A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Apologies for the delay in posting this episode — health issues have continued to affect me. They *seem* to be improving, but I should also mention here that some of the guitar demonstrations in this episode are not quite the same part as Pete Townshend is playing on the records, because my arthritis is affecting my hands. For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Pinball Wizard” by The Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Time of the Season” by the Zombies. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Apologies for the delay in posting this episode — I had a chronic illness flare-up and a frankly awful January. With luck, part two of this story will be up before the end of February. For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Pinball Wizard” by The Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eighty-two-minute bonus episode available, on “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This episode, we look at the song “Many Rivers to Cross”, the birth of reggae, and the career of the late Jimmy Cliff. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “Return of Django” by the Upsetters. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/. (more…)

This episode, we look at the song “Proud Mary” and the brief but productive career of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-four-minute bonus episode available, on “Mendocino” by the Sir Douglas Quintet. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/. ERRATUM: Three times early on I talk about a 1940s label called Concord Records. That’s meant to be Coronet Records — Concord Records is the label that *bought* Fantasy Records in the early twenty-first century, Coronet Records is the label that *became* Fantasy Records. (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, although this episode doesn’t get as far as Led Zeppelin’s formation, and is mostly about the intertwining session careers of John Paul Jones and (especially) Jimmy Page. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirty-eight minute bonus episode available, on “Jim’s Blues” by P.J. Proby. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, although this episode doesn’t get as far as Led Zeppelin’s formation, and is mostly about the intertwining session careers of John Paul Jones and (especially) Jimmy Page. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirty-five minute bonus episode available, on “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” by Lulu. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Erratum: At one point here I say “Cannonball Adderley” when I mean “Nat Adderley”. This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

Transcript It’s that time of year again, the time that regular listeners have come to know as Pledge Week, where for five days (this time from Tuesday through Saturday, because I had a migraine yesterday when I should have been recording this intro) I post five old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed as a way of persuading some of you to sign up to become Patreon backers. I say at the end of every episode that every week there’s a ten-minute bonus episode, and that’s no longer completely true (and I’ll be refreshing the outro on the podcast soon to acknowledge that). Instead there’s at least one bonus for every main episode, plus other ones as frequently as I can release them, which seems to average about once a fortnight overall. But the bonuses are also a lot longer than ten minutes now — at the shortest they tend to be twenty minutes, and some of them can stretch to ninety minutes or longer. And you can get access to all of them — around two hundred currently available, plus new ones — for one dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . You could, if you wanted, sign up, pay your one dollar, download the two hundred or so episodes that are there, and then cancel. Though obviously I’d prefer you stick around a while. As always when I do this though I want to make something clear — while Patreon is the only way I make my living, and my Patreon supporters are the only way I am able to keep doing what I’m doing, I do not want you to sign up to my Patreon if you are short of money yourself. I am currently making a very comfortable living — I could always do with more, and I need to do these pledge weeks every so often to keep the numbers up, but if you don’t have any spare cash I do not want anyone going short to support my work. But if, after paying your own bills, helping out loved ones, supporting charities and good causes, and putting something away in savings, you still have a dollar a month left over (and it’s completely understandable if you don’t), then I think there are worse things you could do with that dollar than support me at patreon.com/andrewhickey. And if you don’t have a spare dollar left over after all that, then please continue listening to the main podcast for free, and maybe tell just one friend about it. I’ll be back in a week or so with the next main episode, on a band a lot of people have been looking forward to hearing about.

This episode, we look at the song “Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5, and the brief career of the most revolutionary guitar band of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. As explained in the episode itself, it would be impossible to do this episode without using one particular Oedipal epithet, but use of that term would lose this podcast its clean rating. Therefore this is a censored version of the episode, with the many, many, many uses of that word replaced. Patreon backers have access to an uncensored version, if you want to hear me say a lot of swear words. Patreon backers also have a twenty-four-minute bonus episode available, on “Get Together” by the Youngbloods. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ . Also, thanks to Mia Murch for checking the final version and making sure no expletives were left in. (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “Baby It’s You” by Smith. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third and final (and very, very long) part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene, as well as the life of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ninety-minute bonus episode available, on “The Letter” by the Box Tops and the career of Alex Chilton. I’ve also started up an email newsletter at https://it-was-ninety-years-ago-today.ghost.io/. I took a temporary break from that while finishing this episode, as it became much, much longer than I expected, but I will be resuming it shortly. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene, as well as the life of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Fruit Tree” by Nick Drake. I’ve also started up an email newsletter at https://it-was-ninety-years-ago-today.ghost.io/ Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one is later than normal, for reasons explained in the episode. The next one should be up much sooner. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Israelites” by Desmond Dekker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This is just to let people know that there is a better than usual reason for the longer than normal delay in the next episode. I was about to record it early last week, when checking a minor detail I discovered a book published this year, after I’d bought the books I used for the research, which showed that everything in the first half of the episode — everything that had been published in every book on Huddie Ledbetter, who is the focus of that first half — was badly mistaken. I had to totally scrap a completed script and redo the research from scratch. I start recording tomorrow and it should be up in a few days. I think you’ll agree when you hear it that it’s worth the extra time it ended up taking.

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, and the links between Charles Manson and the LA music scene. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Light Flight” by Pentangle Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the fourth and final part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode covers January through December 1969, and may distress some listeners as it deals with murder, drowning, attempted suicide, and miscarriage. It’s not a happy episode. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode, on “La Conferencia Secreta del Toto’s Bar” by Los Shakers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode covers so much though , even though it only takes us from February 1967 through December 1968, that by itself it is one of the longer episodes of the podcast (hence the longer-than-usual delay between parts two and three). Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-minute bonus episode, on “I Think it’s Going to Rain Today” by Randy Newman. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode takes us from April 1966 through to the release of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”/”Ruby Tuesday” Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Laurel Canyon Home” by John Mayall. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode takes us from the release of “Satisfaction” through to the release of “Paint it Black”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode, on “Amen Brother” by the Winstons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

An announcement of this year’s pledge week. To sign up to the Patreon, visit http://patreon.com/andrewhickey Transcript Welcome to Pledge Week 2024. For those who don’t know — perhaps you’ve only recently started listening to the podcast — this podcast is entirely funded by people backing me on Patreon, the crowdfunding site, and so occasionally I’ll do a pledge week, where I remind people about this and encourage people to sign up. The main benefit you get for signing up to the Patreon, other than the knowledge that you’re supporting an independent creator, is bonus episodes. There’s one of these with every main episode, and sometimes random other ones as well. They’re shorter episodes than the main episodes — I say at the end of each main episode that they’re ten minutes, and that’s how they started out, but often in more recent years they’ve been twenty-five minutes or more, sometimes as long as an hour, as they’ve grown in the same way the main episodes have grown. These bonus episodes are about artists who for whatever reason don’t fit into the main narrative I’m telling. Sometimes they’re a massively important artist, but one who never interacted much with the rest of the music world and made their own path, and so they don’t feed into the larger story. Sometimes they’re an obscure artist who never had much success at the time but gained a cult following after their death. Sometimes they’re just a personal favourite of mine who I can’t really justify devoting a main episode to. Sometimes they’re someone who made great music but had a boring story that wouldn’t be worth spending a long time over, but I can tell the highlights, and sometimes they’re someone who made terrible music but had a fascinating story. And sometimes they’re people who I would cover in a main episode but who there’s simply not enough information about to tell the story in any detail. There are lots of reasons for artists being covered in the Patreon but some of the episodes I’ve done for that have been among my favourites. Anyway, anyone who signs up to the Patreon as a backer for $1 or more gets access to every single bonus episode I’ve done, and continues to get access to new ones as long as they’re a backer. Now I have to emphasise this time round that that is “for $1 or more”. For some reason known only to themselves, the people at Patreon recently decided it would be a good idea for their crowdfunding site which exists as a way for people to pay artists they want to support, if they put in a compulsory free tier on every account where you pay nothing, and to make that the default that people see. So if you sign up, you see “Sign up for free!” If you sign up for free you won’t get anything. But if you sign up for $1 a month, you’ll get somewhere in the region of two hundred bonus episodes — and if you want you can cancel right after you download them all, and you’ll have only paid one dollar. I won’t be annoyed at that — that’s the deal here. I know times are tough and sometimes a dollar is a lot. If you sign up for higher tiers, you get copies of most of my old books as ebooks, and new print books when they come out (though it’s been quite a while since a new book came out — the person who was proofing and indexing the next book based on the podcast got sick with long covid and I’ve been having to do that myself while doing my other work, but that should be out sooner rather than later, and you’ll get access to all the past ebooks straight away). People on all tiers also get occasional blog posts from me — gig reviews, occasional updates about my work process, and so on. But the main extra you get is the bonus podcasts. So for the next five days, tomorrow through Saturday, I’m going to post five of those bonus podcasts to the main feed, to give you a free taster of what these bonus episodes are like. If you like what you hear, you can sign up at patreon.com/andrewhickey — there’ll be a link on the blog post associated with this, as there is with all of the episodes. And one more thing I need to stress — *only sign up for the Patreon if you can afford it*. My listeners are currently very generous, and I am making a good income from this podcast now. I have to do these pledge weeks to keep the numbers up and make sure new listeners know what’s on offer, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they are under any obligation to pay me a penny. And times are tight enough that many people genuinely can’t afford even a dollar a month. But if, after you’ve paid your living expenses, helped out any needy friends, given to proper charities, put away something in savings, and all the other important uses for money, you do have a

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This episode looks at the whole career of Sly and the Family Stone, from their first rehearsal until today. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This week we take a short look at the formation of Sly and the Family Stone, and in a week’s time we’ll look at the group’s career after they formed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we’re looking at the career of Marvin Gaye from 1963 through 1970, as well as his duet partners Mary Wells, Kim Weston, and Tammi Terrell, whose tragically short life comes with a great many content warnings. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly And if you just can’t get enough of me talking, I’ve also guested this week, with Tilt and Gary from The Sitcom Club, on our friend Tyler’s podcast Goon Pod, talking about the 1974 film Man About The House. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time we’ll take a longer look at the sixties career of the song’s most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one… won’t be. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Bend Me Shape Me” by Amen Corner. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Transcript The next proper episode will be up in a couple of days – I’m recording it tonight – but I just wanted to make a brief announcement. It has recently been brought to my attention that the French language podcast Un dernier disque avant la fin du monde has, for nearly two years, been making French-language versions of my podcast without giving me credit (the episodes before that don’t seem to be ripped off from me), and has been monetising them on Patreon – including making his own French-language versions of some of my Patreon bonuses. This is not a case of someone just taking inspiration from my work. It’s not someone doing episodes on the same songs and possibly leaning a little too heavily on me as a source. That kind of thing is forgivable. This is someone who has been doing word-for-word translations, without my permission, and without crediting me or even notifying me, and posting them as his own work. As far as my schoolboy French indicates he’s not even lightly paraphrasing. He clearly listens to my podcast, so I am going to give him until Monday to take all those episodes down and post an apology before I contact a lawyer. I’m posting this publicly so that anyone who has been listening to his show and wondering about the similarity, or listening in the belief I authorised his work, knows that this is the work of a plagiarist, not something I’ve endorsed in any way. And if anyone *wants* to do translated versions of my work, they can contact me and make proper arrangements. I put too much time and effort into my job to have someone pass my work off as theirs without a fight.

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. Part one was on the original version by Bob Dylan, while this part is on Jimi Hendrix’s cover version. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Games People Play” by Joe South. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata: I mispronounce Ed Chalpin’s name as Halpin for most of the episode. And towards the end I say “January the 28th 1969” when I meant 1970 (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. This one is on the original version by Bob Dylan, while part two will be on Jimi Hendrix’s cover version. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the fourth and final part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock, this time mostly focused on what Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman did after leaving the band. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a four-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “With a Little Help From My Friends” by Joe Cocker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode on “My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This is just a brief announcement. The fact that I’ve released stuff so inconsistently over the last year, along with the last episode being so long that it actually caused problems for Tilt’s editing softwaere has caused me to reconsider how I’m breaking these episodes up. I have had very good reasons for making the episodes longer rather than doing multiple parts — we would have had episodes titled “White Light/White Heat”, “Eight Miles High”, and “Good Vibrations” which literally didn’t mention at all the bands they were ostensibly about, and people would have got very annoyed at listening to an episode supposedly about the Beach Boys and finding it was entirely about a Soviet inventor in the 1920s. But the balance has tipped the other way now. Things have got a bit ridiculous. So what I’m doing npw is I’m still writing the scripts the same way I always do, as one long narrative, but then once a script is finished I will break it into sections of about 5-10,000 words (somewhere in the 45-minute to ninety minute range) depending on where natural cliffhangers come, and I will release those parts fortnightly. There still might be gaps between the last part of the previous song and the first part of the next, but probably nothing like as long as they have been. The actual content will still be the same — just for example the Velvet Underground episode would have been split into three or four parts, with the first part ending with John Cale joining the story, and me saying “join us in two weeks time”. But it’ll be broken up into more manageable parts which hopefully won’t cause Tilt’s editing software to explode, and if you like listening to it all in one go you can just wait until the final part of that story and then listen to it all. So today you’re going to get, not ‘Episode 172, “Hickory Wind” by the Byrds’, but ‘SONG 172: “Hickory Wind” by the Byrds: Part 1, Ushering in a New Dimension”, and then Song 172 part two two weeks later. I want to emphasise that this will still be *exactly the same content* as it would otherwise be. The stories will go on as long as they need to. Some will be a single episode, some will be three or four. But breaking it up like this should mean you get more consistent releases and I can get ahead. Indeed, it *might* mean I could go back to weekly episodes — I’ve averaged somewhere in the region of thirty thousand words per month last year on the main podcast, which would be four seven-thousand-word episodes — but I won’t even think about that unless I start to actually build up a backlog. The stories should be getting shorter anyway as we finally move out of the late sixties, so the rate of storytelling *should* get faster, but this way at least you’re going to get regular episodes. So listen to today’s episode, and then join me again in precisely two weeks as Gram Parsons joins the story.

Episode 171 looks at “Hey Jude”, the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “I Love You” by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Astral Weeks”, the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on “Stoned Soul Picnic” by Laura Nyro. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart” and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “Spinning Wheel” by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Gospelaires sang backing vocals on Doris Troy's "Just One Look". That's what the sources I used said, but other sources I've since been pointed to say that the vocals are all Troy, multi-tracked, and listening to the record that sounds more plausible. Also, I talk about ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears" just after talking about white rock hits, but don't actually say they were white themselves. To be clear, ? and the Mysterians were Latino. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it’s actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There’s barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum.  This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited

Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight” by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “S.F. Sorrow is Born” by the Pretty Things. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, a one-time request here — Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. (more…)

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads”, Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips” by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Star” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested.  Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings] Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five,  or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from P

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Light/White Heat” and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on “Why Don’t You Smile Now?” by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)