Andrew Hickey

28:56So 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 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 the standard was for sessions players to play on records and The exceptions were the Beatles and even then George Martin was playing long Yeah, yeah, the Beatles had George Martin They had a lot of orchestral players.

29:34They had Andy White playing drums on the first record, you know now it is true that Most British bands of the time largely played their own instruments off from with the exception of drums. You would often have Bobby Graham or somebody going into the studio to replace a drummer, which is why George Martin thought that was perfectly okay to do for the Beatles first single. But at 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 it says they never played on their records.

30:13they 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, she's Simon and Gaffer and Coursier members and poppers, those kind of people who had won acoustic guitar player in the band. They weren't playing all those instruments obviously to work all the way 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.

30:45Their 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 Motan Records and Stax Records were somehow artistically inferior to, you know, some mediocre jam band from San Francisco, just because the mediocre jam band, you are took me to play the guitar, and the temptations didn't. 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.

31:28No, 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 pay for the session musicians. 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.

32:00Now, 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 her 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 through an entire take as no layering, no multitracking, everybody playing at 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 that you know you cut you can't do 20 takes in that time.

32:47And 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 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.

33:20If 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 once 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... Of course! ...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 our recording studio and to expect them to be able to deliver the way someone who spends their entire life in a recording studio recording.

34:06It's just a different it's 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 change, to show how the assumptions change, the technologies change, and as a result, what was normal in the studio change, as a result, the sound of records change, as a result, the expectations of records change. You don't really get the rock band as a thing until 1967, as a sort of cultural phenomenon.

34:43There were bands that we would now consider rock bands before that, but they were sort of 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 man, electric guitar, maybe keyboards, maybe not. But 1964, that's that 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.

35:16But 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 Il Pai 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 into, 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.

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37:30Do 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 clear ideas about what was cool and what wasn't and what was good music and what wasn't and I frankly disagree with a lot of 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.

38:26Before 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 Dale and the Deltons and all those kind 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 Manfit bands with people who could switch between Hammond organ and flute. And you had lots of Hammond players there's actually lots and lots of bands with Saxon, Hammond organ.

39:07And they also died out in the late 60s when the American bands 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 Britain and the States was rather one side for a long time, because of a mutual ban that came into 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.

40:07He was just Ray Noble, the conductor and our bully, the singer, who were allowed over. And actually the Glen Miller orchestra, Glen Miller was Ray Noble's band leader in America. His group built up from that, basically. But for a long time this meant that you couldn't have banned musicians moving back and forth between the two countries. Was that both directions or both directions, yes? 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 Dulligan had a hit in the state.

40:51He was allowed to go over to America. The band was strictly for 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.

41:31You had a lot of American service bases in Britain and also in Germany and stuff that 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 was somebody to somebody said it, but I quote that quote line often, when Bo did these things, I am a man, he means I'm a man so don't call me boy honky.

42:12When the yard birds sing I'm a man they mean I'm a grown man now mummy 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 they are a lot of early British rock role was attempt at copying Bill Haley in the comments rather or even like Bill Haley in the comments imitate is like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys rather than copying Elvis or people like that.

42:47In 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 if a British musician was allowed to go over and play America. And the musician had to be somebody who played the same instrument. So, you know, Louis Armstrong could come over and play Britain. But there was some random trumpet player from Devin who got to go and tour of America. Otherwise, Louis Armstrong would be putting this trumpet player out of business, which, of course, is nonsense, but you know, is Louis Armstrong.

43:26Yeah, trumpet players are not fungible, but that was the ruling. And so then you start getting people like Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochrane and so on coming over here. And what tends to happen is it tends to be the American artists who are slightly a slightly past their prime in the state. 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 Cochrane 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.

44:13And 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, Sisters of the Thore Potus, 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 it well also because the Colonel would be arrested for murder if he'd left America But Elvis wants to be making 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 Tell Star by the tornadoes or like literally no more deweats.

45:02Yeah 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 it tends to be cover versions rather than and the records themselves. And it's only really in 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.

45:46So 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 the mid 70s, the musician's union thing, they just say find whatever you can play wherever. But that restriction and the slight loosing of that restriction is what leads to the feedback becoming two 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.

46:24Eddie Cockfran was. And obviously then people like Elvis and Little Richard were obviously big influencers even though neither of them toured Britain, Elvis never and Little Richard not until after he'd 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 on no one at the time in the state. And British rock music developed independently in different places.

47:00Deliverpool scene was very, very different from the London scene and the London scene was mostly influenced by like 1926 Xylan Chaz and then by Muddy Waters which have now, Muddy Waters has obviously now become one of the bed rocks of rock and music but that's sort of retrospective at the time he wasn't a rock music person and they were listening mostly to his acoustic things. And people like Lead Belly, 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 Vickie Nelson actually and vocal style in the sound of his records.

47:36And he was very influenced by Vickie Nelson actually, but he was also covering my babe 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 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.

48:11The 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 had seen people doing Han Jives, which was a British dance. And they actually recorded William the Han Jive for the British market in the hope that that would become under the hits over here and it wasn't but it was a massive hit in the state. 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 Bellys.

48:53You know you could tell because he gets the train line wrong. He says that the Rock Island line goes down to New Orleans which it doesn't but Lonnie Donnegan had misheard Mulean on the Le Belly record as New Orleans and Johnny Cash was copying Lonnie Donnegan. But these tiny little influences, but there's no, as far as I can tell, three, 1964, 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, 1963. And so, yeah, people like Martin Carthie teaching Paul Simon's Scarb the Fair, those kind of things.

49:35And indeed, a lot of Dylan and Paul Simon's early work is very, very, heavily influenced by the British folk music tradition. But 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 influencing Britain and not the other way around thing until 1964. before 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.

50:12It seems like even the folk movement in the US was inspired by music from Ireland. 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.

51:01But for the most part, they were playing music that was inspired by Irish music for the five generations back, you know, often with the place names changed, so places in Ireland would be places that 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 of 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 is a cultural love of music in the UK that's different than in the US, which feels more disposable.

51:43And culture in general, not just music, but music as well. 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 if 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 of the States. You know, Britain is roughly the size of New Jersey or somewhere but has 65 million people in it.

52:24So 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 know, you've got you won 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 sized venue in most of Britain's major cities for these people. I've currently 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 which was the free trade hall Manchester and like 200 people from London travel up to Manchester for that show.

53:16Manchester is like Britain's second or third biggest city, compared to London. This is like somebody from New York traveling 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 accommodation but you know a couple of hundred miles you can do it you know 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.

53:56Whereas that's been the case occasionally in America with other time were 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. You know, and there's much more opportunity for personal connections to build up subcultures there.

54:31So I think that free internet, free easy communication, it was much easier to have an underground in Britain, you know, 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 at the 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.

55:10So 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 you know Gene Vincent Zeredi Cochvins and so on became big over here but in general most of the people that Vistam took to its heart that weren't really huge and the states were black, you know.

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57:20Do 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 actually haven't looked into that stuff very much. There's obviously, like you said, there's Vilari, there's things like it's now on 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 copyrights 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 and they didn't look too closely.

58:08And so they'd slapping you, set a 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 only tangentially connects to rock music, but of course so many of the great crew members of the 50s and early 60s, you'd thanks an actress, you'd Dean 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 there was a thing for that in the particularly around sort of 1963 right before the Beatles hit America that was very very big among in the sort of the general pop audience here.

58:56Have you read Vab Dylan's new 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 you know he's most recent album, the one from like last year the year before. It is absolutely packed with references to the songs of his youth. He'll just be throwing out things about pink pedal pushes and red cattle, I can have black mustache and all these lines from son 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 fun 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.

1:00:08From, 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 podcast, it's about a year ago, I learned about your podcast. And the person who told me about it said, this is Bob Dylan's favorite podcast.

1:00:43So I don't know if you've ever heard that before. 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 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 I 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. But if I say the wrong thing and this person decides, decides, And that's a flopping, flopping, casting it if true.

1:01:31I 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. It wouldn't surprise me. I'm fishing in 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... 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.

1:02:07Tell me about are there any influences on the podcast? What motivated you to start? What are the threads that led to this? The first thing goes back 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?

1:02:47And 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, 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.

1:03:23I 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 beat the beach boys and Phil Specter and love and the turtles and it's 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 planned to do a book series along the lines of my California Dreaming book History of what music in 500 songs and it was gonna be a much much smaller scale thing that I'm doing now It's still gonna cover 500 songs, but it's gonna be like a thousand words on each one 10 50 ,000 word books You know the shortest podcast episodes have done.

1:04:12I've been like 3000 words So the most recent one was more like 30 ,000 so you know there is But that was my original plan. I was gonna 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 it was going to so you know I thought Matt as well do 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 some sort of trippy attack to him or something but But Cachena Mindstones 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.

1:05:02I 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 Cachena Mindstone, show me firstly that you can do that kind of writing that I've been doing another 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, I'd be able to 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.

1:05:40You 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 big, and not to sound arrogant, but I think I do what I do well and the potential for what it can do only revealed itself to me over the first few episodes, and then I got all into it far more so you know. I mean even in the very earliest episodes I'm doing the until -inking things you know basically the entire first six episodes are all about the Carnegie Hall concerts of the 1930s, 1938 and everything that comes from that.

1:06:29But 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 cocaine and rhinestones. Yeah. I love that in the doors episode, recent episode. I don't think the doors even form as abandoned till 40 minutes into the episode. Yeah. 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.

1:07:19And the more interesting story is to see how these things grow from influences from jazz, from influences, from influences, from transcendental meditation, from all these kind of things and how all that plays into the story. You can do the, oh yeah Ray Manzervek 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 much more interesting Yeah, to me at least yeah me as well 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 or net Coleman and yeah really John Coltrane and the Ravi Shankar and how that played into getting to 8 miles high.

1:08:10In 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're still occasional very song focused episodes. But with 8 miles high obviously that hangs on that song because the deer, deer, deer, deer, it comes from culture, it's in India and that kind of thing. But 8 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.

1:08:54All 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, was, 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.

1:09:31Might 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. You know, I think where 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, that episode, not everything is front of brain. But I think something like 8 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.

1:10:14And 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? 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 taste, purely because what I try to do with the podcast is make every single episode seem like the best case for that record on that artist. And so if I say I don't like artistics but I do like artist why, 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.

1:10:56And 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 favorite to mind. I grew up listening to lots of old blues records. My dad was a hippie and listened to sort of Frank Zapper, Captain B fart, those kind of things. My mum was listening to David Bowie, Sam and Garfunkel and I grew up on all that stuff as well and then I moved backwards and forwards in my own appreciation. I collected like lots of bixiland records and swing records and stuff where I was a kid but also I moved forward and I listened to lots of punk and post -punk and indie music and stuff like that.

1:11:39There are genres that I'm not so keen on, but it's more that there are artists that 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 onto 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 Janssen November. Those are some of the people I'm going to see live over the next few months, you know.

1:12:20I have a particular love for, as you can probably tell from the episodes, for 1950s LA, R &B music, Richard Berry is your the Otis's Johnny Guitars, 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. I have such a deep love for so many forms of music. It's hard to lead the categories. 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.

1:13:08You know, I wish that I'd been able to leave this podcast to left it, Mark Lewis, 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 now I am 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 people will say no I really do think this other version of the story is what happened but as far Now 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.

1:14:03There have been times when I've mis -spoken up and there's been like an aside that's been, if you look on the podcast website there's usually and there are many of the episodes, there's a little of our to section where it'll be like, you know, after that's Walker Shaw Wisconsin, there's Walkisha, which people still pull me up about five years later even though I've put a note on there saying that. But there were 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 touch would, I've not said anything out right wrong on a real major scale.

1:14:38Tell me about Trad Jazz. Okay, Trat 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 Dixie Lange's of the 1920s. 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 Beshay 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 out here as to what jazz should be.

1:15:26And it was music that was from New Orleans up to, and including 1924 and no later, basically this kind of thing. And they were trying to 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. What are those weird flukes where something's more or less inexplicable. But there were some people in the Trad Jazz movement who were a little less rigid and a little less rule bound than the others who yes they liked playing traditional Dixie jazz music but they liked other forms of music that were sort of related to that.

1:16:09A lot of them particularly loved blues, 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 boom that came along in 1956 from Beckler's made in 1954 but where people playing washboards and THS bases and so on playing old lead belly songs that comes out of the track jazz boom. And even more than that, a bloke called Chris Barber, who was the preeminent trad jazz drum -bone player. He started bringing over American individual musicians to perform backed by him in his band. He brought over and what he wrote as he brought over his sister as a tharp.

1:16:49He 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 Mann 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 Dixieland Jazz Band.

1:17:28It really works actually. But that that that was a huge huge cultural movement in Britain in the fit for about 1946 through to about 1962 Richard Leicester's first film the direct who obviously went on to direct hard days and all these kind of things His first film was at the cheapy quicky called it's trad dad featuring all these Trad jazz bands plus for some reason to be checker and Del Shannon as well. It was the kind of teen fad way where you would have of cheap films made of it, even though the people doing it with these people who are getting to pure, pure of the arguments over who played banjo on some track from 1923, you know.

1:18:08You referred to it, I believe, as a back -to -basics movement. Yeah. And I want to talk about the back -to -basics as a recurrent theme because it seems like Oh, yes. 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.

1:18:49So in the course of the Beatles career, for example, you have starting out with Love Me Do and then getting into the big side of the Peppa kind of things and then going, no, we need to be, we need to be a little four piece band again and doing the get back sessions. You have it over longer periods, like I said, the trad jazz 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.

1:19:23The skiffle movement was that and it is something that happens over and over again. I think it happens within bands 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 and 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 stooges are whoever coming, coming out and then not 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, ten years later and other low to T &A just 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.

1:20:32Certainly in well up to through the 80s most rock musicians or ever 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 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 world we live in 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.

1:21:14I don't know what the kids are listening to. Using the trad jazz example of music ended basically with Dixieland jazz and every day since then is no good. I had the opportunity to work with ACDC and to ACDC 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, but at the same time, they're clearly not doing the same thing as Chuck Berry. For instance, you know, you would never mistake an ACDC record for a Chuck Berry record.

1:21:53And even if you are trying to recreate in earlier sound, much more much more accurately than they're doing. Even if you sit down and just play Chuck Berry Riff's, the fact that you are playing a Chuck Berry riff now makes it different from Chuck Berry playing the riff in the 50s, like the Boy Has Story PM and R, the author of the Keyhote, you know, somebody sitting down and trying to write the whole of Donkey Hote, exactly as Savannah's wrote it, is producing a different book because it's not 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 Dixiel and Jazz musicians were doing.

1:22:35But of course, what the Dixiel and Jazz musicians were doing was trying to progress. They weren't trying to recreate anything, you know. 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.

1:23:10You can't go back but you can try and take new lessons from the old things and you can go down new on explored paths from the start, you know. How important is Elvis to the overall story? Very, very, very important. He is the reason why rock and roll became a cultural phenomenon rather than being a kind of music, if you like. Took him transcended music. Is that the idea? He became a thing in the culture. Yeah, John Lennon talking about going and seeing Elvis films and seeing all the girls screaming thinking that looks like a good job. Elvis invented the rock star. Bill Haley had told more records than Elvis early on.

1:23:56I believe Rocker Am the Clock is still the best selling vinyl single ever. Bill Haley was just a bloke. He was just a singer. Elvis was a rock star and Elvis was the first rock star, really. Again, there were always precursors for any cultural phenomenon. and 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 Rock 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.

1:24:34I always thought that was also fascinating to me because he is the first person to hit a lot of the Problems that took the to the right is hit later on because he is the first rock and roll start to hit a career slump And have a comeback and try and have a second act and try and deal with all the problems of what does it mean to be a rock star in your 30s and 40s You know, 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 model of what to do and a model of what to avoid for all the musicians that came after him.

1:25:12And also Elvis is such a racially problematic figure that he embodies 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 to extend you can Extricate Elvis's incredible artistry from the fact that there were other similarly talented artists who never never had his level of success because of their race all those all those kind of things playing to plane to Elvis's story as well and he is fascinating in many many ways.

1:25:59He's possibly the single most fascinating figure in the whole of rock 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 bands Lermanfilm did a little bit. It often gets misunderstood in a way that a lot of the stories I talk about in the podcast get get misunderstood, you know. But yeah, he is a fascinating central figure. I mean, there's Kinky Friedman 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, you know.

1:26:42And 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 them 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 it, 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 Linchpin key artists in the story? Well, the way I've been trying to structure this story so far is to have two or three artists who I am telling their story through multiple episodes while hitting the other ones.

1:27:22Not all of them are artists, well, 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 integrate 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 Springsteen, he discovered Stevie Ray Vaughan, he discovered Leonard Cohen, like 50 year career.

1:27:56So 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 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 enormously influential figure you know.

1:28:42May end the 60s it is Specter 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 the spoiler is in a way, but Bowie is going to be one of the, in 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 friends and was so connected with so many of them.

1:29:26And there were 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 then the band takes their place. You can't pull the Beatles out of the story and then somebody else takes their place. You can't pull out of this out and somebody else takes their place.

1:29:59Yeah, 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. Yeah. And that's not to downplay the Stones as musicians or the 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.

1:30:36One of the others would have had that if it wasn't them. The Beatles were something different. Elvis this was 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 I've 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 informing for most of the six days.

1:31:13You 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, you know, they are a massively important part of the story but they're not like a central figure in the way some of these other ones are. Yeah. They're like multiple episode band rather than a seven episode. One of the episodes you talked about Dexter Gordon's music teacher in Los Angeles. Samuel Dvown, Samuel Dvown, yes, yes. So what do we know about Samuel Brown?

1:31:50He was an astonishing figure. He was the joint first black person to become a teacher in LA at and he was a scarily talented musician and he was teaching an inner city L .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 thought in guest speakers into class, this is into a normal high school He brought in Lionel Hampton, he brought in W .C. 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.

1:32:41He brought these people in to give guest lectures to the kids. And if you look at the people he taught, he had Big Jamek 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 Vann's classes elsewhere. 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 her thing for the penguins and these kind of things.

1:33:27He was a massive, massive influence. He was taught by him. I think, yet, a James was taught by him. People go and just google Samuel Rudney 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, one of his students said, he was like Miles Davis or Charlie Parker. He was that influential to them. Yeah. And it's just 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 think in California, certainly an LA at all.

1:34:06It'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 talk about everything. It's not it's not my area of expertise, but he is, you know, if there's somebody out there who wants to do that, please go and do it, you know, 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 phuddergy. People have made claims that he played a lot of 50s Iron and he didn't actually, he was like 1112 when some of these records were being made that people took away and playing up.

1:34:51But 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 Brown was their music teacher, 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 Tread Jazz person, the one person who influenced the whole British blues scene, he wasn't a teacher.

1:35:36No, 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 muddy waters, he wrote over Otis, Spani, Vortov, Sister Rosetta, Tharp, all 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.

1:36:14He spoke to the kid in the first row, hey kid, want to buy a Trombone? How much? Like £5 and £6 shillings, oh, however 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 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, which is where all the bands like the Who and the Stones and everybody played in the early years, founded by Chris Barber.

1:36:54The 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 his 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 much. I was doing research for a project related to one of the Beatles and I spoke to Mark Lewisen and he said he's not a believer.

1:37:37Lewisen. 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 single. Yeah, it goes through in the 60s. 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 We. 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.

1:38:16The way that it actually happened could not have happened. Yeah, absolutely. This is a thing you find over and over and over again. I wouldn't want to say if it's 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. We can't know. But there were 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 biographies 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 Smokey Robinson's house and then Smokey Robinson was talking to a wether Franklin and you know it's just like and this is in like 1955 or whatever the 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 faith or providence but you can also look at it is how many more smokey Robinson's and a wether Franklin's are they're out there that's ended 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.

1:39:39And 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 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.

1:40:20You 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 immensely 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 pickets, all these big soul and arm and bee stars. He was just playing with him guitar for them and learning learning his craft, learning his trade and he was working a lot and there are people who were going to be coming up in the 70s who were like that as well from Britain.

1:41:03I 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 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 rehearsally, but then 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.

1:41:43He 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 you know and 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.

1:42:35But yeah Bill Haley was a he was almost thinking thinking in the way that a lot of the sort of calculating stars have today think in that he took his band down to place schools and noted that the responses of the audience has been changed, changes set this and changes repertoire to fit what the teenagers were doing. He would play three 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 rock and roll style, you know, because if you listen to his early records, the things, the chord things like Yodel, my blues away, and they are accordions and yodeling records, you know.

1:43:21The 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.

1:44:05Becoming 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 the 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.

1:44:49I 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 were the most had the most opportunities for class mobility and had the most opportunities for people who were from poorer backgrounds to be 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.

1:45:33I say something very early I think in the episode on Sisters at a 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 put 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 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. It seems like hip hop completely trumps that argument though.

1:46:13Yeah, yeah. But that let us say that's rock music specifically. obviously hip hop starts out very very interconnected with it but quickly quickly 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 has not had... It hasn't had any room for Black people and there 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 rock music or Black people don't play rock music or anything.

1:46:58I 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 at Toy Interrock and Roll, how bebop works at Toy Interrock and Roll country, aren't 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 that's an unveral label for amplitude of things.

1:47:43When 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 rhythm and blues was already started to be considered low class, like disgraceful and so even though rhythm and blues 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 Gillett 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 Rose were doing a few years earlier.

1:48:25You've got the Muarlin's piano music of people like that Stomano, 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 two 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 you bring in chess blues mostly through the influence of Chuck Berry, who was also very influenced by country music and things like that.

1:49:10Chuck 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 Tukberi was also influenced by Nat King Cole. He listened to his vocals, Tukberi is doing Nat King Cole a lot of the time. So I've heard from the start, this same label is being applied to Tukberi as is being applied to the platuses, is being applied to Fats Dominoes, is being applied to Karl Perkins.

1:49:49So I've heard from the start, you have this convergence of different musics and a lot of the Arv and B music in particular is always very influenced by jazz. You know, you can draw a very very direct line between 1950s, little bit little bit richer than 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. So Louis Jordan started out playing with Chick -Webs band. He and Elefit's travelled with the front people of Chick -Webs band. Basically what happens is in the 40s it becomes uneconomical for the big band to tour.

1:50:40So the big swing bands break up into three subjummers if you like. You have the western swing bands, people like Bob Wells and so on. Slim down, 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 Webb's band, they basically slim down become Louis Jordan and you use electric guitars and very very loud honking saxes to make up for the volume issue rather than having like five saxophone plays. You just have one bloke playing really loud and you also have the ones to then go off and become bebop musicians.

1:51:23But there was still a lot of intermingling between these people. People like Big J McNeely was playing with the bebop 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 becoming part of Mickey and Sylvia and so on. Johnny Otis is the prime example. He desperately they wanted to play like Joe Jones from Count Basie's band and he was a, 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 Hangev and so there's always this jazz influence there in the background and then this 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.

1:52:15So the influence of Cool Jazz becomes something that particularly the dope smokey musicians on the west coast get into this as a way to show their musical sophistication. A lot of these people 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 the 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 birds you start getting the doors records and you start getting this improvisational aspect adding to the music.

1:53:13Not always to the music's benefit as we 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 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. 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, people like John Cage.

1:53:53The 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 development of the band, but also as well, through like Eocorona's influence on John Lennon. You know, Eocorona 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.

1:54:34And 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 favorite 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 sit -off on there, you know, something like Green Tamperine by the Lemon Piper.

1:55:08It's a ridiculous record, but and it's a bit of work. Yes, yeah. And one of the things that's what 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 sort of market tendency of picking up little bits from everywhere and sticking them together and You know 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. Yeah, and Jim Morrison clearly was influenced by By Dean Martin singing style He definitely was.

1:55:52I 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 you. But yeah, I mean Dean Martin 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.

1:56:31Also, 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 him 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 lakunae that I hope to fill in because there was so much to talk about one of the things I'm discovering as I do this, eventually you have to incorporate the whole history but yeah, D -Martin 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 and Elvis, the other big influence again you were talking about the near -political singing style and stuff 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.

1:57:25Simply 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 we, 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 then, 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 until now these days, because I'm mostly on Twitter and things like that.

1:58:10But 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 to anything like the same extent, 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.

1:58:53You read, look, this invite, very smile by Dominic Pryor and he says that Brian Wilson intended smile to be sequence, sequence as 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 hired these musicians who he taught, yeah. 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 I've been deleted and say, this is why I know this thing.

1:59:25But a lot of the really deep music obsessives spent much of the early 2000s, but in particular, you can hang around on message boards just a massive huge amount of information, often on their very, very specific niche interests, you know, like 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 there are still communities like that, the Steve Hoffman 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 accurate discussion.

2:00:09And a lot of that stuff is people who know more about their tiny bits of expert knowledge than the authors who write books that think it 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, whatever, but you know, stuff sticks with you. understood beautiful. Thank you so much for doing this.

2:00:44It's a pleasure talking to you and I want to thank you for 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. Thanks very much.