Ongoing History of New Music

One of my great accomplishments of the year was the construction of a new home office…after 12 years working on this program in a converted bedroom, I built a full-feature workspace in the basement… Oh, it’s lovely…for the first time since I started doing this program in 1993, all my stuff is in one place…all the computers, all the CD’s and vinyl and books and magazines are all together…it’s a marvelously efficient workspace… This, however, was not an easy project…renovations being what they are, it took a full ten weeks longer than projected…permits, trades, materials—the usual problems…and then there was the matter of all the stuff I had scattered about the house… I feel terrible for Matt and Elisha…they were a couple of interns who had to haul thousands of books—most of them hardcover—out of storage and down into the basement where they had to be sorted by topic, alphabetized and neatly put on the shelves…mat had the horrible duty of filing hundreds of CD’s that I had neglected for a couple of years… And then there were dozens of bankers’ boxes, many filled with forgotten research notes and newspaper clippings…which brings me to this: collectively, me and the interns uncovered a lot of material that has never been used on an ongoing history program…it would be a shame to let all that knowledge go to waste, wouldn’t it?... So here we go…this is third annual office cleanout…it’s another edition of 60 mind-blowing facts about music in 60 minutes… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If anyone were to look at Linkin Park around 2011, there no reason to think that anything was going wrong… In the ten years since the band was formed, they’d sold over 80 million albums…they had millions of fans all over the world…they were in firm control of their career, planning to release a new album every 18 months or so, a schedule they, not the record label, set out… Plus they had time to indulge in all kinds of side projects, some musical, some not—like remix albums, soundtracks, even movies…DJ Joe Hahn had started to direct films …not a bad position to be for a bunch of guys still in their 30s, right?... That was the view from the outside…and for the most part, that rosey view was correct…but if anyone had taken the time to really get to know Chester Bennington, there might have been some warning signs…they would have been subtle, slow-burning, almost undetectable…but in hindsight, something was going on inside, something that would end tragically about six years later… This is the third and final part of our remembrance of Chester Bennington… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a musician dies, there’s a light that goes out in fans…it’s not like we knew this person, you know, personally…but it might feel that we did…that’s because the art they created expressed feelings and concepts and thoughts that we couldn’t articulate ourselves…it’s through their music that we are able to learn more about ourselves…that’s why we need artists… And we often don’t realize how deeply their music affected us and in what ways it has worked into our lives and psyches until that person is gone… We saw this when bowie died...it happened when prince left us…same thing with Chris Cornell and Gord Downie and any other musician you wanna mention…and it happened again when Chester Bennington died… Linkin Park sold tens of millions of records, many on the strength of Chester’s abilities to express how he felt, feelings that resonated with so many others…and now that he’s gone, we’re looking at how he did that on his own, with Linkin Park and with some of his side projects… This is remembering Chester Bennington, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the news first came down on the afternoon of Thursday, July 20, 2017, maybe your reaction was the same as me… “another celebrity death hoax…it’s gotta be because this doesn’t make sense”…but it as the minutes ticked by, it was soon obvious that it wasn’t a hoax…but it still didn’t make sense… By the end of the day, everything was confirmed…Chester Bennington, vocalist with Linkin Park, was not only dead, but dead by his own hand…what?... This guy was the frontman for a band that has sold somewhere around 100 million records...he was drafted in to sing for Stone Temple Pilots for a couple of years…he having fun with a couple of side projects…he dabbled in acting…and he had a loving family with six—six—kids… What happened?...and even though the news came during a long string of musician deaths, this one was one of the most shocking…totally unexpected… Let’s see if we can’t sort out what we can…and as we do, we’ll remember Chester Bennington…this is part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As someone who churns out tens of thousands of words a week—everything from emails to blog posts to business documents to these radio scripts—I’ve developed a fascination with words and, for whatever reason, names…especially the origins of names… The study of word origins is “etymology”…and the study of name origins is “onomastics”… Take, for example the name Ignatius…this is an ancient name dating back to the Etruscans, the civilization before the romans…a lot of dudes were named “Ignatius” over the centuries… When Spanish came along, it morphed into Ignacio, which was often abbreviated to “Nacho”…fast-forward to 1943…Ignacio Anaya lived in Piedras Negras, which is just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, home to a U.S. military base… One night some American soldiers came to his restaurant looking for something to eat…with almost nothing in the kitchen, he wiped something up featuring deep-friend tortillas cut into triangles, covered in cheese and served pickled jalapeno peppers…the soldiers loved the improvised snack so much that they named it after their host: Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya… But there’s another part to the Ignatius story….back over in Europe in Bavaria, Ignatius transformed into Ignatz…the short form for that was “Nazi”…this is how “Nazi” came to denote a backwards peasant from the Bavarian countryside… This is the same part of Germany that gave rise to a political party called “nationalsocializmus” led by a guy called Adolph Hitler….those who thought Hitler was a clown, abbreviated “nationalsocializmus” to “Nazi” as a way of calling the party a bunch of boobs…it was a taunt, an insult… But Hilter and his crew turned everything around and took the term “Nazi” as their own and—well, things turned out badly for the planet… But isn’t that kind of cool?...there’s a connection between something as diverse as German fascists and a plate of junk food that’s great for hangovers… What if we apply this sort of scholarly etymological and onomastical research to the names of musical groups?...let’s do that…hang on…a lot of data is about to come your way… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not that long ago, if you wanted to make an album, you needed rent a big, expensive recording studio…in addition to paying an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly rate, you need to pay for a producer, an engineer or two, all the recording tape you used and any catering that was required…it could get very expensive very quickly… But that was okay because back then, the music industry was awash in money…your label would happily advance you the money to cover your recording costs because they were just going to take it out of profits derived from the future sales of that album… Because there was so much money to be made, a lot of big, expensive recording studios were built…some were in big centres like New York, L.A., and London…others were chateaus out in the countryside or maybe on an exotic island…even a medium-sized city could boast half a dozen solid studios…. These days, it’s possible to make a very good-sounding album on a laptop in your bedroom…heck, I know of some people who have made credible-sounding records on their smart phones… But this doesn’t mean that big-time recording studios are now irrelevant…there are some things, some sounds and some needs that require a dedicated recording studio environment…but then there are those facilities that have been forced to shut down, killed by the massive changes to the music industry and the high cost of maintaining a studio when bookings are down… Still, there’s something really, really cool about recording studios, places where Legendary songs and iconic albums were created…and I’d like to take you on a tour some of these studios and listen to some of the music that was made within those walls…some of these places are still with us while some are only memories… Legendary recording studios, past and present… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is part two of our remembrance of Gord Downie… We left off last time with The Hip in their golden years—a glorious run of singles, albums, tours, festivals (like edgefest, their own “another roadside attraction festival, edenfest) along with appearances on radio, TV and in movies—plus things like Junos and Much Music video awards… “Day For Night” was followed by “Trouble At The Henhouse” in 1996, which spun off five singles…the concert album, “Live Between Us” was recorded that year at Cobo Hall in Detroit… And the band continued to evolve…song structures became more complex…Gord started experimenting with different vocal styles and phrasing…and the longer the band stayed together, the more Canadian their music seemed to be with more and more references to people, events and places… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here is how we’re going to do this…we all know how important Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip have been to Canadian music, Canadian culture and Canada, period…we’ll take that as read… And when Gord died on October 18, 2017, it seemed like the whole country went into mourning…the best tweet I saw read “Canada closed…death in the family” …those six words summed things up better than anything else I saw... What I’d like to do is remember and celebrate Gord and The Hip, filling in some blanks along the way…they’ve never been interested in any kind of chronological autobiography and no book about them has ever received official authorization from the band… So, although The Hip was around for more than three decades and have some of the best fans ever, there’s still plenty of stories to be told…and along the way, we’ll remember Gord for who he was and what he did that touched so many people across this country…and we’re going to start at the very, very beginning… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’d just landed at Pearson airport in Toronto after a long flight from the far east…as soon as we left the runway, I turned on my phone…the texts and the emails came one after another…blam: Gord Downie was dying…blam: brain cancer…something called “neuroblastoma”…blam: and the prognosis wasn’t good…the condition was terminal…one year, maybe two—five at best… But that same news conference also announced that The Hip was going on tour again…the Man Machine Poem tour…that turned into a massive national celebration of all things Gord, all things hip, all things rock and all things Canadian… Tens of millions of people stopped what they were doing and watched the final show that Saturday night in August…the band never said it would the “last” anything—but I think we all knew that was the case… Then came a period of denial…sure, Gord was sick, but we were still seeing him around…a couple of interviews…his “Secret Path” documentary…showing up to receive an order of Canada…things were fine, right?... They must have been—especially after we heard about a solo album in late September…that was a sure sign that Gord was doing well, right?... Well, no…sessions for that album wrapped up in February…and since thing, radio silence…lots of rumours, but no news…nothing from him, his family, the band, his management or the label… We knew it was coming, but all we could do was wait…and then on the morning of October 18, we got the news…Gord was gone… The outpouring of affection and grief was immediate and sustained…Hip music started playing everywhere…we covered his death like other countries might cover the death of a head of state… And as the tributes continue to pour in, I thought we’d have this look back on Gord and The Hip and what they meant to us… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this Friday bonus Podcast of the Ongoing History of New Music we dig deep into the OGH archieves to the spring of 2005 and have a look at one of the most influcential bands of the 80's They only exhisted for barely 4 years and released just 4 albums but without them would there be a Smashing Pumpkins? Nine Inch Nails? Marilyn Manson? White Zombie? This is a program in the "what's the big deal series?". An occasional look at why todays music sounds like it does. This time we ask "What's The Big Deal About Bauhaus?!?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a Friday bonus Podcast of the Ongoing History of New Music. We dig deep into the OGH archieves to bring you episodes that you want to hear again. This time in Podcast form. This week it's the 2nd part of the Oral History of Madchester as told by someone who was there to see it and make it happen. Gaz Whelan of the Happy Monday's! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we sit here together, it’s been about 11 years and five months since Tool released their last album, “10,000 days”…that record came out on April 28, 2006… Let’s put that into perspective…the last time we tool gave us a record of new material, the introduction of the iPhone was still more than a year away…Bob Barker was still hosting “The Price is Right”… And this is my favourite: that was the year when NASA launched the new Horizons Probe towards Pluto…it has since flown past Pluto and is well into the Kuiper Belt…in other words, you can travel out of the solar system in less time than it takes Tool to make an album… This isn’t the longest interval between albums from a band who has never broken up…in fact, Tool has gone out on tour multiple times, just to remain acquainted with their fans…but this has only served to underscore the point that Tool hasn’t come up with any new music since 2006… Here’s the question: why?...what’s the holdup?...where’s the new music?...those are three big questions that we’re going to try to answer…i call this show “The Tool Odyssey”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At some point, all of us will shuffle off this mortal choir and join the choir invisible…doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you may have or how famous you might be…in the end, we’re all mortal… This really hits home when musicians we love disappear forever…it’s not like we personally know these people, but because their music helps us know ourselves, a little piece of us dies with them… The circumstances of their passing’s vary…misadventure, accidents, overdoses, suicide…some can be explained away while other deaths will forever remain a mystery… With that in mind, let’s take a look back on the last hours of some of those musician’s who have left us… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are a couple of musical terms you may have heard of… Earworm: that’s when a clip of a song keeps running through your head on a loop over and over and over again. Mondegreen: a misheard lyric…a great example is in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…he sings “’scuse me while i kiss the sky”…some people hear that as “’scuse me while i kiss this guy”…there are lots of mondegreens in popular music… I propose we need a third term…it’s that opinion that overcomes us when we believe one song sounds almost exactly like another… I know you know what i mean…you hear a new song and a brief sense of déjà vu fills your head as your brain tries to correlate its musical database with what you’re hearing…and when all the processing is completely, you might think (a) “hey! Someone ripped off [artist x]!”…or (b) “someone’s gonna get sued!”… But you know something?...it’s not that simple…far, far from it…welcome to the murky world of unfortunate sonic coincidences… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is so hard to have a hit record these days…hell, with all the music out there it’s nearly impossible to attract any kind of attention…all the noise and distractions and competition… If you’re a new band with a debut record, you’ve got anywhere from six to thirteen weeks to make an impression once that first single comes out….if you fail to achieve significant traction with radio and retail and with fans during that short window, you’re in trouble…and if your record label doesn’t make it happen for you with the second single—well, I hope you didn’t quit your day job… It wasn’t always like this…back in the day when music was harder to come by, a record label could afford to wait for a band to develop and mature through two, three, four, five albums… Look at U2…they stumbled through their first two records before settling down with “War”… Look at the Red Hot Chili Peppers…warner brothers let them discover themselves through three albums before they could deliver the a little breakthrough with “Mother’s Milk” and then the big breakthrough with “Blood Sugar Sex Magick”… And look at REM…they released five indie records, each better than the last, before they were signed to a big major record label deal…that was hard…they were on a treadmill of recording and touring and recording and touring with little downtime…but they wanted it bad, so they did what they had to…it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll, y’know?... You can say the same of the Black Keys…a lot of people might think that these guys have what, three records in their catalogue…nope… They have eight full albums, two eps, one live album and close to two dozen singles…and unless you’re a longtime or hardcore fan, you may not know about some of the stuff they’ve done… Let’s fix that for all the latecomers…this is catching up with the Black Keys… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You probably know someone like this: a guy (or a woman) who through having loads of talent or tons of luck or both has become successful…they have everything anyone could ever hope to have…money, notoriety, stuff…access to all kinds of pleasure and adventures and opportunity...everyone you know wishes they cold be this person… And then they screw it all up…not by bad luck or illness or any other misfortune, necessarily…they just make some bad decisions or questionable moves that damage or destroy their careers and their lives… Sometimes this downfall happens in slow motion over a period of weeks or months or even years…but sometimes, the crash comes in seconds…and in the end, there’s no one to blame except the person themselves…. This sort of things happens in music a lot…ego, bad advice, hubris, arrogance, drugs, stubbornness, being out of touch, mental illness—all these things can lead to tarnished legacies at the very least and full-on catastrophes at worse… These are stories of spectacular acts of self-sabotage… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The last few years have been rough for music fans…Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Prince and a dozen more have left us…2017 has also had its share of loss…Chuck Berry…Gregg Allman…Chris Cornell—and now Chester Bennington of Linkin Park… A new ongoing history show about Linkin Park is on the schedule for the fall…but in light of the events of the past week, we’ve pulled out an older show dating to 2008…this tells the story of Chester and Linkin Park to that point… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being in a band seems straightforward…you pick up some instruments and start playing…but it’s much more complicated than that…the music that you end up making is influenced by so many outside forces…where you grew up…what music you listened to as a kid…what music you listen to now…the city in which you’re writing songs…the city in which you’re recording those songs… All these factors (and more!) Affect the music you make…but how?...and fans love this stuff…they love to know what other bands influenced their favorite musicians…it’s all part of the understanding and discovery of music… The Foo Fighters know this…and they set out to document all the stuff that goes into one particular album: Sonic Highways…eight songs recorded in eight different cities…and not only did they make a record, but they made an HBO tv series documenting the whole process… Here’s how it worked: the band set up in a new city for each of the eight songs on the record…they’d hang out, talk with musicians from that city…and then at the end of the week, Dave would sit down with a transcription of the conversations he’d had and then sort of cut’n’paste words and phrases from those conversations into what would become the lyrics for that song…and then the band would get to work on the song… It was a very, very interesting way to make a record—and the process also laid bare the influences that went into writing these songs as well as digging into the influences that made each member of the foo fighters who they are as musicians and who they are as people… I had a chance to talk to the whole band about all the different things that make the Foo Fighters the Foo Fighters… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all done something that we’ve later regretted...it seemed so right at the time, you know? In hindsight, though, it turned out to be really, really dumb… Maybe we were misinformed or lacking all the information we needed…maybe it was emotion or ego that prompted us down that path… or maybe we just disobey what our gut was telling us… “Hey! What’s that big wooden horse outside the city gates! Let’s bring it inside!”…that kind of thing… Prohibition…New Coke…the Ford Edsel…the U.S. invasion of Iraq…. Or the doofuses at mars refusing to allow M&M’s to be used in the movie “ET”…that’s why Elliott ended up using Reese’s Pieces… Listen, everyone has regrets, right?…the best we can do is minimize the number we have...so how can we do that?...the first thing we can do is study the mistakes of other people…if Hitler had learned anything from Napoleon and not decided to invade Russia during the winter, what kind of world would we be living in now? Then there all the bad decisions we’ve seen in the music industry…Elvis agreeing to do all those bad movies…Decca turning down a chance to sign The Beatles…Van Halen hiring Gary Cherone… Those are the famous boneheaded moves…but what about the worst career moves in the history of Alt-Rock?...glad you asked…here are ten of them…listen and learn… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are many ways to clear or expand your mind to allow creativity to flow, stress to dissipate and peace to descend on the mind and body…exercise, meditation, prayer…but that takes exertion, practice and devotion…what if there was a simpler way? Well, there is…drugs…it’s not the smartest way to solve your problems, but for centuries and centuries, drugs have worked for artists… We can go all the way back to cave paintings made in France, Spain, Italy, southern Africa and the Americas 50,000 years ago that some anthropologists claim were made after these ancient artists took drugs, probably some kind of hallucinogenic mushrooms or plant extract… Why do scientists think that? because many of these paintings feature specific geometric shapes and images that scientists say are common visions resulting from the ingestion of certain types of chemicals…in other words, some of humankinds first artists were junkies… Art and genius drugs have gone together ever since—not always, but more than you might realize… Vincent van Gogh?...he took digitalis for his epilepsy, which caused him to see everything with a slightly yellowish hue…think about that the next time you look at one of his paintings …Picasso liked hash…some say his cubist period was all about smoking hash… Would Friedrich Nietzsche have become a famous philosopher without his opium?...Thomas Edison enjoyed cocaine elixirs…how would World War II have turned out if Winston Churchill wasn’t wired on amphetamines? Andy Warhol liked obetrol (an early form of Adderall) so he could stay awake all night…both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were fans of LSD… See what I mean?...and we haven’t even touched music… rock stars often use drugs for both inspiration and escape, just like those cavemen 50,000 years ago... Which drugs, which rock stars and why?...that’s what we’re going to investigate in a show that’s part chemistry, part psychiatry and part warning…welcome to a primer on rock’n’roll drugs… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is almost impossible for anyone from a lightweight boy band to transition to serious, respected artist…it can be done—we can look at Justin Timberlake and, um…well, we can look at Justin Timberlake…. And as tough as that is, it’s even more difficult to move from being pigeonholed as a novelty act to one that carries gravitas and serious artistic merit…yet that’s what the beastie boys managed to do… No one took them seriously for the first eight years of their career…they were spoiled, snotty frat boys writing goofy songs and making funny videos… “Licensed to Ill” was a parody of hip hop…a good one, but a still a parody…let’s not forget that “Rolling Stone” described the album as “three idiots make a masterpiece”… But then something changed…The Beastie Boys grew up…they grew as artists…they grew as businessmen…they grew as humans… They took risks…they experimented…they branched out…they sought to make a difference—not just in music but in the world…and by the time it all came to an end with the death of Adam Yauch in the spring of 2012, The Beastie Boys had cemented a reputation as one the most important bands of not one but at least two generations… This is remembering The Beastie Boys, part 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For an entire generation of music fans—two generations, really—The Beastie Boys were always there…and now that they’re no longer with us, there are a lot of people who feel like there’s a void in music… But we’ll always remember their contributions…and there were a lot…this is part one of “Remembering The Beastie Boys”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a misconception that it takes a lot of people to come together to create a viable music scene…not true… The original punk scene in New York consisted of a few dozen weirdos who hung out at places like CBGB, the mudd club and Max’s Kansas city in the uglier end of town… The UK punk scene started with a similar number in the fall of 1976, pretty much every London punk fit into a single club on oxford street for a two-night music festival…capacity at the 100 club was official 350, but there was plenty of room to move around… The start of the english technopop scene focused around the few people who hung around the blitz club in Covent Garden… The same can be said for a dozen other scenes that resulted in sounds that eventually spread around the world…that includes grunge… Grunge started with maybe a dozen people in and around Seattle…that’s it…but within a few years, it expanded to became the dominant sound of western rock for much of the 90s… To become this in such a short period of time, this required a swift and steady change reaction…among those dozen or so people were artists who were not only to form successful bands but multiple successful bands…and every one of these groups exploded with a force great enough to prompt other neighbouring music to do the same… To prove my point, i would like to trace one of those chain reactions…and for the purposes of this show, we will call the singularity of this chain reaction “Chris Cornell”…a lesson in grunge physics coming up… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every once in a while, something extraordinary happens in rock’n’roll…I hate the use the cliché of “a perfect storm,” but that’s exactly what I’m talking about…a bunch of things involving culture, politics, demographics, economics and technology all collide and mix in just the right way for something totally new and unexpected to be created… Lemme give you some examples…Elvis came along in the 1950s just as million post-war kids—these new constructs that were now called “teenagers”—began gravitating to new radio stations that played music derived from a mix of the blues, country and r&b…this music greatly annoyed their parents, something that made it dangerous and forbidden… In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show with a fresh, new sound that helped drag America out of the funk that followed the assassination of JFK…as far as rock is concerned, the 60s really began that February night in 1964… Let’s try something more current…you might remember the appearance of the music video in the early 80s transformed the industry…. or the time you heard “smells like teen spirit” for the first time and immediately you somehow knew that whatever came next in the 90s would be very, very different… And hip hop? don’t get me started…there are people—academics! —who will argue that the appearance of hip hop in popular culture was an even bigger deal that the Beatles… There’s one other event that we need to include on this list: the rise of punk rock in the middle 70s…as it was happening, it was no big deal…it was an aberration, a niche thing that indulged weirdos and misfits… “it’s just noise,” said the rock purists, “ignore it and it’ll go away” … But it didn’t…in fact, we’re still talking about punk…and punk became more than just a form of music… it became a way of thinking and acting and creating and presenting…it’s music, film, visual art, literature, dance, politics… it altered much of western thought…the punk aesthetic—that “screw you, I’m gonna do it anyway” ethos—can be found virtually everywhere in society today… But what led to this? what were the factors that led to the rise of this music? and how it appears worldwide at virtually the same time in an era long, long before the internet? great questions…. let’s see if we can find the answer to the question: “why did punk happen at all?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Myths and legends come in all sizes…Atlantis…that’s a big one that we can’t seem to wrap our heads around…but maybe homer was just yanking our chain… “feed a cold, starve a fever”…turns out that’s wrong…depriving yourself of calories may make it harder for your body to fight off that infection or virus… “we only ever use 10% of our brain”…wrong…neuroscience has proven that to be false…the right number may be 20%--but there’s a lot of dispute over that… Here are some other myths I’ve run across…don’t feed pigeons uncooked rice or they’ll blow up…the great wall of china isn’t the only man-made object that can be seen from space…and you can’t certainly see it from the moon… Oh—and the “fact” that men think about sex every seconds…untrue…it happens a lot every day, but there’s no basis in any scientific literature that it happens every seven seconds…we’d never get anything done… There are also myths and legends in music, too…Robert Johnson’ pact with the devil at the crossroads…Gene Simmons of Kiss did not have a cow tongue grafted onto his…Jim Morrison, Biggie, Tupac and Elvis are most certainly very dead…but Paul McCartney is still very much alive… But what about the alt-rock word?...what kind of myths and legends lurk there…stick around…you may be very, very surprised… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some years ago, I had a conversation with Don Letts, the DJ, filmmaker and confidant of The Clash…and he said something that stuck with me: “the average lifespan of a band is seven years…that’s enough for them to form, get big, become stars, develop creative differences and break up” … He’s not wrong…the clash did their best work from ’76 to ’83…The Beatles from ’63 to ’70…Nirvana was around from ’87 to ’94… But then there are the exceptions, groups that have survived multiple seven-year cycle…U2, the Stones, Oasis, Green Day, Foo Fighters…and if we’re going to make a list, we must include Blink-182…this is a band who had a big rise and then a big fall before clawing back again… This kind of roller coaster career can be really hard on a band—and there are often casualties…you’ll see what I mean as we get into part three of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s rare that a band has a career with two acts…it’s not impossible…the survivors of Joy Division managed to do quite well as new order…the Barenaked Ladies were once written off before roaring back to life…and how many times has Black Sabbath risen from the ashes?... I’ll give you another one…Green Day…they’d run out of gas by the end of the 90s and contemplated breaking up for good…but then they reinvigorated themselves with their “American idiot” period and continue to do well… And then there’s the story of Blink-182…by 2000, they’d made it to the top and were selling albums by the tens of millions…but then things slowly started to go sideways—badly… However, like Green Day, Blink-182 was able to recover from that career nosedive—but not before having to enduring some serious—and literal—casualties…this is part two of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After grunge blew up in the early 1990s, the walls between mainstream rock and the alternative universe crumbled completely…what other music had been hiding in the plain sight?... There was goth and industrial and various forms of electronica…and there was all this punk rock…tons of it…all different flavours, too…pop punk, punk-funk, hardcore, garage punk, glam punk, queercore, riot grrrl, ska-punk… Punk had always been there, waiting to be discovered by a whole new generation…and finally, the time was right… There was green day, offspring, rancid…then there was sublime, no doubt and 311…NOFX, Pennywise and Bad Religion…some of these bands were brand new…others had been doing their thing for a while… Alot of the big action seemed to be centred in California…orange county, the bay area…but down in the skatepark suburbs of San Diego, something began brewing that would end up being responsible for selling 35 million records… These guys went from zero to worldwide superstars and then almost back to zero again before clawing back… This is part one of the rise and fall and rise of blink 182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices