Sweet blindness.

This is from the "Francis Albert Sinatra Does His Thing" TV special, in November 1968:

Also from 1968, the same Laura Nyro song, from Liza Minelli on "The Ed Sullivan Show":

I'm watching these old videos because I just finished listening to Andrew Hickey's podcast, "500 Songs Bonus: 'Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro'" on Patreon (which you need to subscribe to and really should).

"Where in 1966 and 67 the general feeling had been that the counterculture was moving towards some post-racial utopia where Black and white people alike..."

"... could play psychedelic soul-infused blues music, now [after the King assassination] a Black man like Jimi Hendrix playing music for white audiences was derided by other Black people in terms I won’t repeat, while white singers like Joplin who were influenced by Black musicians were thought of as not far from minstrelsy. Joplin hadn’t noticed this change...."

From a new episode of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" —  "Episode 169: 'Piece of My Heart' by Big Brother and the Holding Company."

Lots of great stuff in that episode, including how intelligent Janis Joplin was and how much her singing was based on imitation:

"There's a quote people often falsely attribute to Eleanor Roosevelt — 'Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.'"

"Now, I don't think that — it's a ridiculously snobbish thing to say, and it requires a total misunderstanding of... well, of everything about humanity. Indeed, the first time something close to that (in slightly different wording) made it to print in 1901, it was followed by the comment 'The fact, of course, is that any of one’s friends who was incapable of a little intermingling of these condiments would soon be consigned to the home for dull dogs.' My own priorities in interest, though, do tend to follow that list to an extent. I am most interested in ideas... Less interesting, but still important, are events — the things like the social movements which shaped how the music was made... And to me, personally, the least interesting part is the details of people's individual lives — their marriages and divorces, their drug addictions and recoveries, and so on."

Says Andrew Hickey, answering questions from his supporters at Patreon. If you're a fan of Hickey's "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," I strongly recommend paying for access to the Patreon extras.

Hickey goes on to say that the details of an artist's life are "intertwined in the creation of the work in ways that mean you *can't* talk about one without the other." And "You can't talk about Dylan's Blood on the Tracks without talking about how he was going through a divorce." 

"[Dylan] and Robertson had had something between friendly discussion and outright arguments about Dylan’s style of songwriting while on tour the year before."

"Robertson — who, at this time, remember, had a body of songs that mostly consisted of things like 'Uh Uh Uh' — thought that Dylan’s songs were too long, and the lyrics were approaching word salad. Why, he wanted to know, did Dylan not write songs that expressed things simply, in words that anyone could understand, rather than this oblique, arty stuff? He kept holding up Curtis Mayfield songs as a model, like 'People Get Ready'... ... Robertson didn’t know... that that song was in a way the grandchild of one of Dylan’s own songs... [It] was inspired by 'A Change is Gonna Come,' which was in turn inspired by 'Blowin’ in the Wind' — but nonetheless Dylan thought that Robertson had a point. He was getting increasingly disenchanted with the counterculture which he was supposedly the figurehead for, and with psychedelic music. But also, he was aware that you could do a lot even with simple language... [b]ecause the folk tradition he came from had a very different attitude to language than either the Beat poets he’d been recently imitating or the R&B songwriters that the Hawks [i.e., The Band] had been listening to...."

Episode 167 of Andrew Hickey's "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" is about "The Weight" by The Band. (It's only by chance that this song came up in the week when Robbie Robertson died.)

"He starts way back at the very beginning—Episode 164, on the Velvet Underground, for instance, opens with John Cage going door to door in Santa Monica..."

"... offering to sell housewives lessons in music and art appreciation. Hickey plays no interviews—it’s just his research, painstakingly arranged to make a point. At first, these essays were of manageable length—half an hour for Episode 4, discussing 'Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,' by Louis Jordan. ('In the nineteen-forties and early fifties, the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people’s minds it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch’boogie.') But the transcript of even that episode is four thousand words long, which, multiplied by five hundred, would give you two million words of content, and would best Gibbon by half a million. (Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War clocks in at around 1.25 million words; the Bible barely hits three quarters of a million.) And, in any event, Hickey’s ability to control his material has begun to gloriously unravel as he has proceeded. A recent episode—No. 165—is devoted to 'Dark Star,' by the Grateful Dead, and it clocks in at well over four hours and 38,458 words. At this pace, Hickey will eclipse every literary project in history; the current plan is to reach the five hundredth song sometime late in this decade, but that presupposes he can keep writing what amounts to a book every fortnight or so. We shall see."

Writes Bill McKibben, in "A Music Podcast Unlike Any Other/Andrew Hickey has embarked on a heroic and wild effort to tell the history of rock music in five hundred songs" (The New Yorker). Much more at the link.

I'm thrilled to see a New Yorker article on "The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," which I've been recommending to you since September 2021, with this post. There are 8 more posts of mine, just click on the "Andrew Hickey" tag.

"If I do my job well, you come away listening to 'Blue Suede Shoes' the way people heard it in 1956, or 'Good Vibrations' the way people heard it in 1966..."

"... and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians.... I can explain the appeal as best I understand it.... But what I can’t do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*.... That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it.... [T]hey always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn’t capture what they did, and that the only way — the *only* way, they were very clear about this — that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs."

Says Andrew Hickey, beginning the long-awaited Episode 165 of his phenomenal podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs": "'Dark Star' by the Grateful Dead." 

Listen to the whole thing, but tell me, did you see The Grateful Dead live and while on psychedelic drugs? Having seen The Grateful Dead live and used psychedelic drugs but not at the same time is not enough.

"There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. We just churned out songs, that’s all. They would say, 'Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,' then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two..."

"... and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. While I was doing that, I was doing my own stuff and trying to get by, but the material I was doing, people wouldn’t go near me with it at the time. I mean, we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let the Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’ I didn’t see it as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give me a subject, and we’d write."

Said Lou Reed, quoted in Episode 164 of the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" — "'White Light/White Heat' by the Velvet Underground.'"

This episode is very long and full of so many varied things — lots about John Cage before we get to John Cale and Lou Reed arrives much later. The stories merge brilliantly. I'm just pointing you at this wonderful episode, not quoting something representative of the whole.

I chose that quote, because that's the point that cued up a snippet of "Cycle Annie," which I found in full here.

"I was dead set on centering my life on the patriotic ideal. I was a son of the American revolution..."

"... and there was blood on the tracks. Recent blood, and it was still drying. The whole record seemed like a real effort toward figuring out what Manifest Destiny was all about. We’d come as far as we could, as far as Horace Greeley told us to go. And so we looked back and tried to make sense of that great odyssey."

 

Said Van Dyke Parks, about the "Smile" album, quoted in Episode 153: “Heroes and Villains” by the Beach Boys, of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs."

"Lamont Dozier said that he wanted to write 'a journey of emotions with sustained tension...'"

"'... like a bolero. To get this across, I alternated the keys, from a minor, Russian feel in the verse to a major, gospel feel in the chorus.' He developed the lyrics with Eddie Holland, aiming for them to sound “as though they were being thrown down vocally.' Dozier said that they were strongly influenced by Bob Dylan at the time, commenting: 'We wanted Levi [Stubbs] to shout-sing the lyrics... as a shout-out to Dylan.'"

That's from the Wikipedia article for the song "Reach Out I’ll Be There," which my son John says is his "favorite H-D-H song, and one of my favorite songs by anyone." That's at John's blog post "Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier has died." Goodbye to Lamont Dozier, who was 81. 

Had I ever thought of Bob Dylan in connection with "Reach Out I’ll Be There"?

 

I see that the "500 Songs" podcast episode about the 4 Tops brought it up:

"... Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke..."

"... Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing 'Hello darkness, my old friend,' for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance — though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn’t been laughing at them, specifically, he’d just had a fit of the giggles — and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan."

That's from the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "Episode 135: 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel." 

I've never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, though, of course, I've often enjoyed listening to their songs. They did seem self-absorbedly gloomy, and I completely identify with the people who thought it was funny to intone — out of the blue — "Hello darkness, my old friend." I have a vivid memory from 1965, when "I Am a Rock" was a hit, and I was 14. I was with some of my girlfriends and a boy from our class, walking by, suddenly and, I think sincerely, sang out "I Am a Rock." Oh, how we laughed at him! It still makes me laugh. You're a rock, are you? That's so interesting. I guess if he was a rock, our derision didn't hurt him.

Knowing little of S&G's background, I learned a lot from that episode:

That podcast I keep recommending.

As you may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Andrew Hickey's podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs." I discovered it around the first of this month. (I forget why, maybe Spotify pushed it.) And I've truly binged on it, getting all the way through the 133 episodes that are currently available. 

There are bonus episodes, most of which are available only to those who subscribe on Patreon, and I've done that, the first and only time I've subscribed to an individual on social media. I have some subscriptions, but only to things that begin with "New York": The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. Wait there's one more: The Times (London). I have a couple subscriptions that were gifts: The Washington Post, Reason. But basically, I'm a subscriber to big media, not to social media. This one thing — "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" — is my exception. 

I've recommended the podcast a few times. Click the "Andrew Hickey" tag to read all the old posts. I love that there's a published transcript, making it super-bloggable. I have to resist over-blogging it, because there are so many interesting things in every episode.

But let me blog 2 things that stood out to me over the 133 episodes I've consumed. Maybe it's evidence of something wrong with me, but I am drawn to stories of the impoverished childhood of a person who goes on to be very successful. So here are 2:

"He introduced a descending bassline... 'a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers.'"

"It’s actually something you’d get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum’s 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this...  And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F.... This is a trick that’s used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward — everything from 'Sunny Afternoon' by the Kinks to 'Go Now' by the Moody Blues to 'Forever' by the Beach Boys — but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll."

From Episode 115 of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "'House of the Rising Sun' by the Animals."

I love hearing about influences that surprise me, about songs I've known very well for over half a century. Another example of that from this podcast is from Episode 113: "'Needles and Pins' by The Searchers":

"There is a whole vein of British music that usually gets called 'music hall' when bad critics talk about it..."

"... even though it owes nothing to the music that was actually performed in actual music halls. But what it does owe a great deal to is the work of Anthony Newley. One can draw a direct line from him through Davy Jones of the Monkees, Bowie, Syd Barrett, Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Blur… even a performer like John Lydon, someone who would seem worlds away from Newley’s showbiz sheen, has far more of his influence in his vocal inflections than most would acknowledge. Every time you hear a singer referred to as 'quintessentially British,' you’re probably hearing someone who is either imitating Newley, or imitating someone who was imitating Newley."

From a bonus episode of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "'Strawberry Fair' by Anthony Newley."

This was a surprisingly interesting episode. It just came up in the order of things, and I was in no mood to get interested in Anthony Newley, but I let it run. Here's an old video I dug up on my own in which he and Joan Rivers are discussing whether it's good to be a rock star:

"Elvis went over and started noodling on the piano. This immediately caused Jerry Lee Lewis to start showing off."

"He went over to Elvis and said 'I didn’t know you could play.' Elvis responded 'I can’t,' at which point Jerry Lee said, 'Well then, why don’t you let me sit down?' Elvis just replied 'Well, I’d like to try,' and carried on noodling.... [T]he majority of the [Million Dollar Quartet session] consists of Elvis on acoustic guitar or piano, Jerry Lee on piano when Elvis isn’t playing it, and them all singing together, with Elvis or Jerry Lee taking most of the lead vocals.... Both Elvis and Jerry Lee were brought up in the Assembly of God, a Pentecostal 'holy roller' church.... ['Jesus Walked that Lonesome Valley'] is interesting, as even though it’s a call-and-response song and starts with Elvis taking the lead and Jerry Lee doing the responses, by the first verse Jerry Lee has already taken over the lead and left Elvis echoing him, rather than vice versa. You can hear there exactly how this friendly rivalry was already working. Remember, at this time, Jerry Lee Lewis was nobody at all, someone who had one single out which had been out a matter of days. But here he is duetting with the 'King of Rock and Roll,' and seeing himself as the person who should naturally be taking the lead."

From "Episode 51: 'Matchbox' by Carl Perkins" in Andrew Hickey's phenomenal podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs."

Here's full recording of the session on Spotify.  

You can listen to the recording of "Jesus Walked that Lonesome Valley" on YouTube here. 

And here's a link to the Wikipedia page for Lewis, where I went because I wanted to check my belief that he's still alive. He is. But I also saw: "On November 22, 1976, Lewis was arrested outside Elvis Presley's Graceland home for allegedly intending to shoot him... 'Elvis, watching on the closed-circuit television, told guards to call the police... The cops asked Elvis, "What do you want us to do?" And Elvis told 'em, "Lock him up." That hurt my feelings.'" Elvis avoided death that night, but proceeded to die on his own, 8 months later.

"Coffee-pot groups were groups of poor black teenagers, who performed on street corners and tried to reproduce the sounds of the lush records they heard on the radio, using… well..."

"... using the equipment they had to hand. For string parts, you’d play ukuleles or guitars or banjos, but for the horns you’d play the kazoo. But of course, kazoos were not particularly pleasant instruments, and they certainly didn’t sound much like a saxophone or clarinet. But it turned out you could make them sound a lot more impressive than they otherwise would if you blew them into something that resonated. Different sizes of container would resonate differently, and so you could get a pretty fair approximation of a horn section by having a teapot, a small coffee pot, and a large coffee pot, and having three of your band members play kazoos into them. The large coffee pot you could also pass around to the crowd afterward, to collect the money in...."

 
From "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs/Episode 6: The Ink Spots — 'That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.'" I'm immensely enjoying this podcast, so I recommend starting with "Episode 1: 'Flying Home' by the Benny Goodman Sextet." 

There is so much detail to the story — the story of rock music — and I've simply pulled out one sample passage that's both really interesting and demonstrative of the level of detail to be found. I love that the podcaster, Andrew Hickey, gives us a complete transcript. It's nice for people who want to share things on line and start conversations, as I'm doing here.

I'm up to "Episode 15: 'Hound Dog' by Big Mama Thornton."