, 10 years later, and all the load of teenagers coming along who are playing Louis Louis again or whatever, you know. And I think as well, there is a case that people's tastes only get so sophisticated and people need to be led in certain ways. And the audience for popular music also ages and how it's every so often. Certainly in, we'll talk to through the 80s, most rock musicians or whatever, making music for people in a particular age bracket and people stop paying attention to music as they grow

older, they get kids, they have a mortgage to to pay that kind of thing. And you have a new group of people whose ears need to be trained to get to get to more sophisticated music, to get to more complicated music. And this combination means that music is, oh, was very, very cyclical. I don't know to what extent that's still the case. I suspect with the access to everything all the time, we'll be living now. I suspect it's possibly not as much the case now, but of course, I don't know because I'm a middle-aged man myself.

So I don't know what the kids are listening to. Using the trad jazz example of music ended basically with Dixieland jazz and every dance since then is no good I had the opportunity to work with AC DC and Right to AC DC the end of music was Chuck Berry like since Chuck Berry nothing good happened And they're in their minds. They're carrying on the Chuck Berry tradition and that's it nothing in between Well, and of course you can clearly hear that that, but at the same time, they are clearly

not doing the same thing as Chuck Berry for. You know, you would never mistake an ACDC record for a Chuck Berry record. And even if you are trying to recreate an earlier sound, much more accurately than they're doing, even if you sit down and just play Chuck Berry Riffs, the fact that you are playing a Chuck Berry riff now makes it different from truck berry playing the riff in the 50s, you know, like the boy has story, PM and R, the author of the key hotel, you know, somebody sitting down and trying to write the whole of Donkey Hote, exactly, exactly a savante is voted, is producing a different book because it's not the same thing.

The world is a different world. The context changes. It means something different today. Absolutely. And so British trad jazz was trying to recreate what the Dixieland jazz musicians were doing. But of course, what the Dixieland jazz musicians were doing was trying to progress. They weren't trying to recreate anything.

And that in itself is always attention. Every back to basics movement is doing something different from the basics that they think they're going back to. And that's why we have different words for these things. That's why we have more than five years worth of records available. You know, because punk does not sound like 50s rock and roll music. You know, ACDC do not sound like Chuck Berry. The Beatles making the get back sessions do not sound like the Beatles in 1962. You can't go back but you can

try and take new lessons from the old things and you can go down new unexplored paths from the from the start, you know. How important is Elvis to the overall story? Very, very, very important. He is the sort of the reason why rock and roll became a cultural phenomenon rather than being a kind of music, if you like. Took he transcended music? Is that the idea? He became a thing in the culture. You know, John Lennon talking about going and seeing Elvis films and seeing all the girl screaming

thinking that looks like a good job. You know, Elvis invented the rock star, you know, Bill Haley had told more records than Elvis early on, you know, but I think I believe rock around the clock is still the best selling vinyl single ever. But you know, Bill Haley was just a bloke. He was just a singer. Elvis was a rockstar and Elvis was the first rockstar, really. And again, there were always precursors for any cultural phenomenon. You can look back to Johnny Ray, you can look back to Frank Sinatra for examples of the kind of thing that Elvis was in the culture. But Elvis combining that kind of presence with this particular kind of music is what made Ruck and Roll into a thing that we're still talking about 70 years later in a way

that we don't talk about other earlier musical movements in the same way. Elvis also fascinates me because here's the first person to hit a lot of the problems that other artists hit later on because Because he is the first rock and roll star to hit a career slump and have a comeback and try and have a second act and try and deal with all the forms of what does it mean to be a rock star in your 30s and 40s? Which obviously, then all the other stars

since had to deal with and they often dealt with it in a different way than Elvis. But Elvis gives you like a muddle of what to do and a muddle of what to avoid for all the musicians that came after him and also Elvis is such a racially problematic figure that he embodies a lot of a lot of the contradictions involved in talking about rock music at all, which is the way that it moved from being a music made primarily by black people to a music made primarily by white people. And to what extent that's cultural appropriation, to what extent it is a normal process of

give and take, to what extent you can extricate Elvis's incredible artistry from the fact that there were other similarly talented artists who never had his level of success because of their race. All those kind of things play into Elvis's story as well. And he is fascinating in many, many ways. He's possibly the single most fascinating figure in the Hall of Front Music history. I've got one more episode on Elvis lined up for in about a year's time and there's a lot to say about the end of Elvis's career which I don't think people have touched on very much. Although the recent band's Lerman film did a little bit, it often gets misunderstood in a way that a lot of the stories I talk about in the podcast get misunderstood, you know, but yeah, he is a fascinating central figure. I mean, there's

kinky freedman tells the story. I don't know if it's true or not, but he tells the story of going to Borneo and there were isolated people there who only knew three words in the English language, Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola. And that's, I think he has lost a lot of his cultural prominence again in the last 20 to 30 years, you know, as the generation that grew up with him has slowly died out, but you can't tell the story of Rockin' Roll without a lot of talk about Elvis, and he did change everything he had done and said before Elvis there was nothing, and of course there was, but people didn't know about it you know who were the other Lynch pin key artists in the story. Well the way I've been trying to structure

the structure this the story so far is to have two or three artists who I'm telling their story through multiple through multiple episodes while hitting the other ones. Not all of them are artists but for example John Hammond is possibly the most important figure of all in the whole of 20th century musical history, and he's going to come up a lot more. For people who don't know, John Hammond, he was the person who suggested that Benny Goodman integrated his band in the 1930s. He was the first person to put on Jazz and Blues music in Carnegie Hall, and to move that music into a concert setting. He discovered Billy Holiday, he discovered Aretha Franklin, he discovered Bob Dylan, he discovered Bruce

Springs, he discovered Stevie Ray Vaughan, he discovered Leonard Cohen, like 50-year career. John Hammond turns up a lot in the podcast mostly in background roles but he's there a lot from the very first episode on. Johnny Otis is a massive, massive figure in the story of the 50s and he's going to turn up again a little bit later on but you know him discovering Little Richard producing Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog, getting the robins together we became the coasters. He is one of the pivotal figures there. Elvis is a pivotal figure and Sam Phillips in the background again and And then the 60s, it's obviously been the Beatles, the Beach Boys because of their fear and the American music industry at the time, because Phil Specter and Bob Dylan, although I haven't done that many episodes on Dylan, but

and we'll be doing episodes on Dylan's songs as well as on Dylan himself. So he and he's almost the influential figure, you know. May end the 60s, it is spectacular for making record production considered an art in itself. There were plenty of to my mind better record producers before him, but he was the first one to make the record producer of Azotur A. Thing, and then sort of Motown and stacks as entities,

possibly Steve Crockford as an individual as well. And those are the big ones for much of the 60s. I don't want to do too much in terms of talking about the future because spoilers in a way, but Bowie is going to be one of the same way that I've done an episode on a Beatles song for every year of the 60s. I'm probably going to do an episode on a Bowie song for every year of the 70s, you know, because he interfaced with so many different trends and was so connected with so many of them. And do we're going to be artists like that?

But to the point we've got to now in the narrative, it's the Beatles, Elvis, Johnny Otis, Sam Phillips, John Hammond and Dylan, like the, you pull any of them out and the story is different, you know, most of the others, you know, the rolling stones for that they became massive and huge and going to have more episodes and all that kind of stuff. You can pull the rolling stones out of the story and another band takes their place. You can't pull the beetles out of the story and then have somebody else take their place, you know, you can't pull out of this out and have somebody else take their place. Yeah, if you watch any documentaries about the Rolling Stones, there's always references to the Beatles,

and if you watch anything with the Beatles, there's rarely a reference to the Rolling Stones. Exactly, exactly. And that's not to downplay the Stones as musicians or their cultural influence, or anything like that. Obviously, they had great influence, and there were many, many bands who very explicitly copied the Stones, whether you look at the stooges or various, you know, it's not to say they weren't influential, but they were the one that became biggest of a number of very similar blues bands playing it a similar time in a similar area. One of the others would have had that if it wasn't them.

The Beatles were something different, Elvis was something different, you know, and then later on Bowie is something different, you know, and then later on Bowie is something different You know, do you see Led Zeppelin as being a key figure going forward or maybe no Yes, I know they are going to have multiple episodes devoted to them But they're not going to be as massive a part of the story as some of these other people have talked about They are a massively important link in a chain rather than like a new starting point, if you see what I mean. I mean, you can tell if you go back and listen, I have been slowly building up to Led Zeppelin forming for most of the six days. You know, I think Jimmy Page first entered

the story in the first Beatles episode actually, in a very minor role. You know, I've talked about him, I've talked about, I've talked about John Paul Jones already and these people are going to, they are a massively important part of the story but they're not like a central figure in the way some of these are the ones are. They're like multiple episode band rather than a seven episode band. In one of the episodes you talked about Dexter Gordon's music teacher in Los Angeles. Samuild Vowen, Samu Samuel Dvown, yes, yes. So what do we know about Samuel Brown?

Right, he was an astonishing figure. He was the joint first black person to become a teacher in LA at all. And he was a scarily talented musician. And he was teaching an inner city L.A. a group of mostly black, I think solely black kids and they wanted to learn about their music and he taught them the proper, the proper rudiments of music but he brought in guest speakers into class. This is into a normal high school.

He brought in Lionel Hampton, he brought in WC Handy, the person who was credited as inventing the blues. He brought in Nacking Cole, he brought in William Grant Still, who was the first great black American classical composer. He brought these people into give guest lectures to the kids. And if you look at the people he taught, he had Big Jamie Neely, who was the great honking R&B saxophone player of the 50s. He had Dexter Gordon, he had Art Farmer, he had Don Cherry, the great jazz trumpet player, used to skip school at his school to go and sit in on Samuel Vance classes elsewhere.

Where? Then if you look at, I don't have a full list in front of me, but pretty much every one of the great central avenue musicians seems to have gone to school and had a music lessons from him. Jesse Bellavin, who I've mentioned in a few times, he was where he died tragically young, but he co-wrote earthenital for the penguins and these kind of things. He was a massive, massive influence. He was taught by him. I think yet a James was taught by him. If people go into just Google Samuel Rodney Brown and look at the list of people he taught, he taught half the black musicians to come out of LA and they all credit him as being like, you know know one of his students said

he was like Miles Davis or Charlie Parker he was that influential to them yeah and it's just an example of what the difference at one teacher actually teaching the kids can make and again the fact that this was the first black teacher in I I think in California, certainly an LA at all. It's just an extraordinary story. And somebody needs to do a proper biography of him. He taught at Jefferson High. And without him popular music for the last 70 years would be totally, totally different.

And somebody needs to do a proper biography of him. It's not my area of expertise, but if there's somebody out there who wants to do that, please go and do it. I think even mentioned Barry White as modern as Barry White. Yes, Barry White was another of his students. Yes, Barry White was somebody who was, he was a sort of child prodigy.

People have made claims that he played a lot of 50s R&B stuff. He didn't actually, he was a sort of child prodigy. People have made claims that he played on a lot of 50s Iron Beast stuff. He didn't actually, he was like 1112 when some of these records were being made that people took away and playing up. But certainly by his early teens, he was already doing session work and he was producing by his late teens. And in the 50s, he was one of Samuel Brown's students. Yeah, this is the importance that this man had. Basically, you pick an LA black musician or vocalist from any time from 1948 through 1955ish, or through 1965ish.

There's a 50-50 chance at least that Samuel Van was their music teacher, you know. Extraordinary, extraordinary man. And it sounds like it's not even so much that he was a teacher because the story that you told about the trad jazz person, the one person who influenced the whole British blues scene, he wasn't a teacher. No, no, Chris Barber, yeah, he, this is another thing that sort of runs through the whole podcast, the way that tiny decisions by one

person can have major, major ripples. In the case of Chris Barber, the really fascinating thing for me is, Chris Barber, for people who don't know, was a trad jazz trombone player, and he was the one who, I said earlier, brought over and bodywaters, he brought over Otis, Spani, brought over Sister Rosetta Tharple, these people, but he wasn't even originally intending to be a musician. He went to a Tribe Jazz gig and the Trombone player at the front in the band was getting sick of it. He spoke to the kid in the first row, hey kid, want to buy a Trombone? How much? Like £5.06 of how much it was. And Chris Barber happens to have that exact amount of money on him, so he bought a trombone. And because of that one decision, we have Larry Donogon's Skiffle band,

which led to the whole British rock and roll music. We have all the blues influence on British music, comes from Chris Barber. The Redding Festival, the second biggest rock festival in Britain and the longest running, was founded by Chris Barber. The Marquis Club, the second biggest rock festival in Britain and the longest running was founded by Chris Barber. The Marquis Club, which is where all the bands like the Who and the Stones and everybody played in the early years, founded by Chris Barber. The whole of any British music made after about 1954 would not exist without Chris Barber at all. And that just happened because the Trombone player happened to be wanting to sell this Trombone on a day

that Chris Barber was in the front row and had the exact right change. And that's on these tiny things, the world turns, you know. Those are the kind of things that make me believe that there's some higher wisdom involved in what's going on. Because it's too much, it's too too much I was in research for a project related to one of the Beatles and I spoke to Mark Lewison and he said

He's not a believer Lewison and He had just finished the first volume of the you know, thousand paid volume of the Beatles up until the time I think that they may have yeah It's up to the first volume of the, you know, thousand paid volume of the Beatles up until the time I think that they may have. Yeah, it's up to the first single. Yeah, it goes through in the six years. So, it's a thousand pages up to the first single. Oh, yeah, that's the short version. He put out the 900 page short version, the 1700 page long version of the biography up to the release of Love Me To. Exactly. And he said, I'm not a believer, and having just done this research, there are so many coincidences and so many things that went right.

Yeah. It's impossible. It couldn't have happened. The way that it actually happened could not have happened. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And this is a thing you find over and over and over again. And again, I wouldn't want to say if it's like a higher power or whatever, because the alternative is how

many other times did something go wrong and we missed out on something better than the Beatles. You know, we can't know, but there are so many of these weird coincidences all through the story, all through every story, it's really, really hard. And the other thing is the weird sort of clumps of people you get, you know, you read barographies of Motown stars and you'll see, you'll see, you know, I was at school with one of the four tops and we went back to Smoky Robinson's house and then the Smoky Robinson was talking to a wether Franklin and you know it's just like and this is in like 1955 or whatever. The fact that you know Smokey Robinson and a wether Franklin knew each other when they were teenagers.

You know how do you get that much talent in such a small area you know and the two ways of looking at it. You can look at it is if it's like fate or evidence but you can also look at it as how many more Smokey Robinson's and atha Franklin's are there out there that ended up working in McDonald's, you know. And that's a thought that keeps you up at night, you know, if you think of it that way, you know. But there are weird, weird coincidences happening all the way through the story.

And obviously I highlight those quite a lot, you know. In the Bill Haley episode, you mentioned that he was just a bloke, not remarkably talented, but he worked very hard, and he worked hard enough that we know who he is now. Yes, absolutely. Are there other examples of artists who just, it was just through grit that they were able to break through? I think that's the case for a lot of artists,

particularly in the 50s and particularly American artists. It seems to be that once British bands start being big because Britain has a much more centralized media and much more centralized scenes. You can go in three weeks from having your first rehearsal to having your first number one record kind of thing, which happens a lot in the story. But on the other hand, you've got people like, somebody like Jimmy Hendrix, he was obviously immensely talented and obviously a

mentee charismatic and so on. But he had spent years and years and years honing his craft playing for the Asie Brothers playing for a little Richard playing all these kind of Wilson picket, all these big soul and arm and be stars. He was just playing with him guitar for them and learning his craft, learning his trade and he was working a lot and there are people who are going to be coming up in the 70s who are like that as well from Britain. I mentioned Bowie before. Bowie is an example of somebody he was trained from like 1964 on to be a rock star. He didn't get anywhere until 1969. He didn't really become Bowie until about 1972, you know, and he just kept plugging along. So did Mark Bowlin, who started out very, very, very connected with Bowie. Or there's a sort of running joke in the podcast about Rod Stewart, keeping almost being in famous bands, you know, he was the kinks first for

Hurstly, but then the the kicked him out. He almost played on my boy Lollipop by Millie. And he was just plugging away and plugging away and plugging away until 1969, 1970, he suddenly becomes big. There's this decade of him being that annoying person who's trying to get in the bands and this track is trying to be big and nobody really wants him or he's playing second fiddle to Jeff Beck or a lot of those in the glammy era in Britain, a lot of people come up there who had been trying for a decade to become big. Elton John was another one. He'd been plugging away for years playing piano in bluesology and all this kind of thing

before becoming Elton John. Some of the British glam rock stars had even had, like, minor success in, like, 1961-62 was almost like Cliff Richard knockoffs and then spent another decade grinding away until coming up again in the early 70s. And it's a more common story than you would think really, but Bill Haley was a... He was almost thinking in the way that a lot of the sort of more calculating stars have to today think, and that, you know, he took his band down to place schools and noted that the responses of the audience and changes that this and changes repertoire

to fit what the teen ages were doing. He would play free shows at schools so that he could get audience metrics so that he could then change his music to fit the audience. And this is how he goes from being a gold letter to being the first fucking whole style, you know. Because if you listen to his early records, the things, the clothing's like, you're all my blues away. And they are accordions and you're all the records, you know. The biggest changes between musical artists

of the 1950s through now, how would you describe the difference in who the people are or how you would describe them? There are multiple different changes and to be clear, I am not an expert on much music made this millennium. There's plenty of music I like from the last couple of decades, but it doesn't tend to be anything that is particularly well known or, you know, I know who Ed Sheeran is, I couldn't name you five of his songs, you know, that kind of thing. And so I wouldn't want to say too much about today except that I believe that today, certainly in Britain, may not be the case for American stars, but certainly in Britain.

Becoming a certainly successful musician requires you to have been born in a life of relative privilege because over the last 50, 60 years, all the ways in which working and lower middle-class people managed to become successful have been destroyed. There was the art college system, there was a strong level of unemployment benefits, there were arts funding for things like the arts labs, which is where David Bowie came through. And all these things have been progressively over, particularly over my lifetime, but even before that. They've been destroyed in such a way that now you have to have some form of capital in Britain. I don't know if this is the case elsewhere, but you have to have some form of capital and privilege to become

successful at all. And not just in music, but in all the creative arts, you know, there is a porosity of voices from outside, a relatively narrow band of society at the moment, which wasn't the case in the 60s and 70s in Britain, which had the most opportunities for class mobility and had the most opportunities for people who were from poorer backgrounds to become successful in the art, in the creative industries, generally, and in music in particular. But beyond that, I wouldn't want to say, but in just in specifically rock music and discarding all of the genres. But I say something very early on, I think, in the episode on Sistar Vazetta Tharp, that

the story of rock music is, in part, the story of black men pushing out black women, then poor white men pushing out black men, then rich white men pushing out poor white men. And I think that is to a large extent the truth. It's not the only truth, but it is part of the truth. And that's partly of course because other genres like hip-hop have become the genres where black performers can be bigger. But that is the way that narrative goes, you know. It seems like hip-hop completely trumps that argument though. Yeah, yeah, but that let us say that's rock music specifically, obviously hip-hop, hip-hop

starts out very, very interconnected with it, but quickly becomes becomes its own thing and yes hip-hop and also modern R&B and so on. They're still areas where black people have huge amounts of success and obviously I think that's one reason why rock music has become a minority genre because it has become so sort of culturally isolated and because it because it has become so sort of culturally isolated and because it hasn't had any room for black people and that hasn't had much appeal to a lot of black people. Obviously, with tremendous numbers of exceptions, I am not saying black people don't like what music or black people don't play what music or anything. I would never say that, but it is a very, very, very white space. Now, that genre is a very white space

compared to the demographics of the population at large. And I think that's for the worst of the genre. Tell me about the intermingling of different styles, like how cool jazz worked its way into rock and roll, how bebop works its way into rock and roll. How bebop works, it's way into rock and roll country. R&B, all of these different tangents. Well, what we originally called rock and roll in the 50s was actually a label that was put on multiple different genres to start with. And so rock and roll was always not exactly a hybrid, but a label, an unveral label for a multitude of things. When the label was originally used, well, not when it

was a video use, but when Alan Fried used it, he used it because the term with them and Blue's was already started to be considered low class, like disgraceful and so even though with them and Blue's itself had only been voting a few years earlier to replace race records. So Alan Fried was using the term rock and roll to describe R&B records. But if you look at 50s R&B, Charlie Gillet I think isolated five different genres, you've got rockabilly which is essentially that that's Hilbilly Boogie, that that's there is little or no difference between what Karl Perkins was doing and what people like the Maddox Brothers and Bose were doing a few years earlier. You've got the Mew Orleans piano music of people

like that Stommerno, Lloyd Price, those kind of things, this rolling R&B sound. You've got vocal group R&B, which we now call do-up, which is really too genres in itself, because West Coast do-up and East Coast do-up, very, very, very, very different things, but they're both emphasizing vocal harmony. And then you've got the Northeastern bands, which of which Bill Haley is the only one that people really remember, but there were a few others like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys who were doing country music, but country music, copying Louis Jordan records. Then to a lesser extent, you bring in chess blues mostly through the influence of Chuck Berry, who was also very influenced by country music and things like that.

So, Chuck Berry himself is almost the epitome of this because if you look at Chuck Berry, his first record, Mabeline, was inspired by Ida Red, the Old Western swing song, but he was also playing a lot of his guitar lines were taken from Louis Jordan's guitarist, whose surname I can't remember Carl's something, but a lot of Chuck Berry's guitar lines were taken from Louis Jordan's guitarist. And Chuck Berry was also influenced by Nat King Cole.

He listened to his vocals, Chuck Berry is doing Nat King Cole at the time. So I've heard from the start, this same label is being applied to Chuck Berry as is being applied to the platuses, is being applied to the platyces, as is being applied to Fats Domino's, as being applied to Karl Perkins. So I'm hoping from the start, you have this convergence of different music. And a lot of the R and B music in particular is always very influenced by jazz. You know, you can draw a very, very direct line between 1950s, little

little bit, little bit of particular, but also took very a lot of this sort of piano and saxophone lead black R and B records in the 50s. You can draw a very, very clear line from them to Louis Jordan. And from Louis Jordan to the big band, Louis Jordan started out playing the Chick-Webs band. He and Elefitz travelled with the front people of Chick-Webs band. Basically, what happens is in the 40s, it becomes uneconomical for the big bands to tour. So the big swing bands break up into three subjumbers if you like you have the western swing bands You're people like Bob Wells and so on slim down get get rid of the trumpet players and so on and

Revolve around the electric guitar and this is what eventually leads to rockabilly you have the black band like chick websband they basically slim down, become Louis Jordan and use electric guitars and very, very loud honking saxes to make up for the volume issue rather than having five saxophone plays. You just have one bloke playing really loud and you also have the ones who then go off and become bebop musicians. But there's still a lot of intermingling between these people. People like Big J. McNeely was playing with the bebot musicians. But there's still a lot of intermingling between these people. People like Big J. McNeely was playing with the bebot musicians. I was also playing early R&B sessions.

A lot of the Atlantic records people, like Mickey Baker. He started out as a jazz man and he moved into playing R&B session work before they'd be coming out of Mickey and Sylvia and so on. Johnny Otis is the prime example. He desperately wanted to play like Joe Jones from Count Basie's band and he was a, you know, he was a jazz drummer and a five-referring player and his first record was Harlem Nocturn but he ends up making Hound Dog and William the Handjahive and so there's always this jazz influence there in the background and then this gets then gets picked up again in the mid 60s

mostly by people from LA the doors and the birds and so on because there is a thriving cool jazz scene there so the influence of cool jazz becomes something that particularly the dope smoky musicians on the West Coast something that particularly the dope smoking musicians on the West Coast get into this as a way to show their musical sophistication. A lot of these people have come from folk music as well, but when they open their minds to other forms of music outside folk, they are not just opening their minds to rock music, they're opening their minds to everything. And so they start listening

to a lot of cool jazz, they start listening to a lot of Indian music because largely because the bloke who ran Pacific jazz label was also a fan of Ravi Shankar and put out his stuff on that label as well. And so you get all these influencers coming in, in like 1966, 67, you start getting eight miles high by the bird, you start getting the doors records and you start getting this improvisational aspect adding to the music. Not always to the music's benefit as to be said, some of this stuff is really, really good, but a lot of the time the rock musicians don't have the chops that the jazz people did and they're trying to do stuff and not really, not really getting it. There's a sort of cargo cult element to some of the use of improvisation in psychedelic rock music that makes some of it, some of it a little painful to

listen to these days. Yeah, you're doing junk whole train, but you're not junk whole train, you know, yeah, you're doing John Coltrane, but you're not John Coltrane, you know. And also around this time, you start getting the influence of avant-garde classical musicians of people like John Cage. The Velvet Underground episode I did recently is another one where the Velvet Underground don't get together until I think over an hour into the story in that case, because I'm talking about how John Kale was influenced by John Cage and by a whole history of avant-garde experimental noise composition. And that gets into rock music, yes, through the whole other end of the band, but also as well through like Eocorona's influence on John Lennon. E Yokoona was part of the fluxes art movement with

Lamont Young, who is one of the most abstract composers around, you know, and that influence goes into the Beatles as well. And a lot of the time these people are only taking, not in the case of the Velvet Underground, because John Cale was properly very, very heavily schooled musician, but a lot of the other people are taking sort of surface level elements of these things and trying to incorporate them into their music. But that can sometimes be a good thing in itself, you know. I mean, some of my favourite music actually is the cheap pop act who were trying to pick up on psychedelia and didn't really know what it was other than that you've got a sitar on there, you know, something like green tamperine by the lemon piper. It's a ridiculous record, but and it's pretty work. Yes, yeah, and one of the things that rock music does

it is best and it seems to have stopped doing over the last 30 or 40 years and that hip hop does all that now is this this sort of markup eye tendency of picking up little bits from everywhere and sticking them together and just going for the shiny thing. But the shiny thing is shiny, you know, so. I haven't heard an episode where you mentioned Dean Martin yet. And I thought it's interesting because Dean Martin was both the reason Elvis died his hair black

was because of Dean Martin. And Jim Morrison clearly was influenced by Dean Martin singing style. He definitely was. I think the only time I think I might have mentioned Dean Martin talking about Bob Dylan's response to Dean Martin insulting the Rolling Stones, but that's about it. But yeah, I mean, Dean was, he was clearly very influential on, particularly on Elvis. If you listen to Dean Martin's 50s stuff and then to Elvis Singing Ballad, you can very, very clearly hear the influence there. He will possibly come up in passing

in a couple of episodes that I'm going to be doing. He may welcome what I talk about the doors next and I talk more about Morrison's singing style because yet Morrison was very clearly a crooner and very clearly specifically influenced by Dean Martin. Also, there is going to be some stuff about Frank Sinatra in one episode coming up in the future and I may talk about Dean Martin there. Other than that, the only time I talked about it was in a bonus episode on Dino Desi and Billy because obviously Dino from Dino Desi and Billy was Dean Martin's son. So there were a lot of these lakunaid that I hope to fill in because there was so much to talk about that one of the things I'm discovering as I do this,

eventually you have to incorporate the whole history of the world. Yes, same. But yeah, Dean Martin is somebody, if I've been doing our long episodes when I was doing the early Elvis ones, I would undoubtedly have talked about D Martin's vocal influence on Elvis, the other big influence again, you were talking about the near-polot and singing style and stuff like that.

And I have possibly not covered the white vocal pop of the 50s and early 60s in as much detail, as I would if I went back and read the whole thing from the start now, Simply because I was, you know, this was still in the period where I was doing 25 to 45 minute episodes rather than the monsters that I'm doing now. And you have to cut out something, but yeah, it is something that I'm going to try and find a way to retroactively bring that stuff into the story. Tell me about the world of message boards and posting.

I know nothing about this world and I'm just curious about it. Well, I have basically lived my entire life online. I first got online in 1997 and stuff. I actually don't spend that much time on message boards and so on now these days because I'm mostly on sort of Twitter and things like that. But much of my late idol essence and early adulthood was spent on message boards discussing things like the beach boys in particular but also other music things. And they still exist but not 20th and like the same, but it was where you would go to have discussions. You would end up making friends who would say, oh, I've

got this bootleg, I can send you a copy, that kind of thing. And particularly in the case of not on cover bands, but under covered bands, much of my knowledge of the beach boys, for example, comes from forum conversations, rather than from anything that's in books. And quite often, in those forum conversations, you'll find out that the stuff in the books was wrong. You read Look This and Vibrate Smile by Dominic Pryor and he says that Brian Wilson intended Smile to be sequence, sequence, just one as one long piece of music. And then you'll have somebody who's gone through all the session logs and he's like, no, this is definitely absolutely wrong. Brian actually intended this and we can tell this because on this day he had these musicians and he told you and unfortunately a lot of that documentation becomes a femoral. So you can't

reference it, you can't point to a conversation from 2003 on a message book that's been deleted and say, this is why I know this thing. But a lot of the really deep music obsessives spent much of the early 2000s, but in particular, hanging around on message boards just a massive huge amount of information, often on their very, very specific nation and these interests. In the case of the Beach Boys, there would be people who would post hundreds of thousands of words literally over a course of a couple of years just about the smile album and the making of that album and this kind of thing. And the vast still communities like that, the Steve Huffman board, for example, which I sometimes visit but never post on, which is primarily an audio file board, but that has some of the best discussion of vintage music around and some of the most

academic discussion. And a lot of that stuff is people who know more about their tiny bits of expert knowledge than the authors who write books that get made public. And so a lot of the time when I'm telling the stories in the podcast, I end up sort of busting myths of one kind of another. And often I can usually find enough reference in conventionally published material to do that. But I only know to look in the conventionally published material in the right places because of discussions

I had there, again, sometimes 20 years ago, or whatever, but stuff sticks with you. Understood. Beautiful. Thank you so much for doing this. It's a pleasure talking to you. And. Beautiful. Thank you so much for doing this. It's a pleasure talking to you. And I want to thank you for the podcast.

Thank you. It's been wonderful. For the podcast, and I'll share with you, it works just as well episodically if you jump around because I have not started from the beginning and listen to every episode. I started by listening to songs that I like and then have expanded from there. And I jump around all the time and it works great. Thank you. you