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

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

This is just a quick one to let people know the schedule for the next little while. I had a flare-up of my chronic illness last week, and so the next episode was delayed. That one's on “(Sitting on) The Dock of the Bay”, it's mostly recorded now, and will be up in the next couple of days. It's annoying, because I was actually working on two episodes in parallel (which may be what caused my flare up). I'm going on holiday for ten days on Saturday, and *had* hoped to get the episode after that, on the Velvet Underground, recorded before I travel and release it while I was away, but that's now unlikely. That *is* though, almost completely scripted, and so I should be able to record it as soon as I get back, and so all being well episode 164 should be up two weeks exactly after 163 and we'll be back to fortnightly releases as before. And Patreon backers will continue to get some content while I'm away. That's all. See you in a couple of days with episode 163

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 160 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flowers in the Rain" by the Move, their transition into ELO, and the career of Roy Wood. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "The Chipmunk Song" by Canned Heat.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Note

I say "And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record." -- I should point out that after Martin's theme fades, Blackburn talks over a brief snatch of a piece by Johnny Dankworth.

Resources

As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I’ve decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here’s part one and part two.

There are not many books about Roy Wood, and I referred to both of the two that seem to exist -- this biography by John van der Kiste, and this album guide by James R Turner. 

I also referred to this biography of Jeff Lynne by van der Kiste, The Electric Light Orchestra Story by Bev Bevan, and Mr Big by Don Arden with Mick Wall. 

Most of the more comprehensive compilations of the Move's material are out of print, but this single-CD-plus-DVD anthology is the best compilation that's in print. This is the one collection of Wood's solo and Wizzard hits that seems currently in print, and for those who want to investigate further, this cheap box set has the last Move album, the first ELO album, the first Wizzard album, Wood's solo Boulders, and a later Wood solo album, for the price of a single CD.

Transcript

Before I start, a brief note. This episode deals with organised crime, and so contains some mild descriptions of violence, and also has some mention of mental illness and drug use, though not much of any of those things. And it's probably also important to warn people that towards the end there's some Christmas music, including excerpts of a song that is inescapable at this time of year in the UK, so those who work in retail environments and the like may want to listen to this later, at a point when they're not totally sick of hearing Christmas records.

Most of the time, the identity of the party in government doesn't make that much of a difference to people's everyday lives.  At least in Britain, there tends to be a consensus ideology within the limits of which governments of both main parties tend to work. They will make a difference at the margins, and be more or less competent, and more or less conservative or left-wing, more or less liberal or authoritarian, but life will, broadly speaking, continue along much as before for most people. Some will be a little better or worse off, but in general steering the ship of state is a matter of a lot of tiny incremental changes, not of sudden u-turns.

But there have been a handful of governments that have made big, noticeable, changes to the structure of society, reforms that for better or worse affect the lives of every person in the country. Since the end of the Second World War there have been two UK governments that made economic changes of this nature. The Labour government under Clement Atlee which came into power in 1945, and which dramatically expanded the welfare state, introduced the National Health Service, and nationalised huge swathes of major industries, created the post-war social democratic consensus which would be kept to with only minor changes by successive governments of both major parties for decades.

The next government to make changes to the economy of such a radical nature was the Conservative government which came to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which started the process of unravelling that social democratic consensus and replacing it with a far more hypercapitalist economic paradigm, which would last for the next several decades. It's entirely possible that the current Conservative government, in leaving the EU, has made a similarly huge change, but we won't know that until we have enough distance from the event to know what long-term changes it's caused.

Those are economic changes. Arguably at least as impactful was the Labour government led by Harold Wilson that came to power in 1964, which did not do much to alter the economic consensus, but revolutionised the social order at least as much. Largely because of the influence of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary for much of that time, between 1964 and the end of the sixties, Britain abolished the death penalty for murder, decriminalised some sex acts between men in private, abolished corporal punishment in prisons, legalised abortion in certain circumstances, and got rid of censorship in the theatre. They also vastly increased spending on education, and made many other changes.

By the end of their term, Britain had gone from being a country with laws reflecting a largely conservative, authoritarian, worldview to one whose laws were some of the most liberal in Europe, and society had started changing to match.

There were exceptions, though, and that government did make some changes that were illiberal. They brought in increased restrictions on immigration, starting a worrying trend that continues to this day of governments getting ever crueler to immigrants, and they added LSD to the list of illegal drugs. And they brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, banning the pirate stations.

We've mentioned pirate radio stations very briefly, but never properly explained them. In Britain, at this point, there was a legal monopoly on broadcasting. Only the BBC could run a radio station in the UK, and thanks to agreements with the Musicians' Union, the BBC could only play a very small amount of recorded music, with everything else having to be live performances or spoken word. And because it had a legal obligation to provide something for everyone, that meant the tiny amount of recorded music that was played on the radio had to cover all genres, meaning that even while Britain was going through the most important changes in its musical history, pop records were limited to an hour or two a week on British radio.

Obviously, that wasn't going to last while there was money to be made, and the record companies in particular wanted to have somewhere to showcase their latest releases. At the start of the sixties, Radio Luxembourg had become popular, broadcasting from continental Europe but largely playing shows that had been pre-recorded in London. But of course, that was far enough away that it made listening to the transmissions difficult. But a solution presented itself:

[Excerpt: The Fortunes, "Caroline"]

Radio Caroline still continues to this day, largely as an Internet-based radio station, but in the mid-sixties it was something rather different. It was one of a handful of radio stations -- the pirate stations -- that broadcast from ships in international waters. The ships would stay three miles off the coast of Britain, close enough for their broadcasts to be clearly heard in much of the country, but outside Britain's territorial waters. They soon became hugely popular, with Radio Caroline and Radio London the two most popular, and introduced DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett, and John Peel to the airwaves of Britain.

The stations ran on bribery and advertising, and if you wanted a record to get into the charts one of the things you had to do was bribe one of the big pirate stations to playlist it, and with this corruption came violence, which came to a head when as we heard in the episode on “Here Comes the Night”, in 1966 Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-wing politician and one of the directors of Radio Caroline, got a gang of people to board an abandoned sea fort from which a rival station was broadcasting and retrieve some equipment he claimed belonged to him. The next day, Reginald Calvert, the owner of the rival station, went to Smedley's home to confront him, and Smedley shot him dead, claiming self-defence. The jury in Smedley's subsequent trial took only a minute to find him not guilty and award him two hundred and fifty guineas to cover his costs.

This was the last straw for the government, which was already concerned that the pirates' transmitters were interfering with emergency services transmissions, and that proper royalties weren't being paid for the music broadcast (though since much of the music was only on there because of payola, this seems a little bit of a moot point). 

They introduced legislation which banned anyone in the UK from supplying the pirate ships with records or other supplies, or advertising on the stations. They couldn't do anything about the ships themselves, because they were outside British jurisdiction, but they could make sure that nobody could associate with them while remaining in the UK. The BBC was to regain its monopoly (though in later years some commercial radio stations were allowed to operate).

But as well as the stick, they needed the carrot. The pirate stations *had* been filling a real need, and the biggest of them were getting millions of listeners every day. So the arrangements with the Musicians' Union and the record labels were changed, and certain BBC stations were now allowed to play a lot more recorded music per day. I haven't been able to find accurate figures anywhere -- a lot of these things were confidential agreements -- but it seems to have been that the so-called "needle time" rules were substantially relaxed, allowing the BBC to separate what had previously been the Light Programme -- a single radio station that played all kinds of popular music, much of it live performances -- into two radio stations that were each allowed to play as much as twelve hours of recorded music per day, which along with live performances and between-track commentary from DJs was enough to allow a full broadcast schedule.

One of these stations, Radio 2, was aimed at older listeners, and to start with mostly had programmes of what we would now refer to as Muzak, mixed in with the pop music of an older generation -- crooners and performers like Englebert Humperdinck. But another, Radio 1, was aimed at a younger audience and explicitly modelled on the pirate stations, and featured many of the DJs who had made their names on those stations.

And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record. At different times Blackburn has said either that he was just desperately reaching for whatever record came to hand or that he made a deliberate choice because the record he chose had such a striking opening that it would be the perfect way to start a new station:

[Excerpt: Tony Blackburn first radio show into "Flowers in the Rain" by the Move]

You may remember me talking in the episode on "Here Comes the Night" about how in 1964 Dick Rowe of Decca, the manager Larry Page, and the publicist and co-owner of Radio Caroline Phil Solomon were all trying to promote something called Brumbeat as the answer to Merseybeat – Brummies, for those who don't know, are people from Birmingham. Brumbeat never took off the way Merseybeat did, but several bands did get a chance to make records, among them Gerry Levene and the Avengers:

[Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"]

That was the only single the Avengers made, and the B-side wasn't even them playing, but a bunch of session musicians under the direction of Bert Berns, and the group split up soon afterwards, but several of the members would go on to have rather important careers. According to some sources, one of their early drummers was John Bohnam, who you can be pretty sure will be turning up later in the story, while the drummer on that track was Graeme Edge, who would later go on to co-found the Moody Blues. 

But today it's the guitarist we'll be looking at. Roy Wood had started playing music when he was very young -- he'd had drum lessons when he was five years old, the only formal musical tuition he ever had, and he'd played harmonica around working men's clubs as a kid. And as a small child he'd loved classical music, particularly Tchaikovsky and Elgar. But it wasn't until he was twelve that he decided that he wanted to be a guitarist. He went to see the Shadows play live, and was inspired by the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, which he later described as sounding "like it had been dipped in Dettol or something":

[Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"]

He started begging his parents for a guitar, and got one for his thirteenth birthday -- and by the time he was fourteen he was already in a band, the Falcons, whose members were otherwise eighteen to twenty years old, but who needed a lead guitarist who could play like Marvin. Wood had picked up the guitar almost preternaturally quickly, as he would later pick up every instrument he turned his hand to, and he'd also got the equipment. His friend Jeff Lynne later said "I first saw Roy playing in a church hall in Birmingham and I think his group was called the Falcons. And I could tell he was dead posh because he had a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier. The business at the time. I mean, if you've got those, that's it, you're made."

It was in the Falcons that Wood had first started trying to write songs, at first instrumentals in the style of the Shadows, but then after the Beatles hit the charts he realised it was possible for band members to write their own material, and started hesitantly trying to write a few actual songs.

Wood had moved on from the Falcons to Gerry Levene's band, one of the biggest local bands in Birmingham, when he was sixteen, which is also when he left formal education, dropping out from art school -- he's later said that he wasn't expelled as such, but that he and the school came to a mutual agreement that he wouldn't go back there. And when Gerry Levene and the Avengers fell apart after their one chance at success hadn't worked out, he moved on again to an even bigger band.

Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders had had two singles out already, both produced by Cliff Richard's producer Norrie Paramor, and while they hadn't charted they were clearly going places. They needed a new guitarist, and Wood was by far the best of the dozen or so people who auditioned, even though Sheridan was very hesitant at first -- the Night Riders were playing cabaret, and all dressed smartly at all times, and this sixteen-year-old guitarist had turned up wearing clothes made by his sister and ludicrous pointy shoes. He was the odd man out, but he was so good that none of the other players could hold a candle to him, and he was in the Night Riders by the time of their third single, "What a Sweet Thing That Was":

[Excerpt: Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, "What a Sweet Thing That Was"]

Sheridan later said "Roy was and still is, in my opinion, an unbelievable talent. As stubborn as a mule and a complete extrovert. Roy changed the group by getting us into harmonies and made us realize there was better material around with more than three chords to play. This was our turning point and we became a group's group and a bigger name." -- though there are few other people who would describe Wood as extroverted, most people describing him as painfully shy off-stage.

"What a  Sweet Thing That Was" didn't have any success, and nor did its follow-up, "Here I Stand", which came out in January 1965. But by that point, Wood had got enough of a reputation that he was already starting to guest on records by other bands on the Birmingham scene, like "Pretty Things" by Danny King and the Mayfair Set:

[Excerpt: Danny King and the Mayfair Set, "Pretty Things"]

After their fourth single was a flop, Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders changed their name to Mike Sheridan's Lot, and the B-side of their first single under the new name was a Roy Wood song, the first time one of his songs was recorded. Unfortunately the song, modelled on "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones, didn't come off very well, and Sheridan blamed himself for what everyone was agreed was a lousy sounding record:

[Excerpt: Mike Sheridan's Lot, "Make Them Understand"]

Mike Sheridan's Lot put out one final single, but the writing was on the wall for the group. Wood left, and soon after so did Sheridan himself. The remaining members regrouped under the name The Idle Race, with Wood's friend Jeff Lynne as their new singer and guitarist.

But Wood wouldn't remain without a band for long. He'd recently started hanging out with another band, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, who had also released a couple of singles, on Pye:

[Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "What's the Matter Baby"]

But like almost every band from Birmingham up to this point, the Vikings' records had done very little, and their drummer had quit, and been replaced by Bev Bevan, who had been in yet another band that had gone nowhere, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, who had released one single under the name of their lead singer Nicky James, featuring the Breakaways, the girl group who would later sing on "Hey Joe", on backing vocals:

[Excerpt: Nicky James, "My Colour is Blue"]

Bevan had joined Carl Wayne's group, and they'd recorded one track together, a cover version of "My Girl", which was only released in the US, and which sank without a trace:

[Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "My Girl"]

It was around this time that Wood started hanging around with the Vikings, and they would all complain about how if you were playing the Birmingham circuit you were stuck just playing cover versions, and couldn't do anything more interesting. 

They were also becoming more acutely aware of how successful they *could* have been, because one of the Brumbeat bands had become really big. The Moody Blues, a supergroup of players from the best bands in Birmingham who featured Bev Bevan's old bandmate Denny Laine and Wood's old colleague Graeme Edge, had just hit number one with their version of "Go Now":

[Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"]

So they knew the potential for success was there, but they were all feeling trapped. But then Ace Kefford, the bass player for the Vikings, went to see Davy Jones and the Lower Third playing a gig:

[Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"]

Also at the gig was Trevor Burton, the guitarist for Danny King and the Mayfair Set. The two of them got chatting to Davy Jones after the gig, and eventually the future David Bowie told them that the two of them should form their own band if they were feeling constricted in their current groups. They decided to do just that, and they persuaded Carl Wayne from Kefford's band to join them, and got in Wood. 

Now they just needed a drummer. Their first choice was John Bonham, the former drummer for Gerry Levene and the Avengers who was now drumming in a band with Kefford's uncle and Nicky James from the Diplomats. But Bonham and Wayne didn't get on, and so Bonham decided to remain in the group he was in, and instead they turned to Bev Bevan, the Vikings' new drummer. 

(Of the other two members of the Vikings, one went on to join Mike Sheridan's Lot in place of Wood, before leaving at the same time as Sheridan and being replaced by Lynne, while the other went on to join Mike Sheridan's New Lot, the group Sheridan formed after leaving his old group. The Birmingham beat group scene seems to have only had about as many people as there were bands, with everyone ending up a member of twenty different groups).

The new group called themselves the Move, because they were all moving on from other groups, and it was a big move for all of them. Many people advised them not to get together, saying they were better off where they were, or taking on offers they'd got from more successful groups -- Carl Wayne had had an offer from a group called the Spectres, who would later become famous as Status Quo, while Wood had been tempted by Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a group who at the time were signed to Immediate Records, and who did Beach Boys soundalikes and covers:

[Excerpt: Tony Rivers and the Castaways, "Girl Don't Tell Me"]

Wood was a huge fan of the Beach Boys and would have fit in with Rivers, but decided he'd rather try something truly new.

After their first gig, most of the people who had warned against the group changed their minds. Bevan's best friend, Bobby Davis, told Bevan that while he'd disliked all the other groups Bevan had played in, he liked this one.

(Davis would later become a famous comedian, and have a top five single himself in the seventies, produced by Jeff Lynne and with Bevan on the drums, under his stage name Jasper Carrott):

[Excerpt: Jasper Carrott, "Funky Moped"]

Most of their early sets were cover versions, usually of soul and Motown songs, but reworked in the group's unique style. All five of the band could sing, four of them well enough to be lead vocalists in their own right (Bevan would add occasional harmonies or sing novelty numbers) and so they became known for their harmonies -- Wood talked at the time about how he wanted the band to have Beach Boys harmonies but over instruments that sounded like the Who.

And while they were mostly doing cover versions live, Wood was busily writing songs. Their first recording session was for local radio, and at that session they did cover versions of songs by Brenda Lee, the Isley Brothers, the Orlons, the Marvelettes, and Betty Everett, but they also performed four songs written by Wood, with each member of the front line taking a lead vocal, like this one with Kefford singing:

[Excerpt: The Move, "You're the One I Need"]

The group were soon signed by Tony Secunda, the manager of the Moody Blues, who set about trying to get the group as much publicity as possible. While Carl Wayne, as the only member who didn't play an instrument, ended up the lead singer on most of the group's early records, Secunda started promoting Kefford, who was younger and more conventionally attractive than Wayne, and who had originally put the group together, as the face of the group, while Wood was doing most of the heavy lifting with the music.

Wood quickly came to dislike performing live, and to wish he could take the same option as Brian Wilson and stay home and write songs and make records while the other four went out and performed, so Kefford and Wayne taking the spotlight from him didn't bother him at the time, but it set the group up for constant conflicts about who was actually the leader of the group.

Wood was also uncomfortable with the image that Secunda set up for the group. Secunda decided that the group needed to be promoted as "bad boys", and so he got them to dress up as 1930s gangsters, and got them to do things like smash busts of Hitler, or the Rhodesian dictator Ian Smith, on stage. He got them to smash TVs on stage too, and in one publicity stunt he got them to smash up a car, while strippers took their clothes off nearby -- claiming that this was to show that people were more interested in violence than in sex. Wood, who was a very quiet, unassuming, introvert, didn't like this sort of thing, but went along with it.

Secunda got the group a regular slot at the Marquee club, which lasted several months until, in one of Secunda's ideas for publicity, Carl Wayne let off smoke bombs on stage which set fire to the stage. The manager came up to try to stop the fire, and Wayne tossed the manager's wig into the flames, and the group were banned from the club (though the ban was later lifted).

In another publicity stunt, at the time of the 1966 General Election, the group were photographed with "Vote Tory" posters, and issued an invitation to Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and a keen amateur musician, to join them on stage on keyboards. Sir Edward didn't respond to the invitation.

All this publicity led to record company interest. Joe Boyd tried to sign the group to Elektra Records, but much as with The Pink Floyd around the same time, Jac Holzman wasn't interested. Instead they signed with a new production company set up by Denny Cordell, the producer of the Moody Blues' hits. The contract they signed was written on the back of a nude model, as yet another of Secunda's publicity schemes.

The group's first single, "Night of Fear" was written by Wood and an early sign of his interest in incorporating classical music into rock:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Night of Fear"]

Secunda claimed in the publicity that that song was inspired by taking bad acid and having a bad trip, but in truth Wood was more inspired by brown ale than by brown acid -- he and Bev Bevan would never do any drugs other than alcohol. Wayne did take acid once, but didn't like it, though Burton and Kefford would become regular users of most drugs that were going.

In truth, the song was not about anything more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected sound and then being unable to get back to sleep because you're scared of what might be out there.

The track reached number two on the charts in the UK, being kept off the top by "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and was soon followed up by another song which again led to assumptions of drug use. "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" wasn't about grass the substance, but was inspired by a letter to Health and Efficiency, a magazine which claimed to be about the nudist lifestyle as an excuse for printing photos of naked people at a time before pornography laws were liberalised. The letter was from a reader saying that he listened to pop music on the radio because "where I live it's so quiet I can hear the grass grow!"

Wood took that line and turned it into the group's next single, which reached number five:

[Excerpt: The Move, "I Can Hear the Grass Grow"]

Shortly after that, the group played two big gigs at Alexandra Palace. The first was the Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream, which we talked about in the Pink Floyd episode. There Wood had one of the biggest thrills of his life when he walked past John Lennon, who saluted him and then turned to a friend and said "He's brilliant!" -- in the seventies Lennon would talk about how Wood was one of his two favourite British songwriters, and would call the Move "the Hollies with balls".

The other gig they played at Alexandra Palace was a "Free the Pirates" benefit show, sponsored by Radio Caroline, to protest the imposition of the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act. 

Despite that, it was, of course, the group's next single that was the first one to be played on Radio One. And that single was also the one which kickstarted Roy Wood's musical ambitions. 

The catalyst for this was Tony Visconti. Visconti was a twenty-three-year-old American who had been in the music business since he was sixteen, working the typical kind of jobs that working musicians do, like being for a time a member of a latter-day incarnation of the Crew-Cuts, the white vocal group who had had hits in the fifties with covers of "Sh'Boom" and “Earth Angel”. He'd also recorded two singles as a duo with his wife Siegrid, which had gone nowhere:

[Excerpt: Tony and Siegrid, "Up Here"]

Visconti had been working for the Richmond Organisation as a staff songwriter when he'd met the Move's producer Denny Cordell. Cordell was in the US to promote a new single he had released with a group called Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale", and Visconti became the first American to hear the record, which of course soon became a massive hit:

[Excerpt: Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"]

While he was in New York, Cordell also wanted to record a backing track for one of his other hit acts, Georgie Fame. He told Visconti that he'd booked several of the best session players around, like the jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry, and thought it would be a fun session. Visconti asked to look at the charts for the song, out of professional interest, and Cordell was confused -- what charts? The musicians would just make up an arrangement, wouldn't they? Visconti asked what he was talking about, and Cordell talked about how you made records -- you just got the musicians to come into the studio, hung around while they smoked a few joints and worked out what they were going to play, and then got on with it. It wouldn't take more than about twelve hours to get a single recorded that way.

Visconti was horrified, and explained that that might be how they did things in London, but if Cordell tried to make a record that way in New York, with an eight-piece group of session musicians who charged union scale, and would charge double scale for arranging work on top, then he'd bankrupt himself. Cordell went pale and said that the session was in an hour, what was he going to do?

Luckily, Cordell had a copy of the demo with him, and Visconti, who unlike Cordell was a trained musician, quickly sat down and wrote an arrangement for him, sketching out parts for guitar, bass, drums, piano, sax, and trumpets. The resulting arrangement wasn't perfect -- Visconti had to write the whole thing in less than an hour with no piano to hand -- but it was good enough that Cordell's production assistant on the track, Harvey Brooks of the group Electric Flag, who also played bass on the track, could tweak it in the studio, and the track was recorded quickly, saving Cordell a fortune:

[Excerpt: Georgie Fame, "Because I Love You"]

One of the other reasons Cordell had been in the US was that he was looking for a production assistant to work with him in the UK to help translate his ideas into language the musicians could understand. According to Visconti he said that he was going to try asking Phil Spector to be his assistant, and Artie Butler if Spector said no. 

Astonishingly, assuming he did ask them, neither Phil Spector nor Artie Butler (who was the arranger for records like "Leader of the Pack" and "I'm a Believer" among many, many, others, and who around this time was the one who suggested to Louis Armstrong that he should record "What a Wonderful World") wanted to fly over to the UK to work as Denny Cordell's assistant, and so Cordell turned back to Visconti and invited him to come over to the UK.

The main reason Cordell needed an assistant was that he had too much work on his hands -- he was currently in the middle of recording albums for three major hit groups -- Procol Harum, The Move, and Manfred Mann -- and he physically couldn't be in multiple studios at once. Visconti's first work for him was on a Manfred Mann session, where they were recording the Randy Newman song "So Long Dad" for their next single. Cordell produced the rhythm track then left for a Procol Harum session, leaving Visconti to guide the group through the overdubs, including all the vocal parts and the lead instruments:

[Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "So Long Dad"]

The next Move single, "Flowers in the Rain", was the first one to benefit from Visconti's arrangement ideas. The band had recorded the track, and Cordell had been unhappy with both the song and performance, thinking it was very weak compared to their earlier singles -- not the first time that Cordell would have a difference of opinion with the band, who he thought of as a mediocre pop group, while they thought of themselves as a heavy rock band who were being neutered in the studio by their producer. 

In particular, Cordell didn't like that the band fell slightly out of time in the middle eight of the track. He decided to scrap it, and get the band to record something else.

Visconti, though, thought the track could be saved. He told Cordell that what they needed to do was to beat the Beatles, by using a combination of instruments they hadn't thought of. He scored for a quartet of wind instruments -- oboe, flute, clarinet, and French horn, in imitation of Mendelssohn:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"]

And then, to cover up the slight sloppiness on the middle eight, Visconti had the wind instruments on that section recorded at half speed, so when played back at normal speed they'd sound like pixies and distract from the rhythm section:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"]

Visconti's instincts were right. The single went to number two, kept off the top spot by Englebert Humperdinck, who spent 1967 keeping pretty much every major British band off number one, and thanks in part to it being the first track played on Radio 1, but also because it was one of the biggest hits of 1967, it's been the single of the Move's that's had the most airplay over the years.

Unfortunately, none of the band ever saw a penny in royalties from it.

It was because of another of Tony Secunda's bright ideas. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, was very close to his advisor Marcia Williams, who started out as his secretary, rose to be his main political advisor, and ended up being elevated to the peerage as Baroness Falkender.

There were many, many rumours that Williams was corrupt -- rumours that were squashed by both Wilson and Williams frequently issuing libel writs against newspapers that mentioned them -- though it later turned out that at least some of these were the work of Britain's security services, who believed Wilson to be working for the KGB (and indeed Williams had first met Wilson at a dinner with Khrushchev, though Wilson was very much not a Communist) and were trying to destabilise his government as a result. Their personal closeness also led to persistent rumours that Wilson and Williams were having an affair.

And Tony Secunda decided that the best way to promote "Flowers in the Rain" was to print a postcard with a cartoon of Wilson and Williams on it, and send it out. Including sticking a copy through the door of ten Downing St, the Prime Minister's official residence.

This backfired *spectacularly*. Wilson sued the Move for libel, even though none of them had known of their manager's plans, and as a result of the settlement it became illegal for any publication to print the offending image (though it can easily be found on the Internet now of course), everyone involved with the record was placed under a permanent legal injunction to never discuss the details of the case, and every penny in performance or songwriting royalties the track earned would go to charities of Harold Wilson's choice. In the 1990s newspaper reports said that the group had up to that point lost out on two hundred thousand pounds in royalties as a result of Secunda's stunt, and given the track's status as a perennial favourite, it's likely they've missed out on a similar amount in the decades since.

Incidentally, while every member of the band was banned from ever describing the postcard, I'm not, and since Wilson and Williams are now both dead it's unlikely they'll ever sue me. The postcard is a cartoon in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, and shows Wilson as a grotesque naked homunculus sat on a bed, with Williams naked save for a diaphonous nightgown through which can clearly be seen her breasts and genitals, wearing a Marie Antoinette style wig and eyemask and holding a fan coquettishly, while Wilson's wife peers at them through a gap in the curtains. The text reads "Disgusting Depraved Despicable, though Harold maybe is the only way to describe "Flowers in the Rain" The Move, released Aug 23"

The stunt caused huge animosity between the group and Secunda, not only because of the money they lost but also because despite Secunda's attempts to associate them with the Conservative party the previous year, Ace Kefford was upset at an attack on the Labour leader -- his grandfather was a lifelong member of the Labour party and Kefford didn't like the idea of upsetting him.

The record also had a knock-on effect on another band. Wood had given the song "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree" to his friends in The Idle Race, the band that had previously been Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, and they'd planned to use their version as their first single:

[Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree"]

But the Move had also used the song as the B-side for their own single, and "Flowers in the Rain" was so popular that the B-side also got a lot of airplay. The Idle Race didn't want to be thought of as a covers act, and so "Lemon Tree" was pulled at the last minute and replaced by "Impostors of Life's Magazine", by the group's guitarist Jeff Lynne:

[Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Impostors of Life's Magazine"]

Before the problems arose, the Move had been working on another single. The A-side, "Cherry Blossom Clinic", was a song about being in a psychiatric hospital, and again had an arrangement by Visconti, who this time conducted a twelve-piece string section:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic"]

The B-side, meanwhile, was a rocker about politics:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Vote For Me"]

Given the amount of controversy they'd caused, the idea of a song about mental illness backed with one about politics seemed a bad idea, and so "Cherry Blossom Clinic" was kept back as an album track while "Vote For Me" was left unreleased until future compilations.

The first Wood knew about "Cherry Blossom Clinic" not being released was when after a gig in London someone -- different sources have it as Carl Wayne or Tony Secunda -- told him that they had a recording session the next morning for their next single and asked what song he planned on recording. When he said he didn't have one, he was sent up to his hotel room with a bottle of Scotch and told not to come down until he had a new song. He had one by 8:30 the next morning, and was so drunk and tired that he had to be held upright by his bandmates in the studio while singing his lead vocal on the track.

The song was inspired by "Somethin' Else", a track by Eddie Cochran, one of Wood's idols:

[Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Somethin' Else"]

Wood took the bass riff from that and used it as the basis for what was the Move's most straight-ahead rock track to date. As 1967 was turning into 1968, almost universally every band was going back to basics, recording stripped down rock and roll tracks, and the Move were no exception. Early takes of "Fire Brigade" featured Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum on piano, but the final version featured just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, plus a few sound effects:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"]

While Carl Wayne had sung lead or co-lead on all the Move's previous singles, he was slowly being relegated into the background, and for this one Wood takes the lead vocal on everything except the brief bridge, which Wayne sings:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"]

The track went to number three, and while it's not as well-remembered as a couple of other Move singles, it was one of the most influential. Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols has often said that the riff for "God Save the Queen" is inspired by "Fire Brigade":

[Excerpt: The Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"]

The reversion to a heavier style of rock on "Fire Brigade" was largely inspired by the group's new friend Jimi Hendrix. The group had gone on a package tour with The Pink Floyd (who were at the bottom of the bill), Amen Corner, The Nice, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had become good friends with Hendrix, often jamming with him backstage. Burton and Kefford had become so enamoured of Hendrix that they'd both permed their hair in imitation of his Afro, though Burton regretted it -- his hair started falling out in huge chunks as a result of the perm, and it took him a full two years to grow it out and back into a more natural style.

Burton had started sharing a flat with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Burton and Wood had also sung backing vocals with Graham Nash of the Hollies on Hendrix's "You Got Me Floatin'", from his Axis: Bold as Love album:

[Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "You Got Me Floatin'"]

In early 1968, the group's first album came out. In retrospect it's arguably their best, but at the time it felt a little dated -- it was a compilation of tracks recorded between late 1966 and late 1967, and by early 1968 that might as well have been the nineteenth century. The album included their two most recent singles, a few more songs arranged by Visconti, and three cover versions -- versions of Eddie Cochran's "Weekend", Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma", and the old standard "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", done copying the Coasters' arrangement with Bev Bevan taking a rare lead vocal.

By this time there was a lot of dissatisfaction among the group. Most vocal -- or least vocal, because by this point he was no longer speaking to any of the other members, had been Ace Kefford. Kefford felt he was being sidelined in a band he'd formed and where he was the designated face of the group. He'd tried writing songs, but the only one he'd brought to the group, "William Chalker's Time Machine", had been rejected, and was eventually recorded by a group called The Lemon Tree, whose recording of it was co-produced by Burton and Andy Fairweather-Low of Amen Corner:

[Excerpt: The Lemon Tree, "William Chalker's Time Machine"]

He was also, though the rest of the group didn't realise it at the time, in the middle of a mental breakdown, which he later attributed to his overuse of acid. By the time the album, titled Move, came out, he'd quit the group. He formed a new group, The Ace Kefford Stand, with Cozy Powell on drums, and they released one single, a cover version of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love", which didn't chart:

[Excerpt: The Ace Kefford Stand, "For Your Love"]

Kefford recorded a solo album in 1968, but it wasn't released until an archival release in 2003, and he spent most of the next few decades dealing with mental health problems.

The group continued on as a four-piece, with Burton moving over to bass. While they thought about what to do -- they were unhappy with Secunda's management, and with the sound that Cordell was getting from their recordings, which they considered far wimpier than their live sound -- they released a live EP of cover versions, recorded at the Marquee. The choice of songs for the EP showed their range of musical influences at the time, going from fifties rockabilly to the burgeoning progressive rock scene, with versions of Cochran's "Somethin' Else", Jerry Lee Lewis' "It'll Be Me", "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" by the Byrds, "Sunshine Help Me" by Spooky Tooth, and "Stephanie Knows Who" by Love:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Stephanie Knows Who"]

Incidentally, later that year they headlined a gig at the Royal Albert Hall with the Byrds as the support act, and Gram Parsons, who by that time was playing guitar for the Byrds, said that the Move did "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" better than the Byrds did.

The EP, titled "Something Else From the Move", didn't do well commercially, but it did do something that the band thought important -- Trevor Burton in particular had been complaining that Denny Cordell's productions "took the toughness out" of the band's sound, and was worried that the group were being perceived as a pop band, not as a rock group like his friends in the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream. There was an increasing tension between Burton, who wanted to be a heavy rocker, and the older Wayne, who thought there was nothing at all wrong with being a pop band.

The next single, "Wild Tiger Woman", was much more in the direction that Burton wanted their music to go. It was ostensibly produced by Cordell, but for the most part he left it to the band, and as a result it ended up as a much heavier track than normal. Roy Wood had only intended the song as an album track, and Bevan and Wayne were hesitant about it being a single, but Burton was insistent -- "Wild Tiger Woman" was going to be the group's first number one record:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Wild Tiger Woman"]

In fact, it turned out to be the group's first single not to chart at all, after four top ten singles in a row. 

The group were now in crisis. They'd lost Ace Kefford, Burton and Wayne were at odds, and they were no longer guaranteed hitmakers. They decided to stop working with Cordell and Secunda, and made a commitment that if the next single was a flop, they would split up.

In any case, Roy Wood was already thinking about another project. Even though the group's recent records had gone in a guitar-rock direction, he thought maybe you could do something more interesting. Ever since seeing Tony Visconti conduct orchestral instruments playing his music, he'd been thinking about it. As he later put it "I thought 'Well, wouldn't it be great to get a band together, and rather than advertising for a guitarist how about advertising for a cellist or a French horn player or something? There must be lots of young musicians around who play the... instruments that would like to play in a rock kind of band.' That was the start of it, it really was, and I think after those tracks had been recorded with Tony doing the orchestral arrangement, that's when I started to get bored with the Move, with the band, because I thought 'there's something more to it'".

He'd started sketching out plans for an expanded lineup of the group, drawing pictures of what it would look like on stage if Carl Wayne was playing timpani while there were cello and French horn players on stage with them. He'd even come up with a name for the new group -- a multi-layered pun. The group would be a light orchestra, like the BBC Light Orchestra, but they would be playing electrical instruments, and also they would have a light show when they performed live, and so he thought "the Electric Light Orchestra" would be a good name for such a group.

The other band members thought this was a daft idea, but Wood kept on plotting. But in the meantime, the group needed some new management. The person they chose was Don Arden.

We talked about Arden quite a bit in the last episode, but he's someone who is going to turn up a lot in future episodes, and so it's best if I give a little bit more background about him. Arden was a manager of the old school, and like several of the older people in the music business at the time, like Dick James or Larry Page, he had started out as a performer, doing an Al Jolson tribute act, and he was absolutely steeped in showbusiness -- his wife had been a circus contortionist before they got married, and when he moved from Manchester to London their first home had been owned by Winifred Atwell, a boogie piano player who became the first Black person to have a UK number one -- and who is *still* the only female solo instrumentalist to have a UK number one -- with her 1954 hit "Let's Have Another Party":

[Excerpt: WInifred Atwell, "Let's Have Another Party"]

That was only Atwell's biggest in a long line of hits, and she'd put all her royalties into buying properties in London, one of which became the Ardens' home.

Arden had been considered quite a promising singer, and had made a few records in the early 1950s. His first recordings, of material in Yiddish aimed at the Jewish market, are sadly not findable online, but he also apparently recorded as a session singer for Embassy Records. I can't find a reliable source for what records he sang on for that label, which put out budget rerecordings of hits for sale exclusively through Woolworths, but according to Wikipedia one of them was Embassy's version of "Blue Suede Shoes", put out under the group name "The Canadians", and the lead vocal on that track certainly sounds like it could be him:

[Excerpt: The Canadians, "Blue Suede Shoes"]

As you can tell, rock and roll didn't really suit Arden's style, and he wisely decided to get out of performance and into behind-the-scenes work, though he would still try on occasion to make records of his own -- an acetate exists from 1967 of him singing "Sunrise, Sunset":

[Excerpt: Don Arden, "Sunrise, Sunset"]

But he'd moved first into promotion -- he'd been the promoter who had put together tours of the UK for Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Brenda Lee and others which we mentioned in the second year of the podcast -- and then into management. He'd first come into management with the Animals -- apparently acting at that point as the money man for Mike Jeffries, who was the manager the group themselves dealt with. According to Arden -- though his story differs from the version of the story told by others involved -- the group at some point ditched Arden for Allen Klein, and when they did, Arden's assistant Peter Grant, another person we'll be hearing a lot more of, went with them. 

Arden, by his own account, flew over to see Klein and threatened to throw him out of the window of his office, which was several stories up. This was a threat he regularly made to people he believed had crossed him -- he made a similar threat to one of the Nashville Teens, the first group he managed after the Animals, after the musician asked what was happening to the group's money. And as we heard last episode, he threatened Robert Stigwood that way when Stigwood tried to get the Small Faces off him.

One of the reasons he'd signed the Small Faces was that Steve Marriott had gone to the Italia Conti school, where Arden had sent his own children, Sharon and David, and David had said that Marriott was talented. And David was also a big reason the Move came over to Arden. After the Small Faces had left him, Arden had bought Galaxy Entertaimnent, the booking agency that handled bookings for Amen Corner and the Move, among many other acts. Arden had taken over management of Amen Corner himself, and had put his son David in charge of liaising with Tony Secunda about the Move. 

But David Arden was sure that the Move could be an albums act, not just a singles act, and was convinced the group had more potential than they were showing, and when they left Secunda, Don Arden took them on as his clients, at least for the moment. Secunda, according to Arden (who is not the most reliable of witnesses, but is unfortunately the only one we have for a lot of this stuff) tried to hire someone to assassinate Arden, but Arden quickly let Secunda know that if anything happened to Arden, Secunda himself would be dead within the hour.

As "Wild Tiger Woman" hadn't been a hit, the group decided to go back to their earlier "Flowers in the Rain" style, with "Blackberry Way":

[Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"]

That track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who was producing the Rolling Stones and Traffic around this time, and featured the group's friend Richard Tandy on harpsichord. It's also an example of the maxim "Good artists copy, great artists steal". There are very few more blatant examples of plagiarism in pop music than the middle eight of "Blackberry Way". Compare Harry Nilsson's "Good Old Desk":

[Excerpt: Nilsson, "Good Old Desk"]

to the middle eight of "Blackberry Way":

[Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"]

"Blackberry Way" went to number one, but that was the last straw for Trevor Burton -- it was precisely the kind of thing he *didn't* want to be doing,. He was so sick of playing what he thought of as cheesy pop music that at one show he attacked Bev Bevan on stage with his bass, while Bevan retaliated with his cymbals. He stormed off stage, saying he was "tired of playing this crap".

After leaving the group, he almost joined Blind Faith, a new supergroup that members of Cream and Traffic were forming, but instead formed his own supergroup, Balls. Balls had a revolving lineup which at various times included Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, Jackie Lomax, a singer-songwriter who was an associate of the Beatles, Richard Tandy who had played on "Blackberry Way", and Alan White, who would go on to drum with the band Yes. Balls only released one single, "Fight for My Country", which was later reissued as a Trevor Burton solo single:

[Excerpt: Balls, "Fight For My Country"]

Balls went through many lineup changes, and eventually seemed to merge with a later lineup of the Idle Race to become the Steve Gibbons Band, who were moderately successful in the seventies and eighties.

Richard Tandy covered on bass for a short while, until Rick Price came in as a permanent replacement. Before Price, though, the group tried to get Hank Marvin to join, as the Shadows had then split up, and Wood was willing to move over to bass and let Marvin play lead guitar. Marvin turned down the offer though.

But even though "Blackberry Way" had been the group's biggest hit to date, it marked a sharp decline in the group's fortunes.  Its success led Peter Walsh, the manager of Marmalade and the Tremeloes, to poach the group from Arden, and even though Arden took his usual heavy-handed approach -- he describes going and torturing Walsh's associate, Clifford Davis, the manager of Fleetwood Mac, in his autobiography -- he couldn't stop Walsh from taking over.

Unfortunately, Walsh put the group on the chicken-in-a-basket cabaret circuit, and in the next year they only released one record, the single "Curly", which nobody was happy with. It was ostensibly produced by Mike Hurst, but Hurst didn't turn up to the final sessions and Wood did most of the production work himself, while in the next studio over Jimmy Miller, who'd produced "Blackberry Way", was producing "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones.

The group were getting pigeonholed as a singles group, at a time when album artists were the in thing. In a three-year career they'd only released one album, though they were working on their second. Wood was by this point convinced that the Move was unsalvageable as a band, and told the others that the group was now just going to be a launchpad for his Electric Light Orchestra project. The band would continue working the chicken-in-a-basket circuit and releasing hit singles, but that would be just to fund the new project -- which they could all be involved in if they wanted, of course.

Carl Wayne, on the other hand, was very, very, happy playing cabaret, and didn't see the need to be doing anything else. He made a counter-suggestion to Wood -- keep The Move together indefinitely, but let Wood do the Brian Wilson thing and stay home and write songs. Wayne would even try to get Burton and Kefford back into the band. But Wood wasn't interested.

Increasingly his songs weren't even going to the Move at all. He was writing songs for people like Cliff Bennett and the Casuals. He wrote "Dance Round the Maypole" for Acid Gallery:

[Excerpt: Acid Gallery, "Dance Round the Maypole"]

On that, Wood and Jeff Lynne sang backing vocals. Wood and Lynne had been getting closer since Lynne had bought a home tape recorder which could do multi-tracking -- Wood had wanted to buy one of his own after "Flowers in the Rain", but even though he'd written three hit singles at that point his publishing company wouldn't give him an advance to buy one, and so he'd started using Lynne's. The two have often talked about how they'd recorded the demo for "Blackberry Way" at Lynne's parents' house, recording Wood's vocal on the demo with pillows and cushions around his head so that his singing wouldn't wake Lynne's parents.

Lynne had been another person that Wood had asked to join the group when Burton left, but Lynne was happy with The Idle Race, where he was the main singer and songwriter, though their records weren't having any success:

[Excerpt: The Idle Race, "I Like My Toys"]

While Wood was writing material for other people, the only one of those songs to become a hit was "Hello Suzie", written for Amen Corner, which became a top five single on Immediate Records:

[Excerpt: Amen Corner, "Hello Suzie"]

While the Move were playing venues like Batley Variety Club in Britain, when they went on their first US tour they were able to play for a very different audience. They were unknown in the US, and so were able to do shows for hippie audiences that had no preconceptions about them, and did things like stretch "Cherry Blossom Clinic" into an eight-minute-long extended progressive rock jam that incorporated bits of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", the Nutcracker Suite, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited (live at the Fillmore West)"]

All the group were agreed that those shows were the highlight of the group's career. Even Carl Wayne, the band member most comfortable with them playing the cabaret circuit, was so proud of the show at the Fillmore West which that performance is taken from that when the tapes proved unusable he kept hold of them, hoping all his life that technology would progress to the point where they could be released and show what a good live band they'd been, though as things turned out they didn't get released until after his death.

But when they got back to the UK it was back to the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and back to work on their much-delayed second album. That album, Shazam!, was the group's attempt at compromise between their different visions. With the exception of one song, it's all heavy rock music, but Wayne, Wood, and Price all co-produced, and Wayne had the most creative involvement he'd ever had. Side two of the album was all cover versions, chosen by Wayne, and Wayne also went out onto the street and did several vox pops, asking members of the public what they thought of pop music:

[Excerpt: Vox Pops from "Don't Make My Baby Blue"]

There were only six songs on the album, because they were mostly extended jams. Other than the three cover versions chosen by Wayne, there was a sludge-metal remake of "Hello Suzie", the new arrangement of "Cherry Blossom Clinic" they'd been performing live, retitled "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited", and only one new original, "Beautiful Daughter", which featured a string arrangement by Visconti, who also played bass:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Beautiful Daughter"]

And Carl Wayne sang lead on five of the six tracks, which given that one of the reasons Wayne was getting unhappy with the band was that Wood was increasingly becoming the lead singer, must have been some comfort. But it wasn't enough. By the time Shazam! came out, with a cover drawn by Mike Sheridan showing the four band members as superheroes, the band was down to three -- Carl Wayne had quit the group, for a solo career.

He continued playing the cabaret circuit, and made records, but never had another hit, but he managed to have a very successful career as an all-round entertainer, acting on TV and in the theatre, including a six-year run as the narrator in the musical Blood Brothers, and replacing Alan Clarke as the lead singer of the Hollies. He died in 2004.

As soon as Wayne left the group, the three remaining band members quit their management and went back to Arden. And to replace Wayne, Wood once again asked Jeff Lynne to join the group. But this time the proposition was different -- Lynne wouldn't just be joining the Move, but he would be joining the Electric Light Orchestra. They would continue putting out Move records and touring for the moment, and Lynne would be welcome to write songs for the Move so that Wood wouldn't have to be the only writer, but they'd be doing it while they were planning their new group. 

Lynne was in, and the first single from the new lineup was a return to the heavy riff rock style of "Wild Tiger Woman", "Brontosaurus":

[Excerpt: The Move, "Brontosaurus"]

But Wayne leaving the group had put Wood in a difficult position. He was now the frontman, and he hated that responsibility -- he said later "if you look at me in photos of the early days, I'm always the one hanging back with my head down, more the musician than the frontman."

So he started wearing makeup, painting his face with triangles and stars, so he would be able to hide his shyness. And it worked -- and "Brontosaurus" returned the group to the top ten. But the next single, "When Alice Comes Back to the Farm", didn't chart at all.

The first album for the new Move lineup, Looking On, was to finish their contract with their current record label. Many regard it as the group's "Heavy metal album", and it's often considered the worst of their four albums, with Bev Bevan calling it "plodding", but that's as much to do with Bevan's feeling about the sessions as anything else -- increasingly, after the basic rhythm tracks had been recorded, Wood and Lynne would get to work without the other two members of the band, doing immense amounts of overdubbing. 

And that continued after Looking On was finished. The group signed a new contract with EMI's new progressive rock label, Harvest, and the contract stated that they were signing as "the Move performing as The Electric Light Orchestra". They started work on two albums' worth of material, with the idea that anything with orchestral instruments would be put aside for the first Electric Light Orchestra album, while anything with just guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and horns would be for the Move.

The first Electric Light Orchestra track, indeed, was intended as a Move B-side. Lynne came in with a song based around a guitar riff, and with lyrics vaguely inspired by the TV show The Prisoner, about someone with a number instead of a name running, trying to escape, and then eventually dying. 

But then Wood decided that what the track really needed was cello. But not cello played in the standard orchestral manner, but something closer to what the Beatles had done on "I am the Walrus". He'd bought a cheap cello himself, and started playing Jimi Hendrix riffs on it, and Lynne loved the sound of it, so onto the Move's basic rhythm track they overdubbed fifteen cello tracks by Wood, and also two French horns, also by Wood:

[Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "10538 Overture"]

The track was named "10538 Overture", after they saw the serial number 1053 on the console they were using to mix the track, and added the number 8 at the end, making 10538 the number of the character in the song.

Wood and Lynne were so enamoured with the sound of their new track that they eventually got told by the other two members of the group that they had to sit in the back when the Move were driving to gigs, so they couldn't reach the tape player, because they'd just keep playing the track over and over again. So they got a portable tape player and took that into the back seat with them to play it there.

After finishing some pre-existing touring commitments, the Move and Electric Light Orchestra became a purely studio group, and Rick Price quit the bands -- he needed steady touring work to feed his family, and went off to form another band, Mongrel.

Around this time, Wood also took part in another strange project. After Immediate Records collapsed, Andrew Oldham needed some fast money, so he and Don Arden put together a fake group they could sign to EMI for ten thousand pounds.  The photo of the band Grunt Futtock was of some random students, and that was who Arden and Oldham told EMI was on the track, but the actual performers on the single included Roy Wood, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, and Andy Bown, the former keyboard player of the Herd:

[Excerpt: Grunt Futtock, "Rock 'n' Roll Christian"]

Nobody knows who wrote the song, although it's credited to Bernard Webb, which is a pseudonym Paul McCartney had previously used -- but everyone knew he'd used the pseudonym, so it could very easily be a nod to that.

The last Move album, Message From The Country, didn't chart -- just like the previous two hadn't. But Wood's song "Tonight" made number eleven, the follow-up, "Chinatown", made number twenty-three, and then the final Move single, "California Man", a fifties rock and roll pastiche, made the top ten:

[Excerpt: The Move, "California Man"]

In the US, that single was flipped, and the B-side, Lynne's song "Do Ya", became the only Move song ever to make the Hot One Hundred, reaching number ninety-nine:

[Excerpt: The Move, "Do Ya"]

By the time "California Man" was released, the Electric Light Orchestra were well underway. They'd recorded their first album, whose biggest highlights were Lynne's "10538 Overture" and Wood's "Whisper in the Night":

[Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "Whisper in the Night"]

And they'd formed a touring lineup, including Richard Tandy on keyboards and several orchestral instrumentalists. Unfortunately, there were problems developing between Wood and Lynne. When the Electric Light Orchestra toured, interviewers only wanted to speak to Wood, thinking of him as the band leader, even though Wood insisted that he and Lynne were the joint leaders. And both men had started arguing a lot, to the extent that at some shows they would refuse to go on stage because of arguments as to which of them should go on first.

Wood has since said that he thinks most of the problems between Lynne and himself were actually caused by Don Arden, who realised that if he split the two of them into separate acts he could have two hit groups, not one.

If that was the plan, it worked, because by the time "10538 Overture" was released as the Electric Light Orchestra's first single, and made the top ten -- while "California Man" was also still in the charts -- it was announced that Roy Wood was now leaving the Electric Light Orchestra, as were keyboard player Bill Hunt and cellist Hugh McDowell. They were going to form a new group with Rick Price and the two drummers from Mongrel, Charlie Grima and Keith Smart, plus saxophone players Mike Burney and Nick Pentelow.

Of course, ELO, as the Electric Light Orchestra soon became known, went on to have a string of hits through the seventies and eighties, featuring Lynne on vocals and guitar and Bevan on drums, like "Mr. Blue Sky":

[Excerpt: ELO, "Mr. Blue Sky"]

and "Don't Bring Me Down":

[Excerpt: ELO, "Don't Bring Me Down"]

And it's very likely Jeff Lynne will turn up in future episodes, and we'll get more of his story then. Bev Bevan, once ELO split up, led a band called ELO Part II for a while, then led a band calling itself The Move, much to Wood's disgust, sometimes with Trevor Burton involved. He also played briefly with Black Sabbath, and is currently in a country-folk band called Quill.

Wood and Price's new band, though, went in a different direction altogether. After having done psychedelic pop, heavy rock, and orchestral progressive music, Wood now wanted to make music inspired by that of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson -- wall of sound pop music -- and the riffs of the fifties rock and roll he'd always loved. And that's what Wizzard did. 

Wizzard's first single, "Ball Park Incident", came out in November 1972 and made the top ten, meaning Wood had had top ten singles with three different bands in the space of six months:

[Excerpt: Wizzard, "Ball Park Incident"]

While Wizzard were a glam-pop singles group making catchy three-minute pop records, their albums were something else. Their first album, Wizzard Brew, was their only one to chart -- it only made number twenty-nine, and contained tracks like the thirteen-minute jazz-rock epic "Meet Me at the Jailhouse":

[Excerpt: Wizzard, "Meet Me at the Jailhouse"]

Their second album, Introducing Eddie and the Falcons, was a collection of fifties rock pastiches, while the third, Main Street, didn't get released at all at the time, as it was just considered too strange. Which is odd, because Wood was simultaneously working on an even stranger album, one he'd started work on while the Move were still going. 

Wood later said of the album in question, Boulders, "This was at the time when people were leaving bands and going out on their own, and then bringing an album out and calling it a solo album. And I thought 'Well, that's not a solo album! A solo album is when you write all the songs, you do all the arrangements, you play all the instruments yourself, you design the album cover, drive the van, and make the sandwiches and the tea, you know? That's a solo album.' Which is what I was determined to do."

And he certainly managed. Other than a harmonium part that opens the first track, which is played by one of the album's engineers, every note on Boulders is written and performed by Wood, who is credited with banjo, bells, cello, cowbell, double bass, drums, glockenspiel, guitar, bass, harp, harp guitar, piano, recorder, saxophone, sitar, slide guitar, tambourine, trumpet, violin, washboard, water bowl, lead and backing vocals, production, liner notes and cover art.

The single from Boulders, "Dear Elaine", made number eleven on the charts:

[Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Dear Elaine"]

But rather astonishingly Boulders itself became the biggest hit album of any that Wood was ever involved in, reaching number twelve. This despite it having songs like "Miss Clarke and the Computer", a song sung from the perspective of a computer who's in love with a maintenance engineer who has been sent out to dismantle it:

[Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Miss Clarke and the Computer"]

While he was working on that, though, he'd also continued working with Wizzard, and Wizzard's second single was also Wood's second number one, "See My Baby Jive":

[Excerpt: Wizzard, "See My Baby Jive"]

Just before that had come out, ELO had put out a cover version of "Roll Over Beethoven" which EMI had publicised as "the follow-up to California Man", and so the B-side to "See My Baby Jive" was an instrumental whose full title was "Bend Over Beethoven (the official follow-up to "California Man")"

"See My Baby Jive" was followed up by "Angel Fingers", another number one, while "Dear Elaine" was followed up by "Forever", a pastiche of Neil Sedaka and the Beach Boys which the Beach Boys themselves liked so much that Wood was invited to join them in the recording of their hit "It's OK". Wood has talked about visiting Brian Wilson's house and being greeted by Wilson's daughters Carnie and Wendy, later of Wilson Phillips, singing "Forever":

[Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Forever"]

That came out at the end of 1973 and made the top ten in the UK in early 1974. In total, from singles released in 1973 either by Wizzard or by Wood solo, Wood spent fifty-two weeks in the charts at the time.

I say "at the time" because the last Wizzard single released in 1973 has spent a lot more time on the charts since. In 1972, John Lennon had released "Happy Xmas (War is Over)", and for the first time British rockers had realised that there was money to be made in Christmas songs. And so after nearly a decade of no Christmas-themed records worthy of note, suddenly Elton John was asking us to "Step into Christmas", the folk-rock band Steeleye Span were charting with an a capella recording of the carol "Gaudete", and Slade were at number one with "Merry Xmas Everybody".

And just below them, at number four, were Wizzard, with "I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day":

[Excerpt: Wizzard, "I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day"]

That track became a perennial on Christmas radio and TV, a reissue of it made the top thirty in 1984, and since downloads started counting towards the charts it has made the top forty in 2007, 2008, and then every year from 2011 on. It's at number twenty-three on the charts right now as I say this.

But that would be the peak of Wood's, and Wizzard's, success. He changed record label in 1974, and some contractual difficulties made him lose a bit of momentum, though he still managed a couple more top ten hits and a fair few in the top forty. But Wizzard had become associated with the glam-rock movement, and musical fashions were changing.

Not only that, Wood was simply too musically eclectic for his own good. You never knew what you were going to get with a Roy Wood album. You'd hear a single on the radio, so you knew what you were in for, but if you bought a Wizzard album you might get a collection of fifties rock pastiches or jazz skronking. And if you bought a Roy Wood solo album you might get songs about a computer in love with its killer, or you might get a note-perfect Andrews Sisters pastiche with Wood's vocals sped up to sound like women, as on the title track to his second solo album Mustard:

[Excerpt: Roy Wood, "Mustard"]

Wood's last charting single was in 1975, and by 1977 he was saying "I've written something like 30 hit songs, you know? It's not easy now to accept that I'm not a success anymore"

He carried on making new records for another decade, with no commercial success and little critical success, but gave up after a brief cluster of releases in 1987 and 88 came to nothing. Since then, the only new recordings he's released have been a live version of "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day", and in 1999 a rather bizarre mashup called "I Wish it Could be a Wombling Merry Christmas Every Day", which married his Christmas hit with another seventies Christmas record by the children's group the Wombles. Rather staggeringly, that did chart. Wikipedia also credits him as being part of a charity Christmas record by the DJ Mike Read under the name Shooting Stars in 2009, but Wood's credit on that seems to be just a songwriting credit, presumably because the song is just Wood's hit "Angel Fingers" slightly rewritten.

Wood apparently still writes the occasional song. He tours most years around Christmas (though hasn't since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic) and always plays exactly the same setlist, in the same order, unchanged since at least 2009, and in that set are three songs that have never had an official release -- a rockabilly song called "Kiss Me Goodnight, Boadicea", a blues track called "Big Girl's Blues", and a jazz instrumental called "Roy's Revenge". But while he occasionally talks about making a new album, he's apparently decided that his body of work is OK to stand as it is without further addition. And who can blame him?

But, as it's the Christmas season now, and as it's on the charts again, let's leave the episode with the song which every British person has heard in every public space every December for nearly fifty years. And if you celebrate it, a Merry Christmas to you all.

[Excerpt: Wizzard, "I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day"]

Transcript

This is just to let people know what's happening with the podcast over the next few weeks, as we head into a season which has holiday celebrations for many people, including me. The podcast has been keeping to a fortnightly schedule for the last few months, but at this time of year I have commitments to visit family and friends for Christmas and New Year, and I've learned that when I'm away from home I can't record and shouldn't even make the attempt. Also, a lot of people don't have time to listen to new podcasts over the Christmas period.

So here's what's going to happen with the podcast between now and the beginning of the year. I'm recording a full podcast episode today, and that will be going up either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, depending how long it takes to edit, so two weeks after the last episode, and then there will be a gap for Christmas and New Year. I will be doing Patreon bonuses during that time on a weekly basis as normal -- they take much less recording time than the main episodes, and I can prerecord them in advance -- but the next main episode of the podcast after this week's will go up on Monday the ninth of January, a little less than three weeks after the last one, rather than the normal two. 

However, to fill in the gap I'm going to put up a few old Patreon bonus episodes over Christmas week. Every year around this time my Patreon bonus episodes tend to be about something seasonal, and so I'll put up a few of the old ones on the main feed for those of you who haven't heard them. These are older bonus episodes, some from four years ago, and so not in the same style as my more recent work, and mostly around ten minutes or so in length, but they'll hopefully be of interest to anyone who is looking for something seasonal to listen to.

Happy holidays to those who celebrate a winter holiday at this time of year, and my sympathies to those who don't or for whom it's a difficult time for whatever reason. I'll see you in a couple of days for the next proper episode.