Andrew Hickey’s History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast (& books) — discuss!

I’ve fallen deep into the rabbit hole of this podcast, & since it looks like there are a number of other ILXors on board, I thought maybe it deserves its own thread.

A few random thoughts:

- I like the approach: no guests, no co-host, just a guy drawing connections and building a portrait of a music.

- He speaks so slowly that I have to listen on accelerated speed, even though this causes the music clips to go breakneck. (With some of the songs, I quite like the effect — especially with the rockabilly stuff! — but it generally doesn’t make for the most seamless experience.)

- The Patreon bonus episodes, I’ve discovered, are essential, & I highly recommend signing up if you like the main show.

- As the show moves into the 60s, I find myself missing the vibe of the early blues & jump stuff, & I’d love to see a similarly well researched podcast devoted to pre-R&R music (you could call it “Before Elvis There Was Everything”)

- Hickey does, I think, a really good job of acknowledging the problematic aspects of a lot of the figures involved without getting bogged down in analysis of those same aspects.

- Now I’m gonna end up searching for and probably buying a lot of 78s :(

I was very interested by the way he talked about category in the Q&A episode since it was something I had come across in a George Lakoff book Women, Fire & Dangerous things while Lakoff was talking about i think Lotfi Zadeh a thinker who I think was a Palestinian academic.
The way he was talking about the subject as pertained to birds where a sparrow is close to the central birdy bird idea and an ostrich is way out of centre to something much fuzzier seemed to come without introduction so I wondered if it was a subject that other people were familiar with since it is a model that I think does apply to a lot of categories. A central archetypal grouping and a gradual fade within the category to things that didn't seem to exemplify that category to people who weren't familiar with the contents of the category.
So did wonder if other people did hear that and get what he was talking about and if it is a more widespread understanding particularly since he didn't seem to need to explain it. May have been something he had talked about elsewhere to introduce it better.

- He speaks so slowly that I have to listen on accelerated speed, even though this causes the music clips to go breakneck. (With some of the songs, I quite like the effect — especially with the rockabilly stuff! — but it generally doesn’t make for the most seamless experience.)

I personally don't feel like he speaks too slowly. I do recall a very early episode or two that sounded self-consciously slow, like a friend had told him, "Hey, maybe slow down a bit?" But none of the episodes since have sounded like that to me. I can't listen at anything other than 1x, partly because of the music, but mainly because of his dramatic pauses (e.g., "Lieber and Stoller were reluctant to take on this young musician...but we'll talk about Phil Spector in later episodes"), asides, and occasional jokes. And also, even listening at 1x I find myself rewinding -- "Hey, wait, who was that? Gaynel Hodge? Hm, I should look him up" -- because of how much information he packs into each episode.

- Hickey does, I think, a really good job of acknowledging the problematic aspects of a lot of the figures involved without getting bogged down in analysis of those same aspects.

Agreed. I very much appreciate his content and trigger warnings.

- Now I’m gonna end up searching for and probably buying a lot of 78s :(

I mentioned this on the podcasts thread, but his recommendations on the best CD compilations of some of the earlier artists -- I picked up ones by Ruth Brown, Johnny Otis, Johnny Ace, Roy Orbison, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe -- are stellar. But his recommendations sometimes lean toward compilations more comprehensive than a casual listener might want -- I like the Everly Brothers, but do I need a boxed set of five of their albums?

The discussion of approach to category seemed to proceed quite naturally from whatever the question was, I didn't feel there was a need for background on it as a school of thought or anything.

I was briefly hung up on the example of a robin as central to the category of birds cos red breasts are atypical and they're pretty darn mousey as birds go. But I get the principle and I'm down with it ;-)

In the category of things that should get a thread on ILM this podcast is dead centre though. Thanks for starting the thread in time for its return.

I _like_ the Everly Brothers, but do I need a boxed set of five of their albums?

I think the big thing with that description of category he was using is the fuzzier less archetypal part. Like there is a rippling edge of things tat fuzzily fit into the category that are not so immediately close to the middle which at closer inspection does have a connection that is just not as immediate. & has caused people on chatlists to try to make out the only things that fit into a category are those things that are more interchangeable with the archetype to the point of things needing to be almost clones of that archetype, Whereas I would think the more interesting things would be those that had some originality meaning they were absolutely not clone but still had a connection in influence/evolution/whatever.
Like all categories are artificial to start with but I do think that idea of a category with a semi obvious core radiating outwards with more fuzzy outliers included is more interesting. Fuzzy outliers may have venn overlap with other radiated categories too. & that overlap is a point of interest too.

I've known Andrew on a number of internet music places for the best part of two decades now*, including FT, so am surprised that he isn't on here too. Maybe he checked it out in the late 2000s when everyone was apparently doing their best to be as unpleasant as possible. Anyway, this is a fantastic project and he has been very supportive to my own much less successful project, so I'm happy to see he has his own thread, even though he isn't here.

*originally on Livejournal over a shared love of The Beiderbecke Affair, iirc.

Well great show and one that I hope continues. Going to take me a while to get through everything up to date. Have listened to several over last few weeks. So will continue to listen through them but am listening through a load of podcasts all the time. Eventually I will catch up witth everything, but i still think I will have caught up with the books i have as a backlog too.
& all the tv shows I've been finding out about.

That Q&A edition was quite interesting anyway. How he works through things, works out what does need to be covered in depth and what as a transient thing inside another discussion.
I'm surprised that Fontella Bass doesn't have more written about her though. Does she need to be rescued like?

Are you guys listening to these in order? I have just started randomly listening here and there, seems like it’s an embarrassment of riches.

I’ve been listening in order. Learned tons about 40s and 50s music. Up to #58 on the Bobettes. My 17 year old son got a kick out of the Billy Lee Riley ep with “Flying Saucers RnR” and has asked to hear more !? I’d call that success.

I think it was in one of these that I heard that Booker T & The MGs recorded Green Onions in what was scheduled as a Billy Riley recording session.
Heard that his band became the Sun house band in the late 50s a few years ago too.
Picked up a Charly cd of his r'n'r years about a decade ago that is pretty great. & had me wondering if it was his version of Baby Please Don't Go that a few bands in the 60s were starting from when covering the song. Pretty primal anyway.

Oh, perfectly timed thread - I started bingeing about a week ago after someone on an Eggpod Twitter Space mentioned it in connection with the Beatles.

I listened to the one for She Loves You then went back to the beginning. I love that it’s opened up new horizons for me in listening - I knew I was ignorant about the early history and prehistory of rock but after this it feels like a world I want to live in for a while.

He’s very impressive, though I can see that his delivery might put a few people off. And he could probably lighten up a bit on all the disclaimers.

even listening at 1x I find myself rewinding -- "Hey, wait, who was that? Gaynel Hodge? Hm, I should look him up" -- because of how much information he packs into each episode.

I'm completely addicted to this podcast. Currently on episode #36 (forced myself to start at the beginning after binging the Beatles episodes).

Favorites episodes:

Rosetta Tharpe - "This Train"
Les Paul and Mary Ford - "How High The Moon"
Johnny Otis, Little Esther - "Double Crossing' Blues"
Lloyd Price - "Lady Miss Clawdy"
Ruth Brown - "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean"
The Chords - "Sh-Boom"
Johnny Ace - "Pledging My Love"
All of the Chess Record Episodes (Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and The Moonglows)
Little Richard - "Tutti Frutti"

In case anyone isn't familiar with Ruth Brown (I wasn't) should watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqmGZRGvKC8

For those that cannot handle his voice (I can’t) and don’t want to read the transcripts in browser (I don’t) he does offer full transcripts arranged in ebook format for his Patreon subscribers and god they’re good. I’m not sure if he’s published the second yet as I’ve been checked out for a while but that first ebook made for an amazing companion piece to bob Stanley’s new pre-rock’n’roll one this summer

It’s a pretty extraordinary thing he’s doing here and I very much appreciate the lengths he goes to to mitigate against the shittiness of his subject matter . It doesn’t slow things down so much when you’re reading rather than listening, perhaps

Also <3 to you CaAL, I discovered your project and Andrew’s at roughly similar times and have followed them in tandem, and between the two of you you’ve completely blown away my previous conceptions about when 20th century popular music got “interesting” and I’ve found it extremely rewarding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-lWQBjnFg

Doing this on phone so apologies if the tags fuck up. But that’s my fav entry. When the chorus kicks in and we go from old timey to rock’n’roll. It’s good stuff

I love this podcast.

I also found about it from ILM, specifically from a thread about Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, where someone linked to a transcript of an episode where Hickey discusses Jones's abuse of women. That episode contains his one effort to avoid causing offense that I found completely ridiculous:

You see, Brian Jones was a sadist, and not in a good way. There are people who engage in consensual BDSM, in which everyone involved is having a good time, and those people include some of my closest friends. This will never be a podcast that engages in kink-shaming of consensual kinks, and I want to make clear that what I have to say about Jones has nothing to do with that.

Because Jones was not into consent. He was into physically injuring non-consenting young women, and he got his sexual kicks from things like beating them with chains. Again, if everyone is involved is consenting, this is perfectly fine, but Jones didn’t care about anyone other than himself.

I can't imagine someone weird enough to be offended by this, but reasonable enough to be assuaged by the disclaimer.

In general, his efforts with this kind of thing strike me as both well-intentioned and pretentious. I think he sincerely wants to avoid causing pointless suffering, and to tell a version of rock history that sheds light on how various people have been unfairly sidelined. And I also think he's very invested in presenting himself as enlightened on these topics (which, of course, requires him to solemnly deny that he sees himself this way).

But that's a minor gripe, considering how good the show is. I've learned so much from it, and I'm beyond curious to see where it goes.

As another listener pointed out in the recent Q&A episode, he's rapidly approaching the point at which a lot of the most critically acclaimed rock music becomes stuff that was less commercially successful and therefore less immediately influential. I'm very interested to see how he'll handle that. I can imagine a version of this show that covers, say, the Eagles but not Minor Threat, and is justified on its own terms in doing so.

What is Camaraderie at Arms Length's project?

XP I don’t read his disclaimers as him being invested in seeming like anything at all … I read them more like “I’ve seen a thousand internet shitstorms and I want to be VERY VERY CLEAR about what I mean by what I’m about to say.”

JRN at 11:24 10 Aug 22

What is Camaraderie at Arms Length's project?

my attitude to the disclaimers is: I am fortunate enough not to have any form of PTSD and therefore these are not for me, but other people aren't so lucky.

I can imagine a version of this show that covers, say, the Eagles but not Minor Threat, and is justified on its own terms in doing so.

He's done Patreon bonus episodes (usually around 10-20 minutes) on a couple of songs that I was sure would be part of the regular 500, particularly Link Wray's "Rumble," and Tommy James And The Shondells' "Hanky Panky." And in his bonus episodes on the Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" and Jackie Shane's "Any Other Way" he says that he tried to find a way to make them part of the 500, but wasn't able to. I'm still not 100% clear on the criteria for inclusion -- and he has stressed that it's not about personal preference, the aesthetic merits of the song itself, or establishing a canon -- but it could be because I wasn't listening closely enough to the episodes that may have laid out the criteria.

All that said, there hasn't been a single "main" episode where I thought, "Why is this here? What does this have to do with anything?" I have thought that before listening -- the one on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" especially -- but not after.

Listening to the Q&A episodes he’s done, a big criterion is songs that give him a way to continue strands of the overall narrative. Sometimes several strands at once.

I've only listened to the James Brown episode, and it was really good even though he seems to be way more of a harmony person than a rhythm person. I probably would have picked a different tune to talk about the invention of funk, but he defended his thesis and I learned a lot of trivia despite being a JB nerd.

There's been a few episodes where he points out the differences between certain rhythms, and how certain rhythmic approaches evolved over the years. iirc, these were mostly in the earlier episodes.

Alba, yes, I do now remember how he's talked about the strands and connections and such.

Chiming in with a few thoughts. The podcast is one of my favorites of the past few years and there are so many similar shows that absolutely get this format wrong compared to Hickey... most "great record survey" type podcasts just gush over an album like a perfect 10 retrospective review and maybe offer a bit of "what was the band doing in the few months leading up to it" information. The approach here is light on the praise, and much more about putting the career of the artist into the context of the evolution of popular music. Excellent research and some great connections drawn between artists and songs I hadn't thought about.

I actually like his relaxed, bemused reading tone, and the writing isn't too cringe apart from the wallowing overmuch in salacious events wherever they crop up and the accompanying endless trigger warnings, and I can definitely quibble with Hickey's curious curatorial choices. He explains why he feels Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters don't belong in his survey but I think it doesn't make sense, really, since one of the big themes of his show appears to be the excellent point that "rock music and (black) soul music are basically contiguous and the musicians themselves listen to and operate across those boundaries, and it's only racist marketing / categorization that kept these two segregated on the radio and in record stores and in people's minds". So instead of some great electric blues episodes featuring what I think most critics would feel are far superior to yet sound right at home next to most 50s "rock and roll" songs, you get 2 Wanda Jackson and Eddie Cochran and Everly Brothers episodes, and full episodes on Tommy Steele, Manfred Mann and that LSD gimmicky surf song, and way too many episodes on Elvis, the Beatles and Beach Boys that betrays an overly "white oldies music fan" focus at odds with the aforementioned "segregation of soul music" theme. But this is quibbling; it's ok to have a point of view and go with it and the extremely high quality of the show speaks for itself.

My head canon I suppose would also have leaned a bit more international and focused less on telling just the story of the US and UK single and album charts. If you're going to say soul music and rock music are basically the same, you might as well include new york cuban-soul fusion bugalu (Joe Cuba) and maybe its precursor the conjunto sound of Arsenio Rodriguez; Jorge Ben and the Jovem Garda which was basically samba-rock fusion; Serge Gainsbourg evolving from chanson to latin jazz to full on 60s rock to writing a ye-ye anthem that wins the Eurovision; and I think the "Lion Sleeps Tonight" episode was fine but soul/latin/highlife hybrids happening in 60s west africa seems like a pretty big oversight to a history of rock music, it's basically some of the best electric guitar music ever made. And same goes for ska, I can see why Hickey went with "My Boy Lollipop" but geez that is just not the 60s ska track I would have picked. Just because it made the hit parade in the UK doesn't mean it's as important as the actual innovations that preceded it. There might be upcoming episodes on Hugh Masekela and Bob Marley and maybe a bonus episode on Mutantes or Veloso/Gil in exile.

Overall I like what Hickey's doing so much I've seriously considered basically copying the format and doing some seasons focusing on some of my sweet spots, like say doing 25 episodes on female 70s/80s post-punk, followed by a season on african musicians... but I think about the head start Hickey must have had owning hundreds of biographies and memoirs and the music I would want to cover, much of it doesn't even have a single biography, so the focus would have to be more on the music than on the biographical details of the artist... sounds like a ton of work.

25 episodes on female 70s/80s post-punk

Oooh, that is rich territory to mine. Au Pairs, Ari Up, Lora Logic, Danielle Dax, AC Marias, just to name a few...

He explains why he feels Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters don't belong in his survey but I think it doesn't make sense

That definitely raised an eyebrow for me, but I do think it makes sense. The early rock 'n' rollers came from Louis Jordan, the Moonglows, the Ink Spots, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Wynonie Harris...Hickey points out that the overt influence of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf didn't happen until Bo Diddley, and then not again until the Rolling Stones. He does point out that Waters influenced Chuck Berry, but has stressed that Waters was one among many of Berry's influences alongside Louis Jordan, Nat "King" Cole, and Charlie Christian.

I initially questioned some of his choices, but not after understanding that a) he's not out to create nor establish a canon; b) he's not choosing songs because they're good (or not); and c) each episode is more about the story than the song. An obvious example of the latter is his most recent episode on "All You Need Is Love." In the nearly 4-hour episode he doesn't get to that actual song until maybe 3 hours in. And when I saw that he'd chosen Peter, Paul & Mary's version of "Blowin' In The Wind" I thought, "What?! Not Dylan's version?!" But the story about PP&M's version is also the story about Dylan's version, and also broadens the scope to encompass the changes happening in the established popular music industry at the time (among other things). As counterintuitive as this sounds, an episode on Dylan's version would've been more narrowly focused, to its detriment.

In his recent Q&A episode, he says that he has done (and will do) episodes on songs that he absolutely despises. This isn't about "Hey, this is a great record! I'll do an episode on that!" And to his credit, the two episodes he's done so far on artists I intensely dislike were surprisingly -- shockingly, even -- engaging and informative.

And what I probably love most about this podcast is who unexpectedly turns up, and where. Sun Ra, Iannis Xenakis, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, and Antonio Carlos Jobim are all mentioned, but not in the episodes you think they might be.

In the nearly 4-hour episode he doesn't get to that actual song until maybe 3 hours in

Re: rhythm. He spends a lot of time in the 40s/50s episodes pointing out rhythmic innovations and trying to explain their origins and influence. Also makes an interesting point that rhythmic innovations could not be copyrighted - so everyone could copy Bo Diddley without him getting paid.

Yeah, I found the Peter Paul and Mary episode interesting and all, but pretty tangential to the history of rock music per se, and again, I'm not sure we need quite as much Dylan in this series as we are going to wind up with. But like I say this is just a quibble. Personally I think the podcast would be better if it focused on the greatest and most innovative performances while maybe not having as much repeated focus on the very biggest names like Elvis, Beatles, Beach Boys, Dylan - and I think Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf absolutely recorded some of the best electrified stomping sing-along popular music that is basically rock and roll, although it gets pigeonholed or dismissed as just being blues music.

I have to imagine that by the time he gets to the 70s there will be less repeat artists, with glam, prog, metal, punk, funk, disco, new wave, etc. all in the mix.

In his recent Q&A episode, he says that he has done (and will do) episodes on songs that he absolutely despises

I've been trying to figure out which ones these are, think Louie, Louie is one, though his description of it just made me love it even more.

I'm still not 100% clear on the criteria for inclusion -- and he has stressed that it's not about personal preference, the aesthetic merits of the song itself, or establishing a canon -- but it could be because I wasn't listening closely enough to the episodes that may have laid out the criteria.

one of the big themes of his show appears to be the excellent point that "rock music and (black) soul music are basically contiguous and the musicians themselves listen to and operate across those boundaries, and it's only racist marketing / categorization that kept these two segregated on the radio and in record stores and in people's minds".

I might be wrong about this but I think I do remember him saying that at some point he would stop covering Soul music on the podcast as the genre becomes established as a separate thing from Rock - curious to see where he places this cut off, as I'd have probably placed it at the emergence of Motown and Stax.

The problem with just continuing to cover Soul and R&B imo is that while musicians listen to all sorts of music sure, as the story advances "Rock and Roll" becomes a term that is very much coded white and carries with it a whole lot of cultural baggage that simply wasn't there in the 50's. So while including Soul or, as per mig's post, MPB and Gainsbourg could be viewed as breaking down dumb marketing barriers, it's also doing so within the context of making it all a sub-genre of Rock & Roll, which I think ends up reinforcing some fucked up hierarchies, it's the same thing as Hip-Hop artists getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. The way to sidestep that would be for it to be A History Of Pop Music, but of course that widens the scope to an absurd degree.

He's done eight Motown episodes, but only one (or two, if you count "In The Midnight Hour") on Stax so far. One of the more recent episodes was on Aretha's "Respect," which obviously talked about Otis Redding a fair amount (and he's said there'll be at least one Otis episode coming up). My guess is that if he stops covering soul, it'll be in the mid-'70s. He did say in an early episode -- one which led me to one of the most stunning recordings I've discovered in the last 15 years or so -- that he will be covering hip-hop to some degree in the future.

Ah, ok, this is what I was looking for (from episode 32 on Ray Charles's "I Got A Woman"):

...it’s worth talking about the musical boundaries we’re going to be using in this series, because while it’s called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, I am not planning on using a narrow definition of “rock music”, because what counts as rock tends to be retroactively redefined to exclude branches of music where black people predominate. So for example, there’s footage of Mohammed [sic] Ali calling Sam Cooke “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world”, and at the time absolutely nobody would have questioned Cooke being called “rock and roll”, but these days he would only be talked about as a soul singer.

And much of the music that we would now call “soul” was so influential on the music that we now call rock music that it’s completely ridiculous to even consider them separately until the late seventies at the earliest. So while we’re going to mostly look at music that has been labelled rock or rock and roll, don’t be surprised to find soul, funk, hip-hop, country, or any other genre that has influenced rock turning up. And especially don’t be surprised to see that happening if it was music that was thought of as rock and roll at the time, but has been retroactively relabelled.

Overall I like what Hickey's doing so much I've seriously considered basically copying the format and doing some seasons focusing on some of my sweet spots, like say doing 25 episodes on female 70s/80s post-punk, followed by a season on african musicians... but I think about the head start Hickey must have had owning hundreds of biographies and memoirs and the music I would want to cover, much of it doesn't even have a single biography, so the focus would have to be more on the music than on the biographical details of the artist... sounds like a ton of work.

― mig (guess that dreams always end), Thursday, August 11, 2022 6:32 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I put together this list of what the first 18 episodes of "A History of Jazz in 500 songs" would be, there is absolutely no way I'm ever making it, but if anyone wants to have a go then I would be very happy to help out.

Unique Quartette - Mama's Black Baby Boy
Vess L Ossman - A Bunch of Rags
Scott Joplin - Maple Leaf Rag
Arthur Pryor with Sousa's Band - The Patriot
Bert Williams - Nobody
Buddy Bolden Band - Funky Butt
Europe's Society Orchestra - Down Home Rag
Sophie Tucker - Some of These Days
Prince's Band - St Louis Blues
Collins & Harlan - That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland
Original Dixieland 'Jass' Band - Livery Stable Blues
Earl Fuller’s Rector Novelty Orchestra - Russian Rag
Wilbur Sweatman's Original Jazz Band - Dallas Blues
Marrion Harris - I Ain't Got Nobody
Art Hickman's Orchestra - Rose Room
Lieut. Jim Europe's 369th U. S. Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band - Memphis Blues
Joseph C Smith's Orchestra - Yellow Dog Blues
Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds - Crazy Blues

David Wondrich is great on Europe’s “down home rag” in ‘stomp and swerve’, that was a real opener for me for with the super early stuff

New episode! And I strongly suspect this is less about the song itself -- unless Scott McKenzie really is somehow fascinating enough to warrant a 2 1/2 hour episode -- and more about the story: https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-151-san-francisco-by-scott-mckenzie/

wasn’t there some stuff with John Stewart as well?

just finished listening, the song itself is covered for only a few minutes- majority of the episode is the career of The Mamas & the Papas and The Monterey Pop Festival 1967.

I'm a bit baffled at how much Hickey shoehorned into this one. Enjoyable to listen to as always but not sure I needed 2.5 hours on the Mamas & the Papas w/ Scott McKenzie and Monterey Pop detours. I feel like I don't have a strong sense of who this John Phillips character really was, or why I should want to know him given what I know of how he turned out. I think the problem was me; I have always held California Dreamin' at arms' length, it's great of course, and moreover I'm intrigued by the hyper capitalist American go-getter make friends and influence your uncle attitude of putting easy listening ba-ba-da-da-da peanut butter in my chocolate rock but beyond Pet Sounds and the more marginal hipster crate digs like Free Design and Millenium, the whole field is kind of a blur to me and the big hits like Eloise and Windy kind of bore me. If I'm in the mood for interesting 60s easy listening I'll usually reach for something like Morricone or Esquivel, Swingle Singers, Peggy Lee, Scott Walker, Francoise Hardy. I think there's more for me to explore in the world of the big sunshine pop hits, "The Archies plus Bacharach" sounds appealing to me, but it's currently lost on me, even after this episode.

It seems there could be a way to use the moment of the summer of love to tie together sunshine pop of the Turtles/Association/5th Dimension and sophisticated adult-themed records of Bacharach and Webb, lounge precursors and the Beatles/Beach Boys/folk rock stuff he's already covered, and talk about California Dreamin' as a sort of happy-sad, beautiful-summation of this cultural moment, and how the band's Fleetwood Mac style internal drama is a presage of the sexual chaos of the dawning era.

I think he's big into that kinda stuff, possibly through being a huge Beach Boys fan. The comment on the LA/SF feud was interesting to me as I was totally unaware this had even been a thing.

Ditto. That strain of '60s California music -- Mamas & Papas, Association, much of the non-Spector/non-Beach Boys Wrecking Crew things like Gary Lewis & The Playboys -- isn't really my bag. And I can't stand the McKenzie song, but I thought it was the perfect fulcrum for this episode. What really struck me was learning that Monterey was set up to be a kind of battle of the bands between LA and San Francisco. As Hickey pointed out, most most of the LA bands either declined, didn't show, backed out, were missing key members, or (as with the Association) were seen as squaresville next to the Dead, Airplane, Moby Grape, Quicksilver, and Big Brother (and forget about comparing the Association to Hendrix or the Who...though Steve Miller is on record saying he despised the Who's set and loved the Association). So it's about how the slick LA scene came up with the McKenzie song -- representative of cynical showbiz appropriations of the new hippie culture -- that those on the SF scene not only laughed at, but made irrelevant overnight.

Latest episode is also California-centered, but is much more focused on the song itself ("For What It's Worth" -- and I had no idea about the somewhat hilarious origin story of the song's title). Not sure how much in this episode will be news to Neil fans (of which I am one, but I never got around to reading Shakey or his autobios), but a few things -- like Neil's love for Bobby Darin, which explains a fuck of a lot about how Neil went about his career -- were genuinely surprising to learn.

Thoroughly enjoying this podcast thanks to this thread. Thanks!

Neil briefly being a Motown artist was news to me!

also lol @ Stills description of Mike Love as "spooky"

i love this sort of thoughtful and in-depth analysis of music, one that takes a wide-ranging purview. the thing that sticks out to me most from the transcripts i read (podcast listening isn't something that comes easy to me so i'm glad the transcripts are there) is andrew pointing out that had little richard been born thirty years later he might have identified as some variety of genderqueer or trans. it's something i struggle with a lot personally - there's a particular really intense piece i've been working on about a particular famous musician, and it's an _extremely_ controversial topic within trans communities. the little richard story also _really_ gives me thoughts about the malign influence of christianity on queer people's lives.

I think about this with prince a lot too but it's obviously extremely sticky territory

I learned a lot esp from the early episodes (later ones are well done too but my interest wanes the closer we get to classic rock) I would love something like this that goes deeper into jazz/blues/proto-r&b and the the connections between the what-we-might-now-call queerness of little richard and sister rosetta sharpe and the what-we-might-now-call GNC/butch/trans/gay/bi/pan/queerness of early blues and jazz performers and the extremely complex intersections with race and religion... basically I'm asking for a different podcast which is no criticism of hickey - it's only that he's done such a good job that I want more

I do strongly approve of reclaiming soul/funk/doowop/vocal groups as rock and I'm v curious to see how far he'll go with this as we move into 70s and later

I think about this with prince a lot too but it's obviously extremely sticky territory

― Left

oh god yes, and with prince it's complicated even further by his being a pretty horrifically narcissistic and abusive person. did he spend most of his time around women because he could relate to them more in a gendered sense? or did he spend most of his time around women because due to their marginalized status it was easier for him to take advantage of them then it was for him to take advantage of men? given that the way he treated women is frankly a _lot_ more prevalent (and condoned) in cis men than it is in trans women, it's fucking hard to argue that his gender non-conforming behavior in any way played a role in his treatment of women, but TERFs have been making that argument for decades anyway, absent anything that even _resembles_ evidence.

i've been trying to read duane tudahl's day-by-day histories of prince in '85 and '86, but it's really harrowing reading, so i haven't gotten as far as the late '86 _camille_ sessions. hard to know what to make of _camille_. he adopted a female persona, altered his voice, and started singing songs like "if i was your girlfriend" under that persona. what sort of song is "if i was your girlfriend"? is it a song of trans lesbian yearning? or is it a song sung by a possessive, controlling abuser who wants to have total control over the person the song is addressed to? ("why not both?", as the answer to these questions generally goes.)

i mean, prince, the question that was always asked about him was "is he gay", and when wendy and lisa were asked that they would laugh and say "oh, no, he's not gay, he's a lesbian, he likes girls". but, you know. they didn't mean it in a _trans_ way or anything. and then complicating that is the influence of, specifically, christianity - a strongly queer-negative religion, but one which has historically served as one of the most major ways for Black people to survive collectively in a systemically racist society that denies them personhood. that's a very different experience with christianity than my own experience with it.

on top of that, there are his obvious conflicted feelings about his own gender and sexuality ("shockadelica", for instance, portrays camille as a basically _malevolent_ force. his songs are filled with these types - annie christian, anna stesia). and there's of course the family abuse and trauma prince went through. again, the idea of "victims" and "abusers" as separate people breaks down when you look at actual abusers. prince was both. the abuses he perpetrated recapitulated, in many ways, the abuses he suffered, the fucked up bullshit he was taught to think of as normal.

female sexuality? on _dirty mind_, prince sings about being sexually assaulted by his sister, and implies though does not openly state that this is what made him queer. this isn't a song i necessarily think of as "dirty" per se. even when he's trying to be positive about queerness, as when he describes the lesbian he names "vagina" (the original name he wanted to give to Vanity) as "half boy/half girl/best of both worlds", that's not really a _queer_ perspective so much as a _chaser_ perspective. he never is able to bring himself to _say_ that he is queer, only to drop double-entendres and perform in heavily queer-coded ways. so if you listen to "originals" you can hear him singing these explicit sapphic songs, but you know, those songs weren't meant to be sung in _his_ voice. they were for the _girls_ to sing, the girls he tried to control and treat as puppets.

and then of course there's prince's death being one of the twin shocks, for a lot of us, in 2016, along with bowie's death. bowie, like prince, was beloved, acclaimed, gender non-conforming, and an abuser. there's a fucking lot to process there.

yes yes all of that I couldn't put any of it better

idk if I read too much into the original camille album being scrapped but it seems pretty significant

obv his predatory behaviour and personal homophobia complicates everything even more same prob goes for little richard

Gone back to start from the beginning, picked up the Train Kept A Rolling episode along the way. Hadn't realised there was history prior to Tiny Grimes. A song written for Ella Fitzgerald apparently gets rewritten for that.
Like wow like.

Didn't mention Led Zeppelin doing the song on early tours but maybe you need to be familiar with bootleg stuff by them to know that.

idk if I read too much into the original camille album being scrapped but it seems pretty significant

― Left

hard to say, it's not as if scrapped albums were particularly rare for him haha - he did scrap three other planned albums in 1986 (dream factory, crystal ball, and the flesh)

There are two very different stories about how “Eve of Destruction” came to be written. To tell Sloan’s version, I’m going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography:

“By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,’ ‘The Sins Of A Family,’ ‘This Mornin’,’ ‘Ain’t No Way I’m Gonna Change My Mind,’ and ‘What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?’ They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously.

‘Eve Of Destruction’ came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel’s. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice.

The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,’ so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!’

I didn’t understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China.

I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,’ I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer.”

Lou Adler’s story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said “It was a natural feel for him. He’s a great mimic.”

"I had a vision...of me paying my rent."

New "Heroes and Villians" episode just dropped.

Re: Prince and Little Richard, I think you have to consider how their world views were shaped by their religious upbringing. Ultimately tragic in both cases - it's speculated it may have indirectly led to Prince's early death (forgoing a double hip replacement that would require a blood transfusion, leading to further complications that required pain management) and in Little Richard's case, I can't even begin to fathom how much it would mess you up/torment you to believe your own sexuality is sinful and evil. I can't demonize them for their homophobia (in Prince's case, he even tried to get Wendy to renounce homosexuality) - they were flat out wrong, but I always felt sorry for them more than anything.

Actually Kate does touch on it briefly. But yeah, given how religious both men were - far more than most people I even grew up with who practiced their faiths regularly - I think what they still managed to do is surprising and impressive. It brings to mind the end of Silence but in reverse fashion. They were devout to the end, but some part of them seemed to remain free - there's some kind of transcendence in their work and what they left behind, and what they accomplished did so much for others even if it ultimately had a limited impact on themselves personally.

The final chapter of The Life And Times Of Little Richard — the authorized biography by Charles White — is a compilation of Richard’s largely anti-gay testimony. But the 2003 preface to this chapter says, “Richard was adamant this be included in early editions of this book, but has since repudiated his views on gays. ‘Jesus loved gays. He died for gays,’ he said recently.”

Booming post, bitw.

I was thinking recently that if the fictionalised character Jesus was based on an actual historical individual that original character was somebody who hung out with societal outcasts and assumed that included gays etc. I know that organised Christianity seems to have more to do with the individual filtered through the gaze/lens of Paul who seemed to be a far less tolerant individual and seemed to intentionally posit his own interpretation of who should and shouldn't be included.
Also hearing elsewhere that initial set of Christianity was more gender equal i.e. was open to having women in prominent roles which itself got stopped by reformation a few hundred years down the line.

Glad to hear Little Richard became more tolerant and accepting of people. I thought he swung that way himself so self-accepting?

Xianity seems to be one of teh most syncretic belief systems ever so not sure what in it is original and authentic to it and what has just been coopted and adopted. Might be true of other religions but seems to be so central to Xianity that I wonder how much of teh core belief is actually sui generis and unique to the faith and therefore how much could have been something else if things hadn't developed in teh space(s) they did.

Also wondering about the idea of homsoexuality prior to the organised church hegemony. I know that indigenous America and various African tribes were a lot more accepting of a non binary view of sexuality/gender before colonisation. Not sure if pre Xian Europe has any of teh same. I assume it must have but don't know what.

Overall I like what Hickey's doing so much I've seriously considered basically copying the format and doing some seasons focusing on some of my sweet spots, like say doing 25 episodes on female 70s/80s post-punk, followed by a season on african musicians... but I think about the head start Hickey must have had owning hundreds of biographies and memoirs and the music I would want to cover, much of it doesn't even have a single biography, so the focus would have to be more on the music than on the biographical details of the artist... sounds like a ton of work.

― mig (guess that dreams always end), Thursday, August 11, 2022 5:32 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I really appreciate Hickey's overall project but I am so much more interested in the parts where he focuses on the sounds and the instruments and the music. The biographical stuff and all the names and the cities and the managers and the labels is too much for me – 20 minutes pass and I realised I've totally zoned out. I would love to hear podcasts doing similar things – i.e. jokeless analysis of music history/culture - that focus on the music itself and not the endless personal connections. So this kind of project, and this particular period, would be very appealing to me.

OK, I've had two upvotes to the idea here, that's encouraging.

A request:

https://500songs.com/podcast/a-request/

Totally.

Tremendous new episode:

https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-155-waterloo-sunset-by-the-kinks/

And there's something of a revelation (at least, to me -- hardkore Kinks fanatics probably already knew) about the writing partnership (yep) that spawned the Kinks' greatest songs.

About his Lithuanian wife?

That's what I was assuming as well.

Can’t remember where I read about that before but it was fascinating.

Ahh, it was Hickey’s blog I read it on! I hadn’t made the connection

Rasa (or someone posing as her) popped up in the comments to confirm the thrust of it:

https://andrewhickey.info/2018/01/28/did-a-teenage-girl-make-the-kinks-great/#comment-83768

Didn’t realize I had read it there either.

Yep, Hickey addresses that in the episode, and also talks about the two other times people directly concerned with an artist or song commented on his work.

Whoever described Hickey's delivery as "jokeless analysis" upthread, that really captures his vibe... I haven't been able to listen to him quite the same since reading that. He reminds me a bit of the local jazz DJ who diligently back-announces the unabridged personnel and recording date of every song played. That said, I haven't stopped binging on the early episodes.

One place he loses me a little bit is his vigorous support of the Blurred Lines decision -- he's mentioned it in 2 episodes so far. It seems like if you could copyright the Bo Diddley beat or the tresillo (which he seems to think would be a good idea), then things would gridlock pretty quickly.

Haha I used the phrase "jokeless analysis" but it was to some extent meant as a compliment - so many UK podcasts (and culture in general) I might get into are ruined by the constant begging for laughs, and I appreciate Hickey's commitment to playing it absolutely straight.

i really enjoy the approach he's settled into and wish more culture history/analysis podcasts were like this - he actually does deep thoughtful research, the production is as good as it needs to be, and while "jokeless analysis" is otm he does manage to lighten the tone now and then, in his weird stiff way. i appreciate that its meant to be informational and not entertainment first - too many friends have recommended too many podcasts to me about music or film history that just end up being "fun" hosts reading wikipedia entries to each other.

that being said i'm definitely aware that, as with just about every podcast with a carefully-honed style & quirky host, i need to moderate my consumption because i can see myself getting really annoyed & sick of it if i overdose on too much of it

Just listed to the episode on Louie Louie. I had no idea about the backstory. Great episode. Glad that Richard Berry eventually made some money from the song even if it was 20 years later. The amateur shambolic nature of the Kingsmen version must have been a huge part of the success even though it was lol only the 2nd best version recorded in Portland that week.

Dave Marsh’s book on “Louie Louie” — which was part of Hickey’s research — is essential, and goes even deeper.

Does teh beach Boys version of Louie Louie predate the recording of the Kingsmen's one. I found the bass harmonies unintentionally funny when I first heard it in my midteens now hear it's some berry had used elsewhere. His version of Have Love Will Travel has similar. I thought Louie Louie was supposed to be tapping into a Calypso or similar West Indian trend which may have also featured Chuck Berry's Havana Moon .
Anyway do enjoy Richard Berry.

A short while ago he talked about having covered a few songs he couldn't stand, and I'm fairly sure one of them is The Kingsmen's version of Louie Louie/

The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" was the first 45 I ever bought. (To tie this to another thread, it had the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout" as a B-side.)

I thought Louie Louie was supposed to be tapping into a Calypso or similar West Indian trend which may have also featured Chuck Berry's Havana Moon

yes, that's how it started per Hickey. You can here it in this
Richard Berry version from 1957

Absolutely loved the Louie Louie episode. Had no idea the lead singer's drunk-sounding performance was simply due to his braces.

The Joe Meek episode was fucking bonkers.

The one problem with Andrew Hickey is that he's a firehose of content, so I can't find this post (I think a Twitter thread?) - but there is a great statement from him about the fact that he's turning up at the top of some podcast charts, and he's started to get people finding him through that who are used to the "Hi and welcome to the podcast, let me recap the premise and where we are at this point on the journey, in this 45 minutes we will be doing this, my guests will be these people, here's how I know them" and so on, in a very structured way.

Whereas, he is operating in a different context and lineage, so he gets a lot of "why don't you do it this way?" tips from people who are being friendly and helpful and incredibly fucking rude.

I probably sound like a sycophant but everything about the show is perfect to me. Most of my favourite music books are well-researched and analysed hard fact rather than opinion-based stuff or hearsay (one of my hobbies is writing Wikipedia articles), and often I find myself put off by podcasts where it’s two people laughing while reading a Wiki page verbatim and saying things like “and at the same time you’ve got so and so happening” as though that’s worth any one’s time. Andrew’s style is perfect to me. He thinks harder and more critically than almost anyone I know of who has written or broadcast about popular music.

One thing I will say is I’ve started listening to Cocaine and Rhinestones because Andrew’s mentioned it so often, and though that’s good and I’ve learnt plenty, it reminds me how well Andrew put things in context. The host of that podcast will quite often mention specifically American things and provide no background for listeners outside the States.

The main problem with Cocaine & Rhinestones is that dude's voice, makes everything sound so dramatic and aggressive even when it's the driest stuff. Hickey's Eeyore delivery I can deal with better.

Yeah the C&R guy is definitely putting on a "podcast voice" in a way that Hickey doesnt, which is another +1 for Hickey.

Also (and I admit this is mostly just my own hangup) I have to admit that C&R became slightly ruined for me when younger people I know who previously couldnt give a shit about country started trying to tell me stuff like "a lot of people think country music is just about trucks and dead dogs, but actually its pretty FUCKED UP when you dig into it, for example did you know..." and its like on the one hand I'm glad that this podcast has turned you onto a genre you'd previously dismissed, but also yes, thank you for the newsflash, i did actually know that country music is good, welcome to the last 100 years bud

I know enough about country music to know it's not just about trucks and dead dogs but not enough to actually know any country songs about trucks or dead dogs. Suggestions welcome (ideally involving both).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIEtYS4iS04

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49gL9hOXoio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILTZsn5spxM

(Alba I have collected a few country trucking records over the years, I guess something like 25 LPs, you’re welcome to come round and marvel at them! Can’t think of any favourites that also include dog action.)

I have yet to really get into Cocaine & Rhinestones, mainly because I keep remembering how insufferable the guy is on Twitter.

houdini said OTMFM. Just finished the latest episode on James Jamerson's "I Was Made To Love Her" -- I've been waiting for this one for a long time, and Hickey did a fantastic job.

Country has more than its share of truck songs, yes. And dudes are still writin' em. The occasional woman too.

Yeah, I had to stop following the C&R guy on Twitter so it wouldn’t ruin my enjoyment of his podcast.

I love Tyler Mahan Coe on his podcast and on Twitter. And on Your Favorite Band Sucks.

That last one is the one I just can’t stomach, sorry.

Your favourite band may suck, but not anywhere near as much as that podcast sucks.

Enjoyed the AMM segment of the "See Emily Play" episode. Imo a nice thing about the sheer scale of the project is that it allows those sorts of connections room to breathe in a relatively unforced way.

I loved this episode, and I'm not a Barrett fanatic. The way he framed it was, for me, unexpectedly very moving.

yeah this was one of my favourites, I love Barrett-era Floyd which if anything put more pressure on this one to be good, and it lived up to it entirely. bonus on The Incredible String Band is also a good un.

xp 100%. I'm also not especially attached to Barrett's work but I thought that Hickey's treatment of the meta-discourse around it was a great example of what this series does best.

catching up on bonus eps and wow fuck John Fahey, don't think I had any idea

One of the worst things about this series is learning just how many of my favourite musicians were garbage humans.

Which bonus episode discusses John Fahey? I think I've listened to them all but I don't remember that one.

Fuck, I really need to proofread my posts! John Martyn, not Fahey.

Artists with similar names that you get mixed up

According to his biography, John Fahey caused a lot of trouble, but mostly to himself.

Fuck, I really need to proofread my posts! John Martyn, not Fahey.

From the Patreon email:

Early Access! Episode 164: "White Light/White Heat" by the Velvet Underground is finally here!

As some of you have seen me complain about, Spotify does a thing where if you upload a file and then fix it, it never corrects the fix, so I get people complaining for literally years about some tiny glitch that I didn't notice when uploading but fixed within an hour.

This episode is *three and a half hours long* (it's one of those stories where I don't even mention the first of the band members until an hour in) and was recorded and edited under more than usually stressful circumstances, so I'm sure that somewhere in there there is a glitch that Tilt or I missed.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to this three-and-a-half-hour long episode a day before it goes live, and if you see any horrible glaring thing in there, let me know. If you don't want to do that, just wait til first thing tomorrow morning and it'll be live in the main podcast feed and linked here as normal. I'm doing this because normally if there *is* an error, someone here is the one to point it out.

(NB I'm not talking about mispronunciations and so on -- I'm not going to rerecord the entire thing -- but if there's a bad edit or something, do let me know, or an *easily* fixed factual error that can be fixed by snipping a sentence. Other stuff has to just be errata. Indeed, I have already noted one erratum which will go in the notes -- I say at one point they didn't play in New York "for the rest of the sixties", when in fact they did at least one performance in 1967)

Also, I'm rather brittle at the moment, so preemptively please don't do any "joking" pointing out of fake errors, or "criticism" that amounts to "I wouldn't have made the episode this way, it's boring". This really, really, took a lot out of me, and if you don't like it, that's your right of course, but I don't need to hear it.

And then, of course, a link.

listening to it right now

Just in time. I finally caught up after listening from the beginning. Was wondering if/when he would tackle VU since he skipped their first lp.

50 minutes in and we've embarked on what promises to be a detailed biography of La Monte Young, no mention of any member of the Velvet Underground yet, brilliant stuff.

Finished this about an hour ago. Ridiculously informative, meticulously researched (which accounts for both its length and, to a degree, the delays in getting it finished), a few surprising mentions/relationships…just endlessly engaging.

oh my god just got to the part where nico talks about gender stuff shortly before the 2 hour mark. _very_ cisgender of her, haha.

45 minutes in and he’s still reading off content warnings.

J/k this was good. I sensed he was tiptoeing around the Todd Haynes documentary trying not to duplicate info from it. But I feel as if he gave a good framework for understanding what the group chose to do at each turning point in their lifetime.

This episode gave more time — and respect — to Yule than Haynes’s film did.

Man, I need to find 2.5 hours to listen to this pronto.

Haynes bio shoehorned Yule in near the end like the after-rehab coda of a Behind the Music episode.

Damn, if I listen to this along with the Jokerman podcast that's been going through every VU and Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico album, I'll have listened to far more hours of podcasts about this band than albums (tbh I never really listened to any of it until the last year).

Interesting episode but yeah time consuming. Does give some interesting background on the avant garde that Cale came out of. Still need to get more Lamonte Young.
Does a beginner listener have the stamina to listen through 3+ hours of the history behind the band history or do they need to tune in a couple of hours in.
Pretty in depth, like.

Haven't listened to this one yet, but for the longer episodes he tends to spend a majority of the time building context and setting the scene, and then gives a reasonable condensed summary of the band. I often find the tangential stuff more engaging than the main act. For instance, in the Byrds episode it felt like he spent more time discussing Coltrane and the history of modal jazz than he did discussing the Byrds, which worked just fine for me.

Just wanted to drop by and say that after listening to the first ~25 episodes and losing a bit of interest (more so found I didn't have time to give it the attention it needed) I bought the books and am loving them. Super readable and rich; I've picked up a ton of detail I missed in podcast form.

I had a similar reaction -- I was too impatient to listen, but I've read all the episode transcripts on his website. The VU episode is great.

This is a good tip, thanks.

What is this weird cover of Bowie’s “Andy Warhol”?

^ Sounded like a demo of Dana Gillespie's version

Yep, it’s on the Bowie Divine Symmetry box. If I hadn’t heard it before, I woulda been pretty baffled.

The podcasts are extraordinary documents but I've only listened to maybe 10 as I find them hard work. Listened to the VU one on a long walk and, yeah, what I said in the first sentence: extraordinary, but was flagging madly by the end. I have no idea how he navigates so much research. Like, where one episode ends and another begins, or how to decide what to include, what to leave out. I can see why he's feeling pretty 'brittle' tbh.

Right. To me podcasts are like audiobooks. On the one hand I like to hear someone else speaking as a way to get something into my head. On the other hand it’s way too much information for me to retain coming through without the ability to constant vary the speed, to double back and reread or look ahead or any of the things that make physical books and to some extent ebooks such an amazing technology.

I really liked his Monkees book. I assume I will eventually buy these books but may get the one about The Kinks first.

I’ve been trying to listen to some of a Twin Peaks podcast by a guy whose writing I really like, and they’re interesting, but so insanely detailed… like he’ll spend almost 2 hrs. 15 mins. dissecting even one of the weaker eps. in the depths of S2. The folks who do these podcasts are so obsessive that unless you’re a fellow super-obsessive, I don’t know how you can have the stamina for them.

I, too, find this podcast to be overwhelming in the amount of detail. I usually listening while running or dog walking or driving but I can never devote 100% of my attention and miss out on long stretches of info.

That said, he provides more detail than I really need in my life so it’s no big deal. I wish he didn’t spend quite so much time on the context/background stuff and spent more time on the song in question.

A fair criticism of this latest episode, which is also a fair criticism of the Haynes doc, is that it doesn’t give enough credit to the influence of free jazz/NYC loft jazz on the VU, even though it includes a Lou Reed quote saying he was inspired by Ornette Coleman and some other progressive jazz guys

Yeah, he had a college radio show, named for its theme song by Cecil Taylor---ilxor tylerw, of bootleg blog Doomandgloomfromthetomb and Aquarium Drunkard, mentions it while intro'ing a later Lou radio guest host marathon, still linked in here:

Had he not been a genius songwriter and musician, it’s easy to imagine Lou finding his calling as a disc jockey. And indeed, as an English major at Syracuse University in the early 60s, he hosted a radio show, Excursions On A Wobbly Rail, playing what was surely an adventurous blend of jazz, rock and doo wop for his fellow Oranges.

Alas, there are no known tapes of Lou’s college radio days. The closest we’ll probably get to it is this guest DJ stint on New York City’s WPIX in early 1979. Lou is in fine, fighting form here, peppering his commentary with scathing diatribes against Robert Christgau, Rolling Stone magazine, Jimmy Carter and NYC taxi drivers. He even takes some calls – witness the hilarious, surreal moment when Lou “Take No Prisoners” Reed admonishes a caller for using foul language. The music he plays is fantastic, too, with some classic doo wop, tracks from his then-unreleased The Bells LP, and a truly bizarro segue from Al Green to Nico. Lou even comes out in favor of disco.

And if that’s not enough, none other than John Cale pops up towards the end of the tape. Even though these dudes spent plenty of time at odds with one another over the years, they just sound like old buddies here. The whole thing closes out with a trio of killer live recordings (otherwise unreleased?) from Cale, featuring the Blue Oyster Cult’s Allen Lanier! What an embarrassment of riches.

And herrre's, Cecil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNL2CyHQMh4

Also, Ornette was on The Raven, and Reed later posted some other things they did, still around here and there---hope the regular Lou-Laurie-Zorn get-togethers find a good home on the Web, or maybe they already have?

A fair criticism of this latest episode, which is also a fair criticism of the Haynes doc, is that it doesn’t give enough credit to the influence of free jazz/NYC loft jazz on the VU, even though it includes a Lou Reed quote saying he was inspired by Ornette Coleman and some other progressive jazz guys

iirc, the Haynes film didn’t mention the new music (Cecil, Ornette, Dixon, Ayler) at all, not even in passing. I was surprised that Hickey didn’t talk more about it. I’ve been wondering if there’ll be an episode that talks about the new music as much as the one on “Eight Miles High” talked about bebop; I assumed/hoped it would be this episode.

Was thinking last night that it might just have added another hour which might have just been too much for a lot of people. Having a straight 3hrs 20 whatever was hard enough I would think.
But do want to hear what he would have to say about the New Thing. Still need to read about the Loft Scene too.

Need to hear what he says about the Downliner Sect. have loved that track and the lp it's on since I was like 14 and found the Charly lp version for like 60p on Walthamstow High St.

Since he's now in 1968 and rock is meeting jazz and things do wonder what else he will cover that will have the option to look into the freer elements of jazz. Is he going to look at crossovers with non Western music much deeper too.
Pretty great research and collation of information so do wonder what else he will look into. 70s and 80s ought to be good if he gets that far.

Ok I'm an hour and a half into this episode and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Lol @ the description of Cale's festival he organized after graduating (banging on the piano with his forearms until audience members tried to wheel it away, crawling after them and continuing the performance).

I've been listening sequentially, and I'm up to 1960 now. The level of detail is just right for me- really wonderful getting me to re-listen to all these 50 r'n'b compilations from the 80s that I bought in the 90s as vinyl was getting unloaded. The only context I had for a lot of that were the liner notes, which assumed a "you were there" knowledge. Hickey really makes the connections and fills in the gaps. So while I knew exactly how Sam Phillips connected things together, I only half understood Lieber and Stoller, and Johnny Otis was just a name I'd heard. Also, understanding how r'n'r took hold in Britain haltingly but steadily coalesced. Fascinating that Gene Vincents British TV appearances were what codified the black leather rocker look after he was out of the spotlight in the US.

I, too, find this podcast to be overwhelming in the amount of detail. I usually listening while running or dog walking or driving but I can never devote 100% of my attention and miss out on long stretches of info.

That said, he provides more detail than I really need in my life so it’s no big deal. I wish he didn’t spend quite so much time on the context/background stuff and spent more time on the song in question.

― tobo73, Wednesday, April 5, 2023 9:08 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

There are a lot of times where he'll say something like "To understand this song, we have to start with Person X. Person X was discovered by Person Y. Person Y worked for Label Z. Label Z was a competitor to Label A. Label A had big Song B." and that chain of connections would be totally lost on me because I was listening in the car and distracted for 10 seconds by a bad driver. I'm not advising anyone to stop listening to the podcast but definitely recommend getting the books and/or re-reading the transcripts. There's a ton of rich detail that I've internalized on review.

I do appreciate hearing the musical excerpts though.

xp The abundance of detail is one reason I can't get into listening -- I'm afraid I'll lose the thread and get frustrated because I missed some vital esoteric connection.

For even more obscure and detailed information, I recommend one of Hickey's favorite sources, Larry Birnbaum's Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll. I've been reading it on and off for a few months and am still less than halfway through.

That book is intriguing but expensive. How long is it exactly?

461 pages including the notes and index, in font sizes that require bifocals

Ah, thanks. That shouldn’t be a problem in eformat.

I listen when doing dishes, not driving!

Here's a playlist inspired by listening, along with associated favorites of mine from the era and revivals.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2w4TXIRBx0XqzFmujeyxrA?si=c9c3db9bac444c84

Since he's now in 1968 and rock is meeting jazz and things do wonder what else he will cover that will have the option to look into the freer elements of jazz. Is he going to look at crossovers with non Western music much deeper too.
Pretty great research and collation of information so do wonder what else he will look into. 70s and 80s ought to be good if he gets that far.

― Stevo, Thursday, April 6, 2023 9:10 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Along these lines, I'm wondering if Miles will get an episode. We're a couple years away from Bitches Brew, which certainly won't go unmentioned, but I wonder if Hickey will devote an episode to it (or something from In A Silent Way).

Hickey definitely seems to be a Coltrane fan, as he's shoehorned Trane into a number of episodes where I didn't expect him to turn up. I just relistened to the "I Was Made To Love Her" episode, and while I've loved Jamerson and Coltrane for decades, I never made the explicit "sheets of sound" connection between the two -- that Jamerson was essentially trying to do that on bass while (as Hickey put it) still playing something you could tap your foot to.

As a casual Coltrane fan, I was completely surprised about all his work with Ravi Shankar. The Eight Miles High episode was fantastic.

I was much more into the early avant garde history than the VU stuff, but it was cool to hear the commercial rock & roll/r&b soundalike tracks that Lou worked on early on (still not done with the episode obv, only two hours in).

How is the Otis Redding one?

Redding episode is great and (obviously) sad. But honestly — and I’m on my third listen to the whole series, gearing up for a fourth — there isn’t a single episode that either misses the mark or has any glaring (or not-so-glaring) omissions.

I’m on my third listen to the whole series, gearing up for a fourth

Wow!

I love Stax of course, but should listen if only because I go past the fateful lake every single day.

I was a little disappointed that the Otis episode was only the third one on Stax (counting “In The Midnight Hour”) but he’s done Patreon episodes on “Sweet Soul Music,” “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” and “Knock On Wood.” One thing I liked about the Otis episode was how it fleshed-out long-heard stories. That is, there’s far more to the story of how he ended up at Stax than “he was the driver for another band and insisted on singing at the end of the session” — very little (if any) of that was happenstance.

For more on Reed’s Pickwick years and how he went from staff songwriter to sometimes performer to touring band to Cale being in the band to the VU (an almost untold story up til now) I can highly recommend Ugly Things magazine issue #60 and the accompanying 2-part podcast, which goes into just about as much depth as possible on the subject.

One of my favourite details from the VU episode was Cale finding out the particular institute he was working at (I forget which) had 88 pianos, obviously the same number of keys on a single piano. His idea was to put each piano on a different boat, send them out onto a lake and record the sound as each boat sank into the water.

Budgeting might be a bit of a problem?

And 88 dead pianists. We mustn't let our conservative instincts stand in the way of the avant-garde!

I can highly recommend Ugly Things magazine issue #60 and the accompanying 2-part podcast, which goes into just about as much depth as possible on the subject.

Jeez, apparently I only listen to podcasts about the VU now despite not even being that big of a fan. :)

But I'm starting out with their episode about Gabor Szabo, which is great so far, and I've never gone deep on him.

Johnny Echols one is pretty good too. In fact the entire series has been good.

xpost speaking of Szabo, I posted this several years ago on Rolling Jazz, re an intriguing first glimpse ov him:

Looking for Charles Lloyd on Bandcamp, found Manhattan Stories (2014), comprised of
Two 1965 New York Concerts, Disc 1 recorded at Judson Hall & Disc 2 recorded at Slugs' Saloon.
A remarkable and previously unrecorded quartet featuring three jazz giants: guitarist Gábor Szabó, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Pete La Roca.
'It was a specific time and place,' Lloyd told Manhattan Stories annotator Don Heckman. 'We all felt like the boundaries were being dissolved and we could do or try anything. This is a music of freedom and wonder -- we were young and on the move.' Which is just what the sample track, "Sweet Georgia Brown," sounds like (17' 49", but quite spritely). Especially digging the interplay of guitar and sax, bass and cymbals, also succinct solos, esp. PLR's and Szabo's---the latter bright and brittle, autumn leaves, but def not drifting. What other Szabo should I check? Used to see his LPs...
https://charleslloyd.bandcamp.com/

I was delighted to learn in the Sounds of Silence episode that when Simon premiered the song in Greenwich Village folk clubs, the audience thought it was hilarious, and people started greeting each other with “hello darkness my old friend.”

and a lulz meme it remains!

Also Rick James's greeting, just about, to Charlie Murphy, according to Charlie Murphy on Chappelle Show (CM being dark-skinned as perceived by RJ) "Old friend" wasn't part of it though!

4.5 hour episode on Dark Star just landed. Holy shit!

yeah it's been a long time in gestation, understandably. quite the piece of work! supporters in patreon have had it for a week now so I've already heard it. can't say I am any more a fan of the dead than I was before, but it goes some fascinating places, they turn out to be very important in a number of ways, though "musical influence" isn't one of them.

Is it fitting that the longest show he's done so far is on a band that specialised in expansive stretching out? & filled with extra tidbits that i hope people aren't seeing as noodling.
I see he excerpts teh Eleven which has to be one of my all time favourite songs too.
Glad he is conscious of how long the episodes have been getting and hope taht si going to mean he cuts back a bit. Thought he was pretty ill recently so hope this keeps coming and he can keep up to to 500. Got to be a lifetime project like.
I was thinking it was a shame he'd got to 1969 cos it meant he was moving out of one of my favourite eras and hadn't covered absolutely everything in it. Though maybe he has in passing.
Think I need to read some of his books now.

yeah, he has been ill, mostly from the effort of putting this thing together. the grateful dead being fundamentally a live act, with songs developing over decades, and not really overlapping with the scenes / musicians he's covered- this breaks the chronological arc of the show, meaning he had to do a lot of extra research, just for the one episode. also his usual editor is ill, so he had to edit it himself. don't think we will see another episode of anything like this length for quite a while, he has sworn he won't anyway.

I think he's still in 1968 since "Dark Star" was originally on a single in April ''68

was wondering if this was single or lp version. So cool, maybe some more on the era then. & I do like the next few years just want loads on psych like.

yeah he is still at the start of 1968, though the year only takes up about 10 minutes of this episode

I think its the live version that is better known and possibly more significant though. But yeah good to know he's got the rest of the year to cover etc.
Is Astral Weeks or Gris Gris going to get a showing? Pentangle before Basket of light?

There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead — late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can’t realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven’t yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future.  I can’t explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can’t not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead.

he had to do a lot of extra research, just for the one episode.

And frustratingly, pretty much all the books on the Dead are either oral histories, or stuffed with half-remembered anecdotes that may or may not have happened, and can only be verified by cross-referencing other Dead books with the same half-remembered anecdotes misremembered slightly differently. So, for instance, when Hart says he was hanging out with Sonny Payne after a Count Basie show in 1967, it turns out Payne wasn’t in the Basie band at that time. And while every Dead book says Donna Jean sang on “Suspicious Minds” recorded at Muscle Shoals, Hickey went, “OK, that’s not right” — it was recorded at American in Memphis. Six weeks of that kind of research must have been (and sounds like it was) insanely trying. The Grateful Dead did not have a Mark Lewisohn.

Is Astral Weeks or Gris Gris going to get a showing? Pentangle before Basket of light?

One of the Patreon episodes is on “I Walk On Guilded Splinters.” I assume Astral Weeks will be covered — he already did a Them episode — but I don’t know if a song from it will get its own episode or if it’ll be covered in an episode about a later Van song. He didn’t do a Velvets episode until “White Light/White Heat” (which caused a bit of consternation among some of his fans; “IT’S 1967! WHERE’S THE VELVETS?!”) but it covered their entire career.

And the song is often a device for telling the larger story. The one on “San Francisco” isn’t two solid hours on Scott MacKenzie, but a way to tell the story of the focal point of the California scene shifting from LA to the Bay Area.

damn, i know what i'm doing next week. i still haven't gotten around to those oral history podcasts... i have "the making of vs", "the making of song cycle", and "the making of neu!" in my backlog. such a backlog.

The Dark Star episode was fascinating. Some wild stuff near the end about the Dead being pioneers of marketing to obsessive fans and the crossover to internet culture. Love me some Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty but that’s all I need. That wasn’t a problem listening to the episode since so many interesting sidetracks to the story.

The stuff about the impact of the Dead on internet culture is a good starting point for a totally different podcast.

Has Jesse Jarnow covered it elsewhere. I Think he talks about it in Heads and I know he does a regular Grateful Dead podcast which is probably archived in a few places. So may be worth looking around to see if there is anything up online by him since I think he was one of the sources for Hickey.

Yes there’s an episode of the Good Old Grateful Deadcast that’s all about the rise of the band wrt Silicon Valley stuff. It doesn’t get anywhere near Barlow and his weird internet politics tho.

ty both ...i should have guessed this topic has already been explored

new episode dropped.
Down to 3 hours, I mean what is happening pull the finger out.
Crossroads by Cream which seems odd chronology but I am blanking on how the last episode fell to be where it stood chronologically. I thought the first appearance of the song was on the first lp but may be confusing it with Spoonful.
I assume this is going to be another case of a song where he can look at improvisation but also the blues revival.
& what an ass Clapton would go on to be of course.

I can only repeat myself when talking about this podcast, because each episode warrants it: this is absolutely stunning.

He’s in 1968 now, and he tends to choose songs that were released as singles, as the live “Crossroads” was. So, chronologically, it makes sense. He doesn’t always introduce an artist with their first record (which is why Velvets fans were losing their shit when 1967 came and went without mention of them), but always covers everything that led up to the song (and most everything that happened after).

And as with many other episodes in this series, the song in question is primarily a jumping-off point to tell a much larger story: the final 40 minutes are about Robert Johnson, and how white historians (Mack McCormick chief among them) fought over his legacy, exploited and stole from his surviving relatives, and simply made up shit about Johnson in order to reinforce their ideas of what “the blues” “should” be.

got there before me, I will just add that the episode finishes in 1969, so Clapton's 1970s fuckery is saved for a later episode.

Also the first part is a very decent history of the first couple of decades of blues music, I agreed with 95% of it, which is an extremely high percentage compared to most of the music histories I read.

I thought the first appearance of the song was on the first lp but may be confusing it with Spoonful.

Clapton first recorded in early '66 as part of a one-off studio supergroup called the Powerhouse for What's Shakin', an Elektra records comp. The arrangement is pretty close to the one Cream later used. Steve Winwood sings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUSah2Egid8

'recorded it'

This was … great. I don’t want to criticize his process because the results are worth the wait, but as soon as I’m finished each new episode I go into a sort of withdrawal and want MOAR CONTENT.

If you like the podcast and don’t support the dude on Patreon, I wholeheartedly encourage it. This is What He Does For A Living and I want — nay, need! — him to continue to do it.

Yeah, I had to artificially slow down my consumption so I didn't fully exhaust the backlog of episodes.
He's been averaging one episode a month in 2023, so with 334 episodes left, this series should be done in... May of 2051.
(I'm also not holding my breath that we're ever getting back to 30 minute episodes... the Patreon bonus episodes are longer than that these days)

I thought the one thing missing from the Cream episode was a clear sense of what makes Cream important enough to warrant this career-spanning examination. They provided a good excuse for digressions about the development of the blues genre and the life of Robert Johnson, which were great. And I enjoyed the stories about Ginger Baker being bellicose and Clapton being pretentious and insecure. But I came away unsure of why Hickey actually thinks Cream are all that significant to the development of rock, musically or culturally.

The '60s British blues scene does strike me as important, but mainly because it birthed the Rolling Stones. And the Stones covered Robert Johnson too, on Let it Bleed in 1969. I wouldn't be surprised if he's got a late '60s Stones episode coming up anyway. So why bother with Cream? I'm sure there's a good answer, but I don't think it was there in the episode.

Cream is a big benchmark in terms of rock instrumentalists being seen as stars largely on the basis of their playing ability. Clapton (and then Beck) with the Yardbirds was an early indicator of this evolution, but with Cream (and soon Hendrix) it really became a major trend - basically, the start of "rockism".

Halfway otm. I thought Hickey perfectly illustrated how the emergence of Cream was a kind of line of demarcation: the end of the multi-artist package shows where everyone plays four songs, and the beginning of headlining shows where one band plays for 90 minutes, necessitating a kind of “stretching out” that hadn’t really happened in that way before, and certainly not from a band with top 10 hits.

In his book, Nick Mason talks about seeing Cream live in 1966 and, noticing the drum kit was as much of an centre-stage attraction as the other members, decided that Pink Floyd's performances could be as striking as theirs was.

I thought Hickey perfectly illustrated how the emergence of Cream was a kind of line of demarcation: the end of the multi-artist package shows where everyone plays four songs, and the beginning of headlining shows where one band plays for 90 minutes

I don't think he illustrates this at all. If you're already aware that package shows fell out of favor, and long jams became a more prominent feature of rock shows, then sure, he gives Cream as a good example of a band whose career straddled that line. But the episode itself only hints that this was a consequential shift for the genre, rather than just a funny thing that happened to Cream.

(Also, one thing the episode DOES make clear is that Cream were accustomed to "stretching out" from their club days (albeit for the length of a standard club set rather than 90+ minutes), and that becoming a band with successful pop singles that coupld play a few numbers on package tour was the more awkward transition.)

Altho come on 45 minutes on Tiny Tim, significantly longer than the first 100 or so _main_ episodes?

That Tiny Tim episode was crazy! I had no idea that he moved in such interesting circles.

I am not a big fan of Cream but it seems pretty hard to avoid that Cream + Hendrix was basically the first step to heavy rock/metal

I'd be interested to know if Cream were an acknowledged influence on the early Black Sabbath. Seems plausible, and their careers did overlap. That's the kind of thing I'd like to have been discussed in the episode.

Sabbath were big Cream fans, Geezer and Bill Ward especially

I thought Cream band the Yardbirds had been significant in popularizing improvisation with major impact on the San Francisco ballroom scene and elsewhere. Or at least translating something that had been happening in a jazz setting into an electric rock one.
I have heard that the very early Who and possibly their earlier incarnation under a different name had done jams on r'n'b/blues stuff so some other bands were probably doing similar but it becoming a direction taken more consciously in the wake of those bands touring.

Also that in a Chinese whispers type take on Cream's intentions of keeping something vibrant but getting stuck in noisy distortion placeholders become widely dispersed method. Repetitive riffs played to at least have a part being played become the focus of those inspired by what the original player thought of as a lack of inspiration etc.& you get the more stoner end of hard rock.

Cream's intentions being more of a nuanced interplay. But amplification and having to play when not feeling fully inspired adding to something not being fully to their liking but something that does lay a usable template for others to explore.

Trying to fit the chronology together in my head but have heard that after first touring the UK/Europe as a raucous electric band in 1958, Muddy Waters was later marketed as an acoustic player to suit the 60s blues revival, Which would be anotherf case of white people rewriting the history of the blues and one I didn't hear Andrew Hickey referring to. BUt I may have missed some of it.

It was really sad to hear how badly the white blues researchers had messed up what information could be verified about Robert Johnson so I think I do need to read his sister's book.

Also interesting coming across the idea that at one point blues was a very current music form, probably more so with the delta style which I think I was coming across being referred to in terms of its archaicism and primality and lovely non valorised things like that. The Delta blues cropped up as an influence on a number of bands in teh mid 80s who were popular enough to have UK music scribes writing about them and trying to evoke the spirit of the blues from a much later prism so adding to the refraction. I'm not sure what people were playing the music that the blues grew out of prior to the popularisation of teh guitar partially through the Sears Roebuck catalogue. & the acoustic guitar being a very portable instrument was very handy for itinerant musicians. (I read something recently about the acoustic guitar only becoming something in Irish trad music in teh 60s which had me thinking about J0hnny Moynihan introducing teh bouzouki which is only a few years later and also down to its being very portable.May have been in Martin Hayes' memoir)

But the episode itself only hints that this was a consequential shift for the genre, rather than just a funny thing that happened to Cream.

One of the things I love about this podcast is how a consequential shift is sometimes presented as a funny thing — we know that future episodes will bear out said consequentiality.

(Also, one thing the episode DOES make clear is that Cream were accustomed to "stretching out" from their club days (albeit for the length of a standard club set rather than 90+ minutes), and that becoming a band with successful pop singles that coupld play a few numbers on package tour was the more awkward transition.)

In the UK they’d been used to playing relatively short club sets, and their only US appearances previously had had them playing only one song a show. But at the Fillmore they were expected to play for hours, and so they had to stretch out. As Bruce said “When we hit the Fillmore, we started to play those long improvisations . . . because we didn’t know hardly any songs! It was partly a repertoire, and partly a product of the times, because all the audiences were stoned out of their collective bonces.”

New Yorker article on the project by Bill McKibben(!)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/podcast-dept/a-music-podcast-unlike-any-other

I've been hounding friends to listen to this. The initial reaction is usually, "oh, huh, another music podcast. Yeah, I might check it out someday."

Weeks later, said friend will collar me and say, "THAT PODCAST HAS ENRICHED MY LIFE!"

It's sure enriching mine. Just caught wind of it here earlier this summer and I am super obsessed (though still catching up). As someone said above, some of my fave episodes are about acts I am not as passionate about, like the Dark Star/Dead episode, which knocked it out of the park imo. It was so great how began with Prufrock and Vonnegut; one of the real pleasures is hearing him drop an apparent non sequitur like that and waiting to see how he'll make it relevant to his larger take.

one of the real pleasures is hearing him drop an apparent non sequitur like that and waiting to see how he'll make it relevant to his larger take.

Definitely. When he kicked off with Eliot and Vonnegut, it was one of those moments where you know you’re in for a helluva ride.

And because it took him so long to finish, I was able to read Slaughterhouse-Five, which I’d inexplicably missed, in the interim. Come to find out Ilium is based on a nearby town. Said town has a great record store where I recently picked up Roy Wood’s Boulders after hearing a snippet on the Move episode. It’s all a rich tapestry.

Also: Firesign Theatre!

I’ve enjoyed some of this guy’s books and those episodes of the podcast I have listened to but now it seems to have mushroomed into a jam band Dick’s Picks volume of material that I will never be able to catch up to in this lifetime.

I'm not even sure when I started this, but I've been making my way through it at least since last autumn and am almost caught up. Proud Patreon subscriber since probably four episodes in and I'm glad to see this getting more attention. I've tried to get so many friends interested in this, but so far nobody has bitten.

I just finally took the plunge, 1 episode in lol. Question for the devotees - will I miss a lot if I skip around? Does he do a lot of referring back to previous episodes, not repeating the context for something that is part of a multi-episode through line, etc? I'd love to be a completist but just seeing how the episodes get longer and longer I can't imagine I'm really gonna be able to do it

I think it's fine to pop in and out, every episode is fairly self-contained and he does say when some previous context is needed. I would start with one of the big recent episodes to see if it's your thing.

Personally, I highly recommend not skipping around for several reasons. I would have missed out on a LOT of fascinating information and tremendous music if I'd skipped some of the earlier songs that I unfamiliar or only somewhat familiar with -- the "Love Is Strange" episode in particular had something in it that utterly floored me.

He does often refer back to previous episodes without contextualizing, though that's not always the case. But for example, if you skipped ahead to the Love "Alone Again Or" episode, there's a reference to Johnny Otis's pigeon breeding. Huh?? Yeah, you'd have to go back to the episodes that talk about Johnny Otis (and there's more than a few) to get that story.

that I *was unfamiliar or only somewhat familiar with

started a while back, it's an incredible piece of work. to echo tarfumes i would say that it's worth going through in order - also for the fact that the episodes i found the most fascinating were not always the ones i was most excited about going in (for instance, bill haley)

in any case, the whole thing has been humbling! (in the old sense of the word) like i really thought i had a better than your average bear knowledge of the origins and early days of rock n' roll but this has been completely eye opening, so much i didn't know.

Just want to clarify that when I say he refers back to previous episodes without contextualizing, it's usually along the lines of mentioning someone in passing -- Gaynel Hodge, or George Goldner, say -- without always saying who they were or what they did.

Does he refer to the latter as "Record Man George Goldner"?

No, but sometimes he'll say "they signed to George Goldner's record label," but won't (and can't, without seriously derailing the episode) give more of the story of who Goldner was.

a reference to Johnny Otis's pigeon breeding.

otis was like the secret nexus of early rock n roll, he pops up every 3rd episode it seems like

I love that I've stuck to it strictly chronologically, to get the feel for it as the years pass. It gave me context for doo wop and vocal groups that made be appreciate those forms much more, which later on gives, say, James Brown's emergence a full band leader a lot more weight. Or how surf, folk revival, Merseybeat, British blues and Motown intertwined in 1962-64.

Just thinking that due to recent episode length you might be better checking out earlier shorter episodes. Though this is pretty high quality so you might just be swept up by an episode that is 2 or 3 hours long anyway.
But earlier episodes were much shorter though they do cover earlier era of music since he is developing a history like.
Just not sure where one would jump in as a neophyte. Couple of series ago he was doing hour and a half though.

another vote for starting from the beginning. like ums i thought i had reasonable grasp of rock history but i was quickly disabused of that notion. the social context discussed in the episodes on music from the 40s and early 50s were super interesting as well

I started at the beginning but then started a second run starting in 1966 since I'm doing some writing about that period right now (and I also kind of wanted to be current with others who were totally up to date). It's working fine for me to be in two places at once, but I do think you would miss something if you were just randomly dipping in here and there. Though it's impossible to remember every single thing he puts down there's a cumulative force to hearing everything that's happening, say, over several episodes in 1957.

As bendy mentions, the benefit of starting at the beginning is that it gives you an inkling of what it may have sounded like to hear, say, Blue Suede Shoes for the first time in 1956.
One thing he's really good at is highlighting what was innovative about a song/artist *at the particular moment in history*. So if you've haven't spent weeks working through the doo-wop episodes, this effect might be lost when you listen to the first rockabilly episode.
The whole thing really is telling a long-form story.

I keep thinking a new episode was posted every time this thread bumps. :(

this is the update he put out yesterday

As part of my efforts to get things to backers on a slightly more regular basis I'm staggering things a little bit rather than clumping them, but there's still a lot of things coming this week.

Tilt is currently editing the first of two Patreon Q&A episodes, which should be up some time Tuesday.

My interview on Rick Rubin's podcast should be up Tuesday night/Wednesday morning assuming it comes out on their normal schedule (I've been told it's this week).

Thursday will be the Patreon bonus episode on The Pretty Things.

Saturday the main episode on The Band will go up (the Pretty Things is the bonus for that episode)

Monday of next week I'll be doing a blog post, reviewing gigs I saw in July

Wednesday of next week will be the next Patreon Q&A.

And with luck you'll get another backer-only bonus podcast on Friday of next week, but I can't promise that.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. I’m starting at the beginning (listened to ep 1 on Benny Goodman in the car this morning) and will go in order but allow myself to take little detours here or there to a song or era that is already well known/beloved to me and thus more easy to engage with. I’m excited.

Yeah, I started with episodes on a few songs I had a connection to and quickly rewound back to episode 1. I’ve listened to the whole thing twice (excepting the most recent episodes). If you click with it, I must recommend becoming a patr(e)on and getting the bonus episodes — they’re essential.

feel like a big part of fixing "the volume question" would be just using better eq and comp for the speech and would really make this a lot more listenable https://500songs.com/the-volume-question/

layering speech over music is my thing, have been tempted to do some remixes but I'll stay out of it. Feel that over the last couple of years "the volume question" has been quietly fixed in any case.

cool! I'm not that far in yet but was thinking it would prob get fixed at some point

He's on Rick Rubin's podcast today

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andrew-hickey/id1671669052?i=1000623142385

Also posted the first part of the Patreon q&a this morning. (And he answered my question!)

https://www.patreon.com/posts/87062010

For those who’ve wondered about his slow delivery on the early episodes, he explains in the Rubin interview.

Hearing him speak without a script explains it pretty well, even without having got to the explanation part yet.

i wish i could find the time to listen to these! they're all super good and interesting. i guess i could just read the transcripts but i do really like listening to the episodes.

anyway i was talking last night to someone about music (because of course i do when i can) and she's like, i was going out with this 56 year old dude and he was telling me about this podcast about all these old songs, and i was like oh yeah that podcast rules, and then she complained that hickey didn't do an episode on "rumble", because that's so often the way with these things, but it was fine because we just wound up listening to a bunch of '70s link wray, which is never a bad thing.

In the first few minutes of that Rick Rubin interview, he mentions that what was originally a 10-year project is now a 20-year project, which means he plans to wrap it up in 2038 (which would mean a pace of 2 episodes per month).

and then she complained that hickey didn't do an episode on "rumble"

It's one of the Patreon bonus episodes.

I've stopped approaching the podcast in terms of "but what about...?" because either a) he'll get to it, or b) there's likely a good reason for it not being covered. That said, the only omission I found genuinely odd -- and I absolutely do not have a horse in this race, because I mostly don't give a shit about Jefferson Starship (though I dig Airplane) -- was no mention of "Miracles." He'd mentioned many lower-charting songs by other artists in other episodes, and that's something of a career highlight for that band. Not a criticism, just an observation, but apparently JeffStar fans were pretty pissed about that.

maybe something to do with the song not being a hit in the UK? I've certainly never heard it before.

It hit # 3 in the US in 1975, and was by far their biggest hit here in the years between "Somebody To Love" and "We Built This City":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOhPNnFOJU

(Apologies for the awful "lyric" video -- it was the only one I could find with the single edit.)

I dig it myself, but yeah, neither the single nor the album (Red Octopus) charted at all in the UK. But then, none of the Airplane singles charted there either.

i'm sure that's true chartwise but i dunno "jane" feels much more enduring

It seems like their airplay, at least on the station I listened to at the time (WLS-AM in Chicago), was out of proportion to their chart positions. I heard "Jane" several times a day, though Chicago's mayor at the time was Jane Byrne, so it was often played after news segments with stories about Chicago politics. Hit # 14 (and #21 in the UK, their only '70s chart placing there). But I also heard "Find Your Way Back" so much that I assumed it was at least top 10. Nope, peaked at #29.

i heard jane on our classic rock station all the time, it was a staple on kqrs in minneapolis

i just listened to miracles and vaguely remembered it but i'm not sure i've ever heard it on the radio

i also didn't know that "find your way back" was them! they used to play that as well

I think "Miracles" suffers from maybe being a little too "Easy Listening" for Classic Rock programmers, the same way you won't necessarily hear certain other popular at the time songs from, say, Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac.

Remember too that Classic Rock stations would be playing the album version of "Miracles", which is like 7 minutes--alot of real estate to be taken up when Joe Six Pack is tuning in to get the Led out of groove to some prime CCR/BTO/BÖC.

"do it again" and "my old school" are the dan songs that got a lot of play on our station, but they are some of the most conventionally rock of the SD jawns

The "Jefferson" rock family evolved so much that it's hard to think of all of those groups as incarnations of the same thing. Paul Kantner is the only person who's on both "White Rabbit" and "Find Your Way Back" and of course Grace Slick is the only Airplane member on "We Built This City."

"Miracles" sounds like the most Airplane-ish of all the post-JA material because of the intertwining vocals of Marty Balin & Grace Slick.

Jesus fucking Christ, they're apparently still going, without one single original member, except, I guess, David Freiberg. What's the point? Who goes to listen to them? This makes me irrationally angry.

Need gas for the Starship.

7 minute version of "Miracles" also had the cunilingus reference, lest we forget

Ahem, a "taste of the real world."

Jesus fucking Christ, they're apparently still going, without one single original member

Wait’ll you hear the episodes on the Drifters…

Andrew Hickey seems to talk faster and faster as the Rick Rubin interview progresses

was no mention of "Miracles."

but apparently JeffStar fans were pretty pissed about that.

I can't even imagine having to put up this these kinds of people.

Plus, I don't understand why he would need to have talked about this song which wasn't released 'til 75 when he's still in the late 60s. Also, I have never heard this song in my life and I've listened to a ton of music from this era, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As someone that kind of likes this but doesn't think it's the greatest thing ever, it's perfectly ok to skip episodes and only listen to the ones that might interest you.

brilliant advice, I'll take it

Plus, I don't understand why he would need to have talked about this song which wasn't released 'til 75 when he's still in the late 60s.

This threw me for a loop as well, but I guess it's that he covers the entire Jefferson Airplane/Starship career? He sometimes does that if the artist doesn't have any more songs to come on the list...

Exactly. Many episodes will cover the artist’s entire career. The earlier ones, due to relatively minimal documentation on the artist, can usually manage this in 30-40 minutes. But the more recent ones can be upwards of two or three (or nearly five) hours.

The Airplane episode covered their whole lifespan, from pre-formation through “We Built This City” and beyond (the no-original-members lineup even gets a mention). I thought it worked perfectly, but yeah, I can’t imagine the annoyance of dealing with angry JeffStar fans. And you’d think Dead Heads would be all over him, complaining he left out a minor detail, but weirdly, there seems to be consensus among Dead Heads and non-fans alike that the Dead episode was something of a tour de force.

I’m a pretty obsessive deadhead and that episode was very cool. I loved hearing the take of an impartial observer with a vast knowledge of the larger music world. There are so many GD bios that cover the same tired territory over and over. This one was different in a great way. Only wish he’d spent more time on the 80s when things kinda went off the rails but that’s probably not so interesting a story to non- obsessives.

Take a load off Andy.

Hes back down to 2 hours with the new episode. So maybe he is lightening his load. Not listened to it yet and probably should get the patreon and not miss any of his output.

I don’t think it’s necessarily that he’s purposely lightening his load. He did say that the Dead, Velvets, and “All You Need Is Love” episodes are outliers, and listening to the Band episode you can see why: there’s a bunch of mentions of people who figured prominently earlier in the series (George Goldner and Morris Levy, among others), and the Velvets and especially the Dead episodes simply couldn’t be tied into the story in the same way. One of the things I admire most about his approach is his keen understanding of how and why details and accounts are important to the story — the Dead episode had to be nearly five hours, but those hours weren’t taken up by minutiae at the periphery. And did we really need all that time on La Monte Young in the Velvets episode, or Dexter Gordon in the “Eight Miles High” episode (which, at 90 minutes, is quaintly introduced with, “This is going to be an absurdly long episode”)? Yes. Yes we did.

(Also, we’re up to five Sun Ra mentions in the series, starting all the way back at episode 7.)

He said in the Rick Rubin interview – which is a great listen – that he very much viewed the Dead one as experimenting with the form in contrast to what he called the "meat and potatoes" approach of the typical episode.

He mentioned in the recent Q&A that there would be other big long shaggy ones coming up, and I am here for it. Even the new Band episode begins with John Ruskin. I love that.

The Band episode was the first major one where I felt like I didn’t learn anything significant or get a perspective that I hadn’t heard before. Maybe I’m too steeped in Dylan & The Hawks lore .. altho I’m probably a bigger Beatles nut TBH and have been illuminated by every Beatles episode. I wonder if Hickey just isn’t as much of a Dylan / Band fan and as such didn’t put as much effort into building a bigger story around the scene; I would have thought that this story, as the real locus of the Cult of Authenticity in Rock, would have been ripe for a new perspective or a takedown even, but it was about the most straightforward retelling of the Rolling Stone version of events as you could get. Ah well.

Fantastic new episode on Aretha's "I Say a Little Prayer," which includes much material on Burt Bacharach. After the featured song is covered there's still one hour of interesting stuff to come.

HIckey breaking down the time counting on "I Say a Little Prayer" is a wonder

The end of the Janis episode makes Jerry look like such a dick

Man I just love this podcast so much. I'm still in the early episodes - just finished the first Elvis one - but there's something about Hickey's almost-effaced narrative voice that radiates human decency; he somehow conveys a deep sense of humility and care for what he says and how he says it without ever revealing anything personal about himself (other than one brief digression about liking the Marx Brothers).

xp that last few minutes was fucking enraging

He reveals that he’s fat in this new episode, but it’s relevant to the story

I met him ten years ago this month, AMA (AIWNR)

Janis ep was ace. The last line was devastating.

it was posted on the active beatles thread and probably those who read that also read this but anyway his write-up on the "new" "song" is tremendous
https://www.patreon.com/posts/92258652

that hickey write-up was so good it actually got me to listen to the song! in general i agree with his thoughts, and in particular... so much of the beatles' work _is_ making silk purses out of, if not sow's ears, than something less than a silk purse. particularly when it comes to lennon's work! i once heard this mix of "instant karma", i can't find it now, that's just the raw backing track and lead vocals. i love it! it sounds fucking terrible! and that's on top of the, ahem, heavy debt the song owes to "magical mystery tour". so much of john's work in particular just doesn't _work_ in its raw form. hickey mentions "watching rainbows" and i think that's another good example - it's not a finished song, it's kind of an improvised jam. (depending on what one's standards are you _could_ in fact have harrison on the song, since it uses a pretty basic two-chord structure as on "i got a feeling".) hell, imagine turning something like "los paranoias" into a proper song. i bet you could. a lot of john's best songs have been studio patch jobs since, well... i was gonna say "since it was technically possible" but "strawberry fields forever" was actually a pioneering use of technology.

but it's not like it was only john's songs that were messed around with that way. the "anthology 3" version of "i me mine" demonstrates clearly that the final version was extended in much the same way that "now and then" was.

i know there's a blog full of "'70s versions of Beatles album", part of the whole "albums that never were" thing... i haven't listened, i don't know if they're any good, but god, even if they're not, you probably _could_ make a fair forgery of the beatles out of the solo albums the four of them did, right? (is that blog still up? anybody know what i'm talking about and/or have a link to the site for that? i can't remember and i feel like trying to find it again would be a chore.)

i also think "homeopathic amounts of george harrison" is a great turn of phrase. it made me laugh.

https://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/

Still around, slower pace but always intriguing, and he recently upgraded most of the What If the Beatles Never Broke Up comps

thanks hideous lump! <3

I always thought that a really really good Beatles tribute act could get deep into 1968-69 mode and start working up the post-breakup solo songs, arranging them in a reasonable facsimile of how the band would have really played them, even rewriting some of the more pointed/bitter tunes or combining half-baked ideas the way the Beatles would have done, to make 3-4 killer fake Beatles albums in this vein.

The failings of the ATNW approach — unavoidable! Not a criticism of his stellar work — are a) the vast sonic differences between the solo Beatles’ records, and b) the lack of a collaborative writing/editing/arranging process. You can never make a solo Beatles track sound like a Beatles cut without George’s bg vox or Paul’s bass playing & arranging skills (etc), or — this is the key element — the intensely competitive collaboration between partic J&P that fuelled their records.

Obv you could never really duplicate what might have been, but I think it’d be fun to try to get super close.

there is often a "who missed who more" discussion about lennon and mccartney solo and i'd argue john needed paul (and george martin, and ringo) to elevate his work more than paul needed john to edit his. songs like tomorrow never knows, walrus, come together are basically drab one-chord things if you're just playing them on a guitar without tape loops, strings, wild bass and drums, etc. lennon solo replaces a lot of that with sax solos.

What

I always thought that a _really really good_ Beatles tribute act could get deep into 1968-69 mode and start working up the post-breakup solo songs, arranging them in a reasonable facsimile of how the band would have really played them,

Ha, they've done a mid 60s-Beatles version of Now and Then already. Not one of their most successful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABa_RH1ygC8

There was an anecdote near the end of the Janis Joplin episode where there was a concert featuring the Grateful Dead and other contemporaries and when the news of her death got out, they just played on like nothing happened and even chastised a journalist who was crying backstage for ruining the vibe. Hippies were weird...or was death that common in the scene by 1970 that it was just taken for granted.

the dead always seemed vaguely sociopathic to me

Not sure about Hickey’s psychoanalytical theory that McCartney crafted ‘Now and Then’ “…to be the message to himself he wanted to hear” … Hickey might be over-thinking it. I suspect Paul’s main aim was give the fans what he thought they most want to see and hear: the sense that the Beatles are back together and that they always loved each other.

This would be a good project for Apple Jam, who do this kind of thing (see their versions of White Album era outtakes for example🕸)

Not one of their most successful

Indeed - completely fluffed the Turnham Green reference!

"Black Saint and the Dinner Lady" - did anyone else hear this in the Van episode or am I going mad? Seems weird for someone so fastidious and scrupulous about his content.

Errata

At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus’ classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on “Slim Slow Slider” when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track).

https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-170-astral-weeks-by-van-morrison/

Well, there it is. At least I'm not mad. I went back and listened a few times and it sounded re-recorded or glitched. Weird. Anyway, good episode.

one thing that seems to be a consistent pattern (i'm still in the 50s) is that the blues + country origin story of rock n' roll is overstated and the influence of jazz has been understated in my previous understanding

haven't listened to the early episodes in a while but can say that country tries to mimic boogie woogie jazz and you get hillbillie boogie which is like a less amped r'n'r about 10 years earlier.

he gets into some of that jazz/country crossover and also western swing

previous post brought on my the james brown please please please episode where apparently james kind of disliked the blues but was a big count basie and louis jordan fan

(louis jordan tends to pop up a lot as an influence on the podcast)

fascinating patreon episode about Larry Norman. Pretty wide-ranging from his 60s music to his surprising influence on all sort of things

Love this example of a rock n roll momentum coming together from jazz and hillbilly. Not really representative of Bob Wills style overall, but certainly shows how swing rhythms would develop into r’n’r.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxVM9_ANbjg

3.5 hour Hey Jude episode just dropped

2.5 hours devoted solely to the coda

lol

Gotta say that Andrew's take on how the Hey Jude coda Na Na Na Na-Na-Na Na is the culmination of India and the TM mantra is genius.

After listening here and there I started from the beginning and have been listening one a day for a couple months. Louis Jordan mentioned a lot of course but everyone wants to dance

Listening from the beginning is really the way to go, I think - at least for people like me who really don't know much about the early history of rock, there's so much foundational stuff here. The episode on Sh-Boom was essential listening for me, and I might never have heard it just skipping around.

Maybe a New Year’s project for us!

I remember a comment on Popular proposing that the coda was Paul's old and new loves colliding - a taste for the avant-garde perhaps betraying awareness of the minimalists, but with the 'jude jude jude yeyeah!' interjections the Little Richard grounding in him breaking through - and I haven't been able to hear it any other way since

Wow, interesting perspective. Even when I think I wanna hate Paul for whatever reason his Little Richard always wins me back. Shut up!

Also that's including when it came on the radio while I was undergoing serious eye surgery

if it's your thing and you're going to commit (totally worth it IMO), then agree that listening from the beginning is best way. so much rich material.

The fact that he follows the canon pretty obediently does mean subject matter has gotten less interesting to me as he goes on, more excited for the bonus eps than the actual ones these days.

how long are the bonus episodes generally? been thinking of subscribing but i don't know if i have the time to listen to another 3-hour podcast in addition to the main feed

Bonus episodes are 10 to ~45 minutes with most of them on the shorter side.

I'm still in the relatively early days but honestly the prehistory stuff is so fascinating and so much more complex than I thought it would be, I would not miss it

Had my mind truly blown when I learned about the early 1940s musician strike and how it led to the decline of big band music and the domination of vocalists in mainstream. So yeah, don't skip the early episodes.

I thought I knew enough about that from Phil Schaap but maybe I need to go back to the well.

“… so that I don’t spend too long on the Byrds.”

THAT SHIP HAS SAILED, ANDREW

I missed any reasoning for him going multiple part to what would have been one long episode. Is it reaction to public demand or his own recognition of pressure. If he's doing it and continuing to research between episodes is he not finding more material pertinent to episodes already transmitted.
Not sure what his work model is. Just finding new episodes dropping into my new episode grouping. So will look if he has given a separate explanation.

i loved all the byrds eps!

He said it was getting to where their editing software was choking on the large files

Yeah and I think he finds it stressful to keep people waiting for a month for new episodes, though now I guess people complain about there being so many episodes on one song they don’t care about. (Though really the first couple episodes hardly get into the Byrds’ country era.)

His explanation is here: https://500songs.com/podcast/announcement-regarding-schedule/

I like the new tack — much rather have an hour every week or 2 than wait 2 months for a big episode.

I just don’t understand how Hickory Wind warrants FOUR HOURS of content. It’s peak cocaine-era Stephen King literary elephantiasis. Hickory Wind is his Tommyknockers.

Well, his explanation for the increasing length is that he doesn’t want the podcast to turn into a rote retelling of lore from an era that’s had a million books written about it, and so the episodes have to include both the stuff that everyone knows, and also the odd connections and backstories that he’d built into the podcast from the beginning. And the stuff most people know and expect to be there is much larger in scope than when the episodes were about the Drifters or Adam Faith.

I have no complaints. So what if Hickory Wind doesn't warrant four hours of content? One of the joys of this podcast, besides being such an amazing example of citizen scholarship, is Andrew's idiosyncrasies. I totally agree with a point above about the many of the best episodes being about music you don't necessarily like or care that much about (and maybe still don't!).

I think it would start to get worse if he started overthinking about what we think we want from him. (Even though I'm already disappointed about his repeated notes that he won't be covering shoegaze, for instance).

Did he say he won't cover shoegaze?

Yes, he's said "I probably won't" a couple of times, leavening it with a possible bonus episode on MBV. I mean, who knows maybe he'll change his mind.

That will be a hard moment for me, since I'm sure he'll feel compelled to do a big Oasis thing, but maybe he'll make it interesting. Definitely the whole Tony Blair/neoliberalism/Cool Britannia moment could be used to discuss Oasis and Blur as exports.

Discussing Britpop alongside Blair is already giving me J*** H***** flashbacks, please no

He will probably do something more interesting!

I think he should cover shoegaze but I’d also be kind of stunned if this podcast makes it to the late 80s at all. I’ll be grateful for whatever we get of course

it seems pretty obvious hickey won't be able to make it to the 90s given his current pace and how every half year his pace markedly decreases. which is fine, he clearly loathes half the music and most of the people he's covering in the late 60s and i'll be surprised if he won't grow even more negative and focused on the salacious and drug-addled aspects of the 70s and 80s. a more accurate title of this podcast might be a history of rock music in 500 content warnings.

4+ hours on the byrds' country turn and gram parsons' early years feels like it seriously needs both an editor to cut it down to 1 hour, and to also ask, what is the theme of this episode... is this about turning away from psychedelia to a pastiche of ultraconservative music, or is it regrounding rock closer to one of its constituent birth parents, the plaintive minor key strummy yawpy dirges of rodgers and williams, which would bear fruit in the often corny but occasionally revelatory singer songwriter genre? but is that genre really influenced by sweetheart?

i suppose i am biased against sweetheart as an album, it has always felt like an above average late 60s country record fakeout by a poisoned compromise between mcguinn and parsons rather than some sort of true template for all the more full-blooded country rock to come from dylan, eagles, stones, neil, dead, etc.

One of the joys of this podcast, besides being such an amazing example of citizen scholarship, is Andrew's idiosyncrasies.

Feels like there's been a lot less of this as he feels compelled to follow the conventional history of boomer rock - so these days the bonus episodes, where he gets to play outside that canon, are a lot more fun imo.

Yeah the current one on Arthur Brown is my favourite thing he's done for a while.

he clearly loathes half the music and most of the people he's covering in the late 60s

I don't get this impression. Which music do you think he loathes?

@Daniel_Rf: See what you mean about the podcast becoming a bit less idiosyncratic, though he did go out of his way (again!) to talk about Firesign Theatre via Gary Usher. And I love it. But I also agree that Arthur Brown bonus episode is a lot more fun than the Byrds one was overall.

The one act I'm 100% he hates so far is The Kingsmen - though I know he's not that keen on The Rolling Stones or Jefferson Airplane.

The Satisfaction episode was a great one though.

I loved Hickory Wind, and didn't mind the length at all. The one time I felt impatient for him to *get on with it* was on the episode on The Weight, where 40 minutes of the 2 hours was spent on Ronny Hawkins.

Next up is All Along the Watchtower, which is both an obvious, and fantastic choice.

So we’ve had four straight episodes of basically country rock. Eager to get back to some actual rocking type rock.

But first a detour to Nashville Skyline!

the nashville dylan detour is good, glad to take spend some time on the slow road to electric ladyland

New bonus episode on Arlo Guthrie is a good listen.

The cool bit where he isolates on the drums of Lay Lady Lay made me appreciate that song a lot more. Love it when he dives in like that (also on the My Girl episode for instance)

Isolating the percussion in Lay Lady Lay was really cool. It made me realize the drums barely register for me on any pop of that era that's not headed towards hard rock.

I had a similar reaction--I thought the isolated drums, even before the congo-and-cowbell part he was highlighting, sounded great. And I doubt I would have noticed otherwise

I finally finished listening to the Hey Jude and Hickory Wind episodes. I agree with the earlier posts that the Hickory Wind episodes illustrate a need for an editor and I also have the impression he stopped liking the music he’s discussing. His writing has increasingly become overwrought and pretentious. I don’t think the recent episodes are “bad,” far from it—but I’ve become a little less excited for new episodes.

I guess, at this point, I’d prefer listening to him talk about stuff enthusiastically rather than completing this project! Maybe that’s the subscriber episodes?

Did Hickey dismiss Axis Bold As Love and Band Of Gypsys? Seemed to be less than positive about them.
I thought they were widely liked and possibly just a little less superlatively good as material considered his best.
I may need to listen through the episode again.

I've seen people write off Band of Gypsys as a step backwards. Foolishness imo.

My friend Doug Decker recorded that Band of Gypsys stuff. He worked for Wally Heider. Then he did the sound for the Johnny Cash Show. Then he worked for Takoma Records. Just another historical tidbit from your pal Scott. Good day, music fans!

I was surprised to hear him say that Band of Gypsys is generally considered relatively weak. I've always loved it and just assumed other Hendrix fans did too.

I think it's just not considered by everyone to be his greatest work. Seems to have been pretty influential and get a good score not a superlative one.

But Hickey hates men who are violent to women. So may be valorised by that.
Came back to me after I posted this morning.
I got Band of Gypsys this week and it's pretty good. Ordered it a week or so ago cos I found it cheapish.

Good score = rated highly where I'm seeing it reviewed. So contrary to weak.

That is seeing it getting 3.7 or 3.9 out of 5 where his best work is 4.15 or something.
& that is high if 3.5 is a decent scoring. A point less than its getting would be mediocre/weak. It's also getting a lot of people bothering to review it which means it is creating some reaction and a weak l.p. probably wouldn't. A lot of titles only get a handful of responses. That's RYM and a few other places.

It seems to me the reputation of Band of Gypsys got a bump around 1990. Miles Davis said in his 1989 autobiography that he preferred that band to the Experience, and then through the '90s it seemed that BoG was the hipster's choice of a Hendrix album. I think it has some of Jimi's best solos on it. Wikipedia suggests the album was long influential in black music circles. Hickey frames it as a contractual obligation record iirc, but it wasn't just that.

But Hickey hates men who are violent to women. So may be valorised by that.

Interesting. I still need to listen to the episode. I would’ve guessed Hickey would’ve defended Hendrix from the invented accusations and used it as an appropriate opportunity to discuss the use of racial caricatures in American and British media.

It seems to me the reputation of Band of Gypsys got a bump around 1990.

Unless you were in the funk or metal scenes where “Band of Gypsys” was considered canonical far earlier than 1990. Hell, Maggot Brain came out the next year.

He does note the influence of Hendrix on subsequent black music, including Funkadelic, though IIRC he doesn't credit Band of Gypsys for being especially influential in that respect

xp you seem very sure that these were "invented" but it seems there are quite a number of women who reported Jimi being violent towards them.

This is the only story I am referencing. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/jimi-hendrixs-ex-kathy-etchingham-scuse-me-while-i-defend-my-guy-20140603-39h1n.html

in the episode he acknowledges that she has consistently denied any abuse and takes her at her word, but says that there are multiple reports of abusive behavior towards other women that he was involved with.

this is well established and uncontroversial

presumably the biopic was doing the shitty biopic thing of "well we do have to address this part" and was extra shitty for not consulting the person they used as stand in for representative victim

but if there was racism in his portrayal in the british press which it's hard to imagine there wasn't there must be better angles to tackle it from

and invented accusations really rubs me the wrong way with shades of the freaks on classic rock message boards who are very insistent that john lennon only ever hit a woman once in spite of all evidence

I have to admit I haven't listened to this thing since it entered the canonised by rolling stone era which I would prefer wasn't covered too exhaustively without (less canonised) respite but I can't tell him what to do I'm just a consumer

Hickey is pretty transparent in his hatred of everything RS endorsed in the late 60s fwiw. Especially all the SF bands of the time. Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company are all damned with faint praise.

Weird

I can never tell when Hickey hates something. I didn't even get the impression he hates the Dead, though I would guess he's not a fan

He doesn't strike me as someone who hates many bands. And I bet in the course of deep diving for a month on a band, you come to appreciate stuff that you thought you never could.

enochroot otm, this is something i really like about Hickey. Listening to the recent "Hey Jude" one and Byrds/Gram Parsons one, I did get the feeling that he probably likes the Beatles substantially more than he likes the Byrds. But in both episodes, he really strikes a fine balance of describing the respective bands and where they stood in the broader rock/pop context of the time--both artistically and within the economics of the industry.

It's really rare to hear anything that sounds like either hagiography or hatchet job on the podcast, and there's also enough insight and ideas and unexpected connections that it avoids the "I'm reading wikipedia into a microphone" trap that some podcasts fall into.

Like you can tell when he thinks the members of a group are kind of dopey--like in the Cream episode--but there was also a really good contextualizing of the band in that episode and the critiques he makes of them are usually insightful, not just potshots.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Potshots, would listen.

Smokey Robinson has shown up in episodes on Mary Wells and The Temptations so far, of course; but it's still kind of mind blowing to me that he hasn't had his own episode yet and we're halfway through 1969! I can only assume Andrew is waiting for 1970 and "The Tears of A Clown", Smokey's sole pop #1 in the US/UK so far, to sum up and climax his story to that point?

I suppose levels of rank misogyny should never be a surprise but god what a piece of shit David Ruffin was.

Yes. Motown has been covered extensively so it's strange that there is no Smokey episode yet. Tears Of A Clown is the likely one. After that, maybe Cruisin' in 1979?

the thing is, Hickey has made it clear that there's a point at which Soul and R&B will no longer be part of the podcast, and his recentish take on what makes a genre - basically something is a genre as long as its fans refer to it as that genre - makes me think the cut off will probably be sometime in the 70's?

What major soul/R&B acts have not been covered yet that are sure to get at least 1 episode? Jackson 5/Michael, Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince, Donna Summer, maybe Al Green

Curtis Mayfield surely

is he in 1969 yet? i thought he joked in the current episode that he's spent more time on 1968 than 1968 itself lasted. and was there a mary wells episode?

i'm kind of glad there's not been a smokey episode yet; i think he's a cruicial songwriter and his voice is remarkable - is it effeminate or just vulnerable? is it falsetto or head voice or what? - but there have been too many motown episodes, just like there were too many beatles and beach boys and spector episodes. lots of the best work of this pod are the smaller stories. perhaps his life is not interesting enough to warrant a deep dive and his episode will just be a quick spin through his incredible catalog.

There's been a curtis and the impressions episode for people get ready, and i'd imagine there will be another for superfly. besides those mentioned i'd expect a gamble and huff ("backstabbers" maybe), an isaac hayes shaft episode, and possibly ones for war's lowrider, gil scott heron's revolution will not be televised, chic, and then we're off to the 80s for who can say what hickey will think fits the brief. if muddy waters and howlin wolf aren't rock and roll in his view but the ink spots are, there's really no way to tell if grandmaster flash or donna summer will get episodes, and that's part of the fun.

he did a previous episode on stevie but we're sure to get at least 1 more.

He also did an Impressions/Curtis Mayfield episode, People Get Ready

he did zappa and the velvets and love's forever changes as main episodes, he should do fela and jorge ben and mulatu astatke when the time comes, and bitches brew. i'm resigned to the fact that maybe franco and ok jazz, while pioneering rock music of the late 50s important to millions of people, is maybe outside the remit of this show.

Interesting development re: whether Hickey hates the Grateful Dead: In this Bluesky post, he says he has 611 tracks in his digital Grateful Dead collection, with "separate directories for Garcia and Weir solo, New Riders, and Dylan & The Dead".

Just found this thread, surprised I hadn't looked earlier. I've listened to them all, just heard the final Sympathy for the Devil episode. I'm also in the facebook group and the sometimes fun sometimes silly "Long-term speculation" chat, which is often a more general chat. I'll have to catch up on this thread, but man he does not have much love for the Stones...Mick Jagger or Brian Jones particularly.

The curious lengths hickey went to sidetrack on wilde, milton, shelley and keats was hit or miss. I appreciate the comparison of the stones and shelley as ever-thus upper class young drug-using edgelord seducers and milton's sympathetic satan as a model for jagger's antihero/evil persona but the wilde trial stuff was maybe too tangential.

Perhaps as with the grateful dead episode, he needed a clear theme and frame to keep his own interest when writing about a subject he doesn't like.

I thought this was one of my favourites, particularly the final part which just went out today. Seems some of the best episodes are where he doesn't really care for the artist in question.

I really don’t get any sense of Hickey’s likes and dislikes. I came away from this song more impressed with Jagger’s intellect, and I already liked his intellect just fine. What I really like is how Hickey gives a ton of context for how wonderful music was created. It’s not geniuses. It’s regular fucked up humans in situations that provided amazing opportunities to reach, and move, a mass audiences. Which probably fucked them up even more.

I miss the long episodes. I understand why he's breaking them up but I appreciate sprawl.

There was some podcast confluence today/yesterday as the Altamont disaster was covered simultaneously by Andrew Hickey and by 'My Favorite Murder.'

The 'My Favorite Murder' girls actually covered it in more and better detail, but then that was their episode's entire focus.

I found it interesting that Hickey basically pooh-poohed all of the alternative Brian Jones' death theories.

I e been waiting since July for this final Sympathy episode to drop before starting to listen. I’m in the middle of part 3 at the moment. I do t feel like this one is as wide-ranging or tangential as the Dark Star or VU episodes, thankfully. I really enjoyed those and think they’re among the best podcasts I’ve ever heard, but as with TM Coe, bloat sets in when you think every episode needs to be an epic. I really didn’t think the Hickory Wind episode needed to be so damn long. And if you need 6 hours to tell the story of the Stones from Satisfaction through Sympathy, well, maybe they deserve a song in the middle somewhere — Paint It, Black or Night Together probably could have got the job done and allowed the narrative to move along. Anyway, I don’t wanna come off like a Neg Nancy because I think he’s still killing it. But he’s only gonna get like 5 songs done this year!

man he does not have much love for the Stones...Mick Jagger or Brian Jones particularly.

As artists or as people? I didn't get a vibe he doesn't like the music, but it's hard to go through the list of events and retain much sympathy for these guys imo, Brian Jones particularly.

I seem to remember in one of the Q&A eps he mentions he used to view Jones as the voice of the group's conscience and now, after his research, very much does not.

Until fairly recently I had this underlying assumption that there would be a buildup to Altamont / Manson as the death of the 60s but having been through the whole story it should have been obvious that was a prime myth to be busted. Hearing Jagger and others try to invoke peace and love while people were being killed really brought home that most of the musicans - and especially the stones - never bought into that in the first place, and any use they had for it was cynical from the start.

xPost I think both. He hasn't shown a TON of interest or respect for their music, and has mentioned an upcoming episode on the Stones will go even deeper into their "problematic" relationship to black music/culture. He's not as effusive in his taste as Tyler Mahan Coe, so it's always nice when the veneer drops and he expresses a real love for some music, or respect of it's influence, and there hasn't been a lot of that with the Stones, going back to the beginning. Probably even a more pronounced discussion of influences, whether going in depth on Martha & The Vandellas influence on Satisfaction, or the Kinks influence on Lady Jane I think it was? I was surprised and happy to hear him say as much as he did regarding the Kinks innovations in that sort of baroque influence.

in part one of sympathy:

The album that they started working on in the same set of sessions as “19th Nervous Breakdown” and completed in a further set of sessions in March 1966, Aftermath, was the first Stones album to be made up entirely of originals, and those originals had a distinctly misogynistic tone. The album started with “Mother’s Little Helper”, a song that stylistically seems to be modelled on the Kinks’ then-recent “Well-Respected Man”, the first of Ray Davies’ series of bouncy acoustic social satires, which came out as a single in the US shortly before “Mother’s Little Helper” was recorded. The song also features the use of electric guitars to imitate the sound of sitars, something that had again been done by the Kinks earlier that year, on “See My Friend”, though it’s likely the group also were thinking of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood”, which had come out the week before

and part two:

However, I suspect that there was another inspiration, and that it either directly inspired Richards or that Jones was inspired by it in the melody he played for Richards. We saw in the last episode how several Stones records in 1966 seem to have been at least partly inspired by the Kinks’ recent records — not that they were plagiarising or anything like that, just that they were picking up on and responding to what their rivals were producing.

There’s an album track by the Kinks from a year or so earlier, “Ring the Bells”, that I never see anyone mention in the context of “Ruby Tuesday”, but which seems to me to be very, very similar indeed. Compare the Kinks:

Excerpt: The Kinks, “Ring the Bells”

to the Stones:

Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”

See what I mean? I find it very hard to believe that there was no connection between the two tracks.

Lol @ Hickey’s little sideways dig, quoting Crowley’s “auto-hagiography”.

My biggest “whoa” moment in the latest episode was the demonstration that Keith Richards took a rhythm guitar lick from Etta James’ version of “I Got You Babe” for use in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I own that Etta James 45 and have listened to it dozens of times over the years without noticing that, but there it is.

I'd never heard that Etta James...was amazing. I think that version just got a whole lot of new fans.

youtube "official visualizer" points out that it was used in The Last of Us, so I imagine that had some impact.

Walmart also used it in their Xmas ads a few years ago.

Listening to part 4, it felt a bit weird to hear in detail about Altamont before he covered Woodstock. But I liked the 4 part Sympathy epic. There was a lot to unpack between the cultural connections, the many instances of dickish behavior, and the musical influences (Ry Cooder! Etta James! South American rhythms!). But yeah it’s hard to imagine him getting to the Clash let alone 90s REM at this rate.

does he talk about olatunji?

i'm going to listen to it soon, never mind

I don't remember mention of Olatunji yet and he did have more widespread influence. Moe Tucker was supposed to have been influenced by him and Bo Diddley. & she's not alone I thought he was pretty important in the popularisation of African music in the West with Drums of Passion in the early 60s and the less well known lps he continued to release for the years afterward.
Would hope for at least a Patreon episode on him but I don't think there is one dedicated. I'm seeing mention of him in the Serge Gainsbourg Je T'aime Patreon episode which I don't think I've listened to.

Nothing about Olatunji that I remember. In Ep3 he talks about a trip Mick & Marianne made to Brazil where they were entranced by Candomble music and then tying that having Rocky Dijon setting the groove for Sympathy.

Rocky Dijon is such a boss name.

if you need 6 hours to tell the story of the Stones from Satisfaction through Sympathy, well, maybe they deserve a song in the middle somewhere — Paint It, Black or Night Together probably could have got the job done and allowed the narrative to move along. Anyway, I don’t wanna come off like a Neg Nancy because I think he’s still killing it. But he’s only gonna get like 5 songs done this year!

Listening to the fourth part now, and while I'm really enjoying it, it does seem odd to me that he continued this episode beyond Brian Jones's death, which it's felt like the rest of the episodes were leading up to, and which seems like a natural cutoff point. Let it Bleed + Altamont seems like another episode entirely, though maybe a shorter one.

I don't exactly get a sense that he dislikes Jagger, but it does seem like he has no real interest in what was going on in Jagger's mind or how he felt about anything, apart from a brief acknowledgement of the trauma of the drug bust. Jagger is a very opaque figure in these episodes, where the other Stones, even (especially?) Jones, come across much more as human beings with feelings.

I really like all the contradictions and nuances and paradoxes of the story as he presents it: the way Jones comes off simultaneously as a terrible person who should have been locked up for life and as a deeply tragic figure; the way the Stones, who could so easily be casually thoughtless and hurtful, responded to Jones's long decline with far more patience and tact than he deserved.

Now that I’ve heard how he fits it all together, I see how he took the central song, “sympathy for the devil” as symbolic of these young guys in a beat band consciously deciding to dive towards darkness and how they coped with the results.

Satisfaction through Sympathy, well, maybe they deserve a song in the middle somewhere — Paint It, Black or Night Together probably could have got the job done and allowed the narrative to move along.

I had the exact same feeling but he explained his reasons in a discussion on Patreon. Basically, besides some great music there wasn't much in the way of interesting narrative after Satisfaction, until the arrests in 1967. So he didn't want to end an episode on the arrests and then leave people hanging for a couple years.

Hickey starts the new episode, which deals with the Beach Boys and Charles Manson, with a disclaimer about why he won't be drawing any material from Tom O'Neil's Manson book CHAOS. The statement is very strange to me. As I understand him, he doesn't want to use anything from CHAOS because the book is too conspiratorial. Hickey says it engages in "narrative pareidolia", a type of thinking so seductive and dangerous that he doesn't want to expose his audience to it, even indirectly.

I read CHAOS recently, and I don't think the "narrative pareidolia" charge is accurate. But even setting that aside, the book contains information about Manson's life, and his connections to the music industry (in particular to Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher), that can be presented apart from the central conspiracy (which is about Manson's possible connections to intelligence agencies and MKUltra).

So if Hickey thinks that information is credible and relevant, he can include it without exposing his audience to O'Neil's allegedly dangerous conspiratorial reasoning. And if he doesn't think it's credible or relevant, then that alone suffices to explain why he's not drawing on the book, no claim about "narrative pareidolia" required. The whole thing is weird. I wonder what's REALLY going on...

i respect this podcast because he is a know-it-all. that's kind of why his podcast is good. but he is a know-it-all, and cuz of that the show is just not for me. (esp the way his moralizing can read as unassailable due to his deep authority and research- unintentionally or not)

CHAOS is a great book btw

i think i’m at the end of the hickey train with this episode. i literally asked myself during his interminably long beach boys sing stephen foster segment ‘why am i listening to this’.

i think the bonus episodes are still good but his inability to edit himself and his obsession with a) lite pop like the beach boys and monkees b) salacious details and allegations over music itself… has just turned me off for good. a fundamental prudery that is antithetical to the spirit of the music and fandom.

I was saddened that he shunted Status Quo's whole career to a bonus episode, which I never heard, but apparently was crap and witlessly negative. One thing I'd hoped his podcast would do would provide opportunities to explain the continued appeal of bands like Quo - one of the biggest UK rock bands of the 70s and 80s, no less - even if he isn't a fan personally, and frame them with more care. Just kinda puts me off.

"I didn't listen to this but it was crap and negative. Why can't thoughtful critical writers be positive about things they haven't heard don't like and think are bad."

Lite pop like The Beach Boys? What are you talking about? First the background in minstrelly, black sound, Jim Crow, all that stuff is totally fascinating and has resonance up to the story he’s telling, second of all The Beach Boys are plainly awesome, favorites of his, favorites of anybody with ears, and things he’s covered at length previously so not much of a surprise for their to be more, and once the point of this episode is leading up to the relationship to Manson, not much of a lite pop subject matter.

Beach boys are just lite pop but status deserve mire attention? You’re both insane.

And the Status quo episode was quite good.

The Status Quo episode was good, a nice bridge for the US listeners who may be unaware of them as anything more than a one-hit wonder. Did it make a case for them as an important band? Not really, because ultimately they aren't that important, they just sold a load of records

The songs picked are always a jumping-off point, and it was great to have his history of mistrelry this week. Not sure how he is going to complete this one but sure he won't attempt to make a definitive history of the Manson murders, so not sure it matters if he's using a particular book.

I agree, it doesn't really matter whether he's using that particular book--so why make a statement about it, and give such a goofy justification? The inescapable conclusion: Andrew Hickey is a CIA asset.

I hadn't heard of "Chaos" and had no idea WTF he was on about or why he was spending so much time talking about a book that he wasn't going to talk about. I was also confused about why he was so mysterious and indirect about what book he was even referring to - he made it sound like Mein Kampf or something. If it's so radioactive, let me know what fuckin book it is so I know to avoid it!

It's my own fault though, I usually automatically skip the first 5 minutes of each episode to avoid the longwinded trigger warnings and disclaimers. I've never understood who he thinks his audience is that wants to hear 3 hours of excruciating detail about "White Light/White Heat" or "White Rabbit" but also can't bear to exposed to a passing mention of mental illness

For now on, I'm waiting until all parts of an episode are out so I can get it all at once. It's a drag for the story to start getting good and suddenly STAY TUNED NEXT TIME FOR THE THRILLING CONCLUSION

the content warnings are just a politeness to people who may find that stuff triggering, if they aren't for you (and they aren't for me either) then you can skip them. I think it's been a positive in getting a wider audience used to that sort of thing, though I don't do them myself and I did put out a half hour audio collage of the holocaust last year so maybe I'm the worst person to talk about this.

Yeah I agree with that. Splitting up an episode is something other podcasts I like also do, and it’s never not annoying.

I’ll gladly wait three months or whatever for Hickey to release his next full episode. I subscribe, so I’ll get the alert when that happens.

My post was responding to Cow_Art’s

(xxp to Camaraderie) totally, you're not wrong. i'd certainly prefer that he err on the side of being extremely thoughtful about that stuff rather than the other way around, for sure.

It's also not nec about avoiding the topics, for a lot of ppl it can be "ok, this has this trigger, gonna listen to that when I'm feeling less fragile" or just "ok, this has this trigger, good to know I'm in for that" as opposed to it showing up out of the blue.

he's also a really weird guy very vocal about his autism and that comes up in different ways with how he presents his information, so I take it as part of the deal. And that extreme repetition, "I'd play this song but I can't if I want to remain in the general public section of the podcast app" or whatever.

For now on, I'm waiting until all parts of an episode are out so I can get it all at once. It's a drag for the story to start getting good and suddenly STAY TUNED NEXT TIME FOR THE THRILLING CONCLUSION

Immediately bought Chaos after hearing the intro.

I really, really like how the 500 songs are not canonical. He’s not saying “I Wanna Be Your Man” is the important early Stones song, but just using songs as touchstones for episodes.

i think i’m at the end of the hickey train with this episode.

He is deep into his own personal Tales from Topographic Oceans phase. Lengthy, fairly indulgent meandering. If Maybelline could be finished in under an hour, does Never Learn Not To Love need five, spaced out over three or four months?

the last episode i finished was "sincerely" by the moonglows. i don't have a voracious podcast episode. i'm taking my time. i'm looking forward to getting into late '60s / early '70s shenanigans. these long epic episodes sound intriguing

*voracious podcast appetite

I think Hickey might end up being better once he’s done (however far along he gets). It’s infuriating waiting months for an episode / song but I have usually enjoyed the result (hickory wind could have been one, two episodes tops). Sort of like waiting for the next episode or season of a tv show to drop… I pretty much only watch series that are completed nowadays cause I can’t take the waiting game.

(Ancient xps to sic upthread. I never heard the Quo episode because it was a subscription one, hence expressing disappointment from what I heard about it from my Hickey train friend when what I was hoping for was a regular ep I could hear myself. Not really interested in his own opinions on the music, more why is it that a band like them - by the mid-70s as conceivably huge in Britain as a band could be - appealed to so many and for so long. Maybe he covered it fine.)

I didn't think there was anything extraneous about the "Sympathy for the Devil" series. Honestly, I like the long ones like the "Dark Star" episode, but no beef about splitting them up.

I thought the Quo episode was good! And I also like the long ones. Grudgingly agree that Hickory Wind could have been shorter, and for once I didn't quite get the long Stephen Foster thing. It's possible he's losing the plot a bit, also that the plot he's writing about (1970s and after) is a different kind of challenge, but I think he's earned the right to go for it. I am definitely going to keep listening.

Oh hell yeah

Halfway done with the new episode and this story about how John Lomax treated Ledbetter is a total nightmare.

he wasn't great to Bessie Smith either. Not in the same league but seems widespread with him. Turned up in a biography of her I read last year.

yeah, it's interesting and infuriating, though the connective tissue is pretty thin in this one. I get that he had first intended to have Ledbetter as a parallel to Manson (though even if you buy into the original biography of Ledbetter that's a little far-fetched) and that he wants people to know about this new biography and puncture the myths, but there's hardly any reason for it to specifically take up half of the Beach Boys episode. There's the "Cotton Fields" cover but that doesn't seem like a particularly significant track. But I get that it feels important for the overall project and he can't rewind and fit it in three years ago. Idk, I'm still enjoying the podcast and looking forward to the episodes, but I wouldn't blame people for feeling like the story's getting away from him a bit.

I feel like he’s getting to use these slightly more tenuous connections to tell a few important stories at once, all worth telling, even if they’re not like totally key to each other

Well says something about continuous research. Just a shame that it has to fit into existing structure to be shared. Not sure how else he'd do it.
Unless he did miscellaneous new findings episodes. Cos even the patron episodes are pretty heavily chronological and I think pretty contemporary to the era the main show is covering.

I've mainly listened to the podcast so not sure if he's uncovering any other revelatory corrections that go as wildly against his chronology. To the extent it won't fit with releases.

I started listening to this only yesterday and I'm very interested in this Beach Boys / Manson thing. I love a diagonal throughline

Not to say Leadbelly's true story isn't worth telling, but I'm a bit taken aback that Hickey previously looked at the official story of a black man incarcerated for murder in the first half of the 20th century and didn't automatically at least consider that this might have been a frame job.

he is a middle class white male, they can be insensitiue.
Hopefully somebody will have pointed that out to him and he can be better in future. Though would be more convenient if he arrived at a similarr conclusion as he read the book.

Yes but he is also, as this thread illustrates, very invested in being sensitive and aware of these issues, so this felt out of character.

It sounds like no one had really done any primary research on Ledbetter’s pre-folk revival life in a very long time to fully disassemble the context of his incarcerations. Hickey is plenty skeptical of romantic narratives around musicians and good at synthesizing multiple sources but this is a case where there hadn’t been thorough scholarship in a long time.

Yeah, sure, I'm not saying he should have been certain Leadbelly was innocent. Just that he shouldn't have been certain of his guilt either, because any judgement made against a black person during that period in that area is automatically suspect imo.

Man, different kind of nightmare, but the stuff about Dennis in part 3 is also a nightmare. I didn't realize that he was (probably) as close to Manson as this suggests. I wonder what we have in store in part four. I expect we'll have to wait a bit!

There's a couple of decent books on The Family. Does the Ed Sanders one still stand up?

Some very dark stuff in this episode. Much more interested in the Ledbetter story though than the more mundane who wrote what on The Beach Boys 1968 album.

Yes, it's all great but I don't really need to know about Ricki Fataar and stuff - a lot of the BBs stuff he covers doesn't feel ancillary to the topic at all.
Still, for all my BBs knowledge, I'm nevertheless learning new stuff about them so I can't complain

Alex Chilton/Box Tops/Chris Bell/Big Star episode up as a Patreon bonus. About an hour and a half long.

Final episode of this 5-month, 4-episode saga finally dropped. I guess I’ll be spending the next week on it.

Started in on this ep on a long run this morning. My mind was wandering so I totally missed the connection between the Leadbelly story and Manson. ?? But the story leading up to the Sharon Tate murders was mind boggling, not to mention the “Charlie don’t surf” stuff. A lot going on there and I was glad he went deep into it.

The way Hickey tied the song “Shortnin’ Bread” to the Manson murders in one terse line was pretty startling

It's quite the odyssey. Great episode.

Things I only just realised: James Jamerson plays bass on *Pacific Ocean Blue*.

I loved the latest episode, but I was surprised about two things. One, Hickey never makes an explicit connection between the Ledbetter/Lomax, Manson, and Beach Boys threads of the story, in a way that explains why the Ledbetter story is included in this particular series. The closest we get is the nexus of Brian Wilson's obsession with "Shortnin' Bread", the folk tradition of hog-killing songs, and the Manson family's use of the words pig/piggy. I was expecting something relating Lomax's racism to Manson's, but even that was just left implicit.

Two, Hickey says that he takes no pleasure in relating the Manson story, but has to do it because of its profound effect on the culture. But these episodes--as I remember them, at least--don't actually speak to that much. That theme could emerge in later episodes, but I was struck by the fact that, just as far as this specific series is concerned, we don't get anything that makes Manson out to be more than a lurid and mysterious footnote in the history of rock.

An episode or two ago the connection was made between Ledbetter and beach boys doing Cotton Fields.

I did find the connections more tenuous but still an interesting way to cover a few stories.

An episode or two ago the connection was made between Ledbetter and beach boys doing Cotton Fields.

Right, but if that's the only sort of connection there is, then the story might've just as well waited for a Nirvana episode, via "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". I'm still wondering why exactly it's incorporated here, at this point in the series. My guess: he just really wanted to cover it and this seemed as good a place as any.

Re: the Manson aspect--Now that I think about it, one of the striking things in this story is how LITTLE the Manson association affected the Beach Boys and Terry Melcher. If it had wrecked their careers, that would justify including the story. If the point was to highlight that a major rock star and big-name producer could be mixed up in a racist spree-killing sex cult--really deeply, in Dennis Wilson's case--and have the public largely not care, that would be interesting. But the former didn't happen, and the latter wasn't Hickey's angle. So what was the point? Is it supposed to be so obvious as to go without saying?

Nirvana episodes aren't happening until 2050 tho...

Sure, and that's if they happen at all. But supposing that the series was going to completed, does it make more sense to cover the Ledbetter/Lomax stuff in the early '70s portion, in the context of the Beach Boys and Charles Manson, than in the early '90s portion with Nirvana?

I could imagine interesting connections being drawn between Ledbetter, '50s/'60s folkies, the association of folk and acoustic instruments with intimacy and authenticity, and the MTV Unplugged series. Plus the contrast between Ledbetter and Kurt Cobain as two tragic figures, one who burned out and one who faded away. And "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" wasn't just a song Nirvana did at some point, like with the Beach Boys and "Cotton Fields". It was one of the last things Cobain recorded in his life (maybe THE last?), was the final track on an album that went octuple platinum, and is a legendarily haunting and poignant performance

I know this is ridiculous armchair quarterbacking. It's just interesting to think about

Not at all ridiculous! I feel pretty much the same way —- like, the minstrelsy to Manson thread gets drawn through Leadbelly & Shortenin’ Bread and tugged taut with the line about how you get shortening: by killing pigs. But that line isn’t going to land very hard if you haven’t read Vincent Bugliosi or been steeped in Manson/Family lore — I don’t think he set it up properly. And it’s also a case of the pareidolia he talks about at the beginning of the series; if there’s a *real* connection between the beach boys’ Shortenin’ Bread and the “pig” murders on Cielo Dr, I don’t think he made the case.

Which would be fine, but he’s spent 5 months telling this story, weaving at least 3 big strands together over 4 episodes, and it didn’t seem to add up to much. There might be a bigger payoff planned (as JRN noted a few xposts above, the *impact* of Manson was stated but not explored) — there’s certainly enough material to come (“Revolution Blues”) that’ll no doubt pick that thread up again.

I do hope, now that he’s gotten his beloved beach boys out of the way, it kind of unblocks him a bit & he can do more one-ep songs and progress the story a bit more efficiently. I hate that I keep playing that note, but at this pace I don’t expect him to get to song 250, much less 500.

I beef, but I beef because I love. And I should step up & say I think he’s still doing a masterful job, in the main, and that I eagerly await each episode (each completed song, that is) and the bonus songs too.

I’m likely to go back & re-listen to this one in the near future.

I agree with all that, and like I said when he got deep in the weeds with Sweetheart of the Rodeo, I look forward to him getting into some actual rock music. The kind that rocks.

I couldn't wait for all of these to come out, which is what I usually do for the multi-part episodes. The wait was so long and the episodes were so long that I gave up. I agree that connections weren't strongly made, but I'm okay with that. When he got to the killing pigs bit I almost got goosebumps. While the epic Dark Star was woven tighter and probably better, I really enjoyed this.

He could use some editing, sometimes he really does go on. But just as often those digressions interesting. Andrew has his own character that he brings to the podcast and at this point I find his trivial wormholes charming.

The Letter is a great bonus episode.

Yeah, Sweetheart of the Rodeo was the big one that dragged for me.

It's tough to wait for new ones to come out, but that's only because he's so good at what he does. And he's spoiled his listeners by being so insanely prolific. Look at what he did in 2023, the volume and quality of work is extraordinary. He may never reach those heights again, but I can't wait to find out.

As a child in the 70s I remember everyone had the Endless Summer comp. Wild to think that their pre Pet Sounds material was out of print until that comp came out.

I agree with HD’s post above … I enjoyed most of The Beach Boys story but I’m glad it’s done. I thought the bonus on Alex Chilton / The Letter was much more interesting.

I loved the bonus ep on "The Letter"/Big Star too. He said on Bluesky earlier today that episode 179 (the most recent was 177) will either be on the MC5 or the Bee Gees (and if the latter, MC5 will be a bonus). Not sure if he's revealed what 178 will be. In any case, I can't wait

The overarching connections I got from the final episode: Leadbelly's story was parallel to Brian Wilson, as they both had a special line into the soul of America, but their vision was always at the mercy of those around them, who both thwarted and enabled them; Dennis was the soul of the actual band, the chemical reaction that made it work, and he was forever damaged by the Mason association. Manson and Ledbetter sat the extreme ends of America dysfunction, tugging those California boys in all the crazy directions.

Beach Boys are a big blind spot in my listening - sweet harmonized singing isn't my thing. Really have never explored the 70s albums and now I'm curious as the rougher texture in the voices and WTF themes have more appeal to me that the 60s hits.

i just started this recently and it was crazy to hear on his first question and answer show that it will take 10 years to finish this project.

Personally I could have done without the excerpts of Manson's music - I know he needs music to break up the monologue but the hipster fetischism for Manson's album was always gross.

I'm still wondering why exactly it's incorporated here, at this point in the series. My guess: he just really wanted to cover it and this seemed as good a place as any.

Think he was pretty upfront in the first episode that he had decided to cover it because he wanted the parallel to be about two murderers, but then it turned out Leadbelly didn't actually kill anyone and at that point he was prob too deep into the ep to start afresh.

Dennis . . . was forever damaged by the Manson association

Was he? It doesn't seem to have hurt his career, and while Dennis was clearly a very troubled guy, that was already true long before he met Manson (and maybe explains in part how he got mixed up with him)

Think he was pretty upfront in the first episode that he had decided to cover it because he wanted the parallel to be about two murderers

We'll never know, of course, but I don't see how that parallel would have been any more illuminating than any of the ones we actually got

i just started this recently and it was crazy to hear on his first question and answer show that it will take 10 years to finish this project.

I was curious how the pace has changed over time, so I checked the history of episodes.

Here's the number of songs he's covered each year
2018: 52 episodes (episodes 1 - 13 in 3 months, which is a pace of 52 annually)
2019: 50 episodes (14 - 63)
2020: 46 episodes (64 - 109)
2021: 31 episodes (110 - 140)
2022: 20 episodes (141 - 160)
2023: 11 episodes (161 - 171)
2024: 5.5 episodes (172 - 177.5)

Obviously, this doesn't measure the number of hours of content he's producing each year, which is probably almost the same as it's always been (it's just that each song takes at least 10x longer to cover).

But if he continues at the 2024 pace, he wouldn't actually reach song 500 until 2079.

My sense is he's gotten a bit bogged down because there is so much more info about the artists he's now covering; people know much more about these stories and have opinions; and Hickey himself has gotten increasing recognition as folks realize how fantastic this project truly is - leading to all the inherent distractions when one achieves a certain level of "fame"

next step - going back to his roots lol

He’s written a couple of books about the beach boys, and blogs about seeing them live on cruises &c, so he obviously got a special interest in them. Since he followed their career to the end in this episode, he’s done with their story. With luck, that means he won’t feel as deeply obligated to explore every nook & cranburger of future artists. (We still have the Beatles’ breakup & aftermath to cover though, and a whole lotta Stones)

I do think the sheer volume of stuff that’s been written about particularly the late 60s poses issues for him (he’s mentioned this as a barrier to productivity).

I thought I was a Beach Boys lore nerd till I listened to these. I know nothing

This was a great episode. I never listened Love You until today. Wonderfully strange album. Johnny Carson is truly bizarre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNlwR8bzY1I

On Bluesky Andrew mentioned his two least favorite songs: “Universal Coward,” which has come up before, and a Mike Love abomination called “Rockin’ The Man In The Boat” about a woman masturbating. If Clarence Carter did the song it would be kinda funny, from Mike Love it’s cringe city.

xp oh Love You is classsssssic

And so is this podcast. Just listened to the Eight Miles High one and very much enjoyed the music theory side of it

This was a great episode. I never listened Love You until today. Wonderfully strange album. Johnny Carson is truly bizarre.

It's the strangest record I have ever heard. It's one thing for non-strange people to make music that deliberately sounds strange. But this is a record made by strange people, desperately trying to sound normal.

The Patreon comments for the latest episode are insane. People are criticizing the episode for being too long, too many tangents etc. and AH keeps getting angrier and angrier. He keeps cancelling people's subscriptions and refunding their money.

I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize his work on that particular forum, but it makes for entertaining reading.

I think the nature of this project and the types it will attract might result in a particular kind of unstoppable force vs immovable object kind of deal

Also I followed him on bsky & like 75% of my feed are his posts & reposts, I’m amazed he ever manages to release an ep tbh

Shocking that people on the interwebs don't understand the difference between "A" history and "The" history...

Gillian Welch had it figured out 20 years ago with the Napster-era Everything is Free

but what's actually scary about the most recent episode is the charlie manson race riot/world re-born craziness and some of the white nationalist insanity we are seeing

When he got to the killing pigs bit I almost got goosebumps

I knew little enough about the murders that it's only reading this thread that I got the significance!

I think that's fine though. I got near goosebumps at the audio excerpt payoff partway through the "Tomorrow Never Knows" episode, and there are presumably people unfamiliar enough with the song for that not to have worked. It would be a shame to have to spell everything out completely.

After the Fairport episodes, he's doing "Kick Out the Jams."

Feels like a mad time jump to go from the Beach Boys to Fiarport to MC5, but it does make sense - they were all happening within close enough time to each other

They're all 69 though MC5 is actually a late 68 recording.
Loads happening at the time. Some very interesting developments in guitar rock which merit much further personal investigation. Richard Thompson came out with some pretty great rock riffs in Liege & Lief that would not be out of place in heavier material. Do wish there had been a lot of live material captured of the band in 68 and 69 cos he was an endlessly inventive improvisor. & that era of the band or those eras with the 2 different female singers are so good. There are a couple pf part sets with Judy Dyble and the so far not fully salvaged live debut of the Liege and Lief set which I'm dreaming technology might find a way of making listenable at some point.

Nick Drake though :'-(