Ongoing History of New Music

The early 90s were an amazing time for music…generation x, a powerful demographic force, reached the age where they were in a position to demand music that reflected their needs and wants and wishes and desires and fears… The biggest sea change came with the rise of grunge, thanks to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and, of course, Nirvana…but that music was just the kick-start for the alternative nation that came to dominate most of the 90s…. For many, grunge was alternative music with training wheels…those who liked what they heard were invariably led deeper into a culture that had existed outside the mainstream for years…Gen X discovered different flavours of goth and industrial and electronic music…and they also discovered punk…. Punk had always been around…sure, it kinda got burned out at the end of the 70s, but it never died…the Ramones kept touring…bands like husker du were putting out records…and American hardcore established itself as a force to be reckoned with… But punk was still a niche thing, away from the attention of most music fans…but then an interesting set of circumstances came into play that resulted in a massive resurrection of interest in punk rock—and echoes of that resurrection are still being felt today… This is chapter 6 of our look at back at the 1990s…it’s the mid-90s punk revival… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If we look at the state of rock here in the 21st century, it is no longer the main musical driver of popular culture…hip-hop is king… This doesn’t mean it’s dead, that it doesn’t have a place in our lives, that it isn’t going to be around for decades to come…but if you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that hip-hop has extended its reach into popular culture with the strength and depth that used to belong to rock… And it’s not like rock’s appeal shrank…it’s that other genres have exploded, hip-hop being the genre with the most growth… Now let’s go back to the 1990s, the last decade where rock ruled everything…alt-rock was the thing…but if we dig through what happened in the 90s, we can see how hip-hop not only infiltrated alt-rock but how it was embraced, incorporated, and celebrated… Regions of the alt-rock universe began to evolve…the beats got bigger…the rhymes got tougher and more complicated…the vibe began to change…and it was all pretty good—but not all of it worked out well… What were hip-hop’s effects on alt-rock?...we’re going to continue with that topic on this next episode on the alternative 90s… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are some things you should never mix...oil and water...nitro and glycerin...tequila and—well, it’s not a good idea to mix tequila with anything other than salt, lemon and maybe some fruit juice… They used to say this about rock and rap music, too...and they were pretty adamant about that… When rap and hip-hop started seeping into the mainstream in the middle 1980s, it immediately polarized people...those who didn’t (or refused) to get it, were aggressively dismissive of what rap brought to the table... “that’s not rap…it’s crap!” …. “this isn’t music…it’s just bad poetry over beats stolen from another record”… It took a few years, but by the time we got into the 90s, hip-hop and rap was becoming a very powerful musical and cultural force…today, it is the genre when it comes to driving culture…after half a century of being in charge, rock has fallen to second place… Not only that, but a chunk of the rock scene was co-opted into hip-hop, creating a new series of hybrid sounds… The original post-punk alt-rock population also aged...the older, set-in-their-ways crowd was pushed out by a new generation who didn’t have any preconceived notions or baggage when it came to these new sounds...to them, rap was just another form of exciting new music... So, by the end of the 80s, there were signs that punk, funk, rap, hip-hop and metal were all becoming inextricably intertwined...but who knew that in a few years we’d all be talking about this thing called “nu metal?”... This is part 5 of our look back on the alt-rock of the 1990s… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want you to think about fashion for a moment…fashion is one of the most disposable of all the artistic endeavours…much of what’s created isn’t designed to last more than a season…once the season is over, time to toss out all the coture and buy new stuff… But there are cycles in fashion…after a certain amount of time, old styles might come back into favour again…this, in a way, makes fashion a renewable resource… Music is also like that…trends and sounds and styles come along and then disappear…but then ten, fifteen, twenty or more years later, those trends, sounds and styles are resurrected by a brand-new generation… Sometimes the kids rediscover the joys and appeal of a certain style of music independently…or maybe they got into some older records and were inspired by that…whatever the reason, anything to keep from being bored, right?... If you were around in the early-to-mid 90s, you may remember a period when every week seemed to bring along something new and cool…a new band with a new sound and a new attitude…and this stuff was coming from all directions… North America had developed a massive appetite for all things alternative, led by grunge…in fact, grunge threatened to completely swamp rock music worldwide, including the UK… But some young musicians would have none of this musical imperialism from the colonies…they decided to fight back with a real Made-In-Britain approach… The result was fantastic…and until the whole thing collapsed under its own weight of excess and overexposure and drugs, it was an excellent party…this is part 4 of our look back of the alt-rock of the 1990s…the topic?...Britpop… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Up until the 1990s, the section of the rock universe known as “alternative” was all over the place…there wasn’t what anyone could call a defining sound…if it was left of centre, weird to mainstream music fans and ignored by the media, then it was “alternative”... If you were around the late 80s—the decade where the word “alternative” began to be used to describe a certain attitude in rock—you’ll remember that this was an umbrella term for so many different types of artists… If you couldn’t categorize a song or an artist by tossing it into any of the regular buckets, then there was only one other bucket you could use…and it quickly filled up… Singer-songwriters…indie pop artists…industrial bands…groups with synthesizers…goth groups…extra-noisy guitar bands…even rap was alternative for a while in the 80s: it was new, it was weird and it was hated by the mainstream…ergo: alternative! There were so many different sounds and textures and moods and looks that just trying to come up with a definition of “alternative music” was impossible…basically, we went by the credo of “I can’t tell exactly what it is, but I know it when I hear it”… Come to think of it, in many ways, back then was a lot like the alt-rock of today…a vast variety of sounds that were adventurous, different and sometimes weird… But then came along something that codified everything, something around which everything else could coalesce and organize…and once that happened, alt-rock was unstoppable—for a while, anyway… This is part 3 of our look back on the 1990s… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1967 during the summer of love, anything seemed possible…civil rights issues were being addressed…the war in Vietnam could be stopped…drugs and free love were in the air…and women were being liberated… Amongst all this was Jimi Hendrix who became a fan of an all-female rock band from San Francisco called “the ace of cups”… Wait a second…an all-girl rock band?...who wrote their own songs?...who had a chick out front that could shred like a man?...and a girl playing drums?... Even in 1967, that was radical…Hendrix was so impressed by their chops that he invited them to open a couple of his shows…it really did seem like a defining moment… But then the old sexist attitudes took over…women groups did not—could not—rock…it was common sense…self-evident…everyone knew that… The ace of cups gave it a good shot, but by 1972, they’d broken up…and until punk rock came around a few years later, the idea of a female-fronted rock band was considered silly… But punk brought in new egalitarian values…and fans embraced groups fronted by, led by and occasionally consisting entirely of women… Deborah harry and blondie…Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders…The Slits…Patti Smith…Siouxsie and the Banshees…Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics… These amazing women did all sorts of good for women’s role in rock…and by the time generation x and the 90s started to happen, the idea of bands where the leader and most (or all) its members had extra x chromosomes wasn’t weird at all…finally… But there was still work to be done…and all through the alt-rock 90s, we were influenced and inspired and entertained by some of the greatest female musicians in rock, period, full stop…this is part 2 of our series on the alternative rock of the 1990s… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a less-enlightened time, women were barely tolerated by the rock’n’roll establishment…they could sing, shake a tambourine and look pretty…but that’s about it…in retrospect, the sexism and misogyny was unbelievable…but back in the day, it was business as usual… Some strong women who broke through…Joan Baez, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Carole King, Janis Joplin…but they were the exceptions… Sexism continued through the early- and mid-seventies…the prevailing “wisdom” was that women just couldn’t rock…it was a biological impossibility, apparently… But then along came punk rock and a sense of egalitarism…the central tennet of being a punk was that anyone with anything to say should be allowed to say it, regardless of musical ability, class, race, religion—or sex… The punk rock of the 70s opened musical doors for women more than any other era in musical history…this doesn’t mean that sexism and misogyny and abuse was over…but it did mean way more strong, powerful female musicians… Slow, steady progress was made in through the 80s…and yes, there were setbacks…but by the time we got into the next decade, the music world was flooded with women who, in many ways, set the agenda for all rock music… This is part 2 of our series on the 1990s… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writing history takes a very long time…sure, you could write down everything as it happens, but that’s really only like writing a diary…you only have a record of events—which is fine…but real history, meaningful history is something more… To understand what happened in the past, more time has to go by so that we can observe the ripples events have the world…it’s only by examining those ripples that we begin to understand what’s happening in the present and what could happen in the future… It’s often helpful and convenient to look at the past by decade…that’s certainly a favourite way to do things with music…in fact, that’s how we like to categorize music history… If I say “50s music,” you know exactly what I mean…if we move to the music of the 1960s, same thing…the names or artists and songs leap to mind, just as they do if I said we’re going to talk about the 70s or 80s… But what about the 1990s?...what comes to mind on that branch of music history?...grunge, Britpop, raves, electronica generation x, hip hop, sampling, cell phones, personal computers, the internet, MP3s, music piracy… The 90s were a transformational decade, in so many ways, the end of the way music used to be and the beginning of what it would become in the next millennium…many people have come to the conclusion that the 90s were the last great decade for music… Is that true?...now that enough time has passed, we can now look back on the 90s to help us understand where we are today… And if we’re going to be successful at that, we’re gonna need to spread this investigation over out over a lot of shows… These are the 1990s, part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How would you like to be remembered when you’re gone?...most people make do with a tombstone or some such other grave marker…maybe a few photographs and other detritus from a life… But maybe you’ve done something exceptional, something that extends beyond just your family and friends…my dad was mayor of my tiny hometown on the Canadian prairies and was instrumental in the development of a tourist area…for that, he had a street named after him…very nice… Others have schools named after them…buildings…airports…whole towns and cities and countries and even continents…North America, for example, is named after an Italian cartopgrapher named “Amerigo Vespucci”…you get the idea… Another way to achieve this sort of immortality is to have something in nature named in your honour…it turns out that this is a great way to pay tribute to rock stars… Sit tight…we’re going to spend the next hour learning a few Latin terms… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He was known by many names over the six decades he made music...and for the last 40-plus years, he was the most discussed, photographed, imitated, worshiped and admired rock star in history... No single rock and roll performer had a more profound an effect on our music as David Bowie...all of today’s best alt-rock bands all have a bit of Bowie in them …and that net can be cast much, much wider…Madonna, Lady Gaga, Prince…the list is endless... He was a singer, a songwriter, record producer, movie actor, stage performer, internet entrepreneur, artist, art critic, fashion maven, wall street investment and gay icon... He has been a trend-setter, a shapeshifter, a cultural mover-and-shaker…he’s Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, Plastic Soul Man, the Thin white Duke...and now he’s gone…he’s David Bowie—and now that he’s gone, it’s important to recognize all the contributions he’s made to our music… This is Remembering David Bowie, Part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sound of a text coming through woke me up at 2:15 in the morning…what was so important that it couldn’t wait until later?...it was either a wrong number—or it was bad news… It was bad news…a friend in L.A. had just heard some awful information: David Bowie had died… This wasn’t supposed to happen…Bowie was supposed to be one of the immortals, someone who would always be with us….after all, he’d been making music through six decades… And yes, he’d been almost entirely out of sight for a decade, but we knew he was there…he released a surprise album in 2013 to much critical acclaim…and didn’t just release another acclaimed album just three days ago…how could be dead?.... No, there must be some mistake…one of internet hoaxes…but as soon as my computer booted up, I could see that it was all confirmed…David Bowie had suddenly, surprinslgy passed away….and from cancer?...he had cancer?... And so began weeks of mourning all over the world… Look, I realize that if you’re of a certain age, Bowie might be as foreign to you as some big band leader of the 1930s…he was an old guy that belonged to another generation, like Elvis or John Lennon…you might even feel that way about Kurt Cobain…Michael Jackson dying—you get that—but this Bowie guy?...why should I care?...why are people making such a big deal about this?...isn’t this just another baby boomer sob story… No, it’s not… here’s a line I’ve repeated again and again since Bowie died: if you take any contemporary artist—and I don’t care which one—and you draw a line from that artist into the past, that line will inevitably, unavoidably intersect with bowie: something he did, something he touched, something he influenced…no matter where you start, all roads lead to Bowie… If you are to understand anything about today’s music, you to acknowledge this…fans already know this…and if you’re still uncertain, don’t go anyway…I will explain why Bowie does and will always matter… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s just say it: Arcade Fire is weird…just about everything they’ve done in their career has been not only unconventional but against the rules… They rarely give interviews…they won’t license their music…they’d rather spend weeks working with the people of Haiti than lounging by a swimming pool somewhere…they won’t even stay on the stage when they perform… Yet whatever they’ve done has worked…junos, Grammy’s, Brits, The Polaris Music Prize…members have had their work nominated for an academy award…humanitarian awards… Critics have fallen all over them for years…they’ve made all the important magazine covers…big name stars all the way up to Chris Martin and U2 and David Bowie have lavished praise on them…and they’re one of the few new rock bands to emerge in the 21st century that is capable of selling out an arena… Okay, so they haven’t sold a gazillion records, but who has these days?...still, they’ve moved several million, which is very respectable…and all those records were made for a small indie label, not a major… Oh—get this: a chunk of the money they’ve big made—a million-dollar chunk—was donated to a Haitian relief organization… There are no reports of legal issues, tabloid scandals, drunken antics, drug use or any kind of anti-social behavior—unless you count it when singer Win Butler gets into foul trouble when he’s playing in a celebrity basketball game… All of this is very good…but in the context of rock’n’roll, it’s very weird… [off mic] how am I supposed to come up with all kinds of juicy bits when there’s nothing at all salacious about these people?...do my best?...what’s that’s supposed to mean?...thanks a lot… All right…let’s see what I can do…this is who the hell is Arcade Fire, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The music world went a little weird on February 13, 2011…and I remember it very, very well because I was in a hotel room in Vancouver with nothing to do but watch TV…I think I was coming back from a speaking thing in Victoria and my flight home had been cancelled… I ordered up a club sandwich from room service and lay on the bed watching the 53rd Grammy awards…all the usual suspects were there…lady gaga, whose album “the fame monster” had been, well, a monster…six nominations, including best album… Katy Perry…seven nominations for her “Teenage Dream” album…Eminem was back…Rihanna had a bunch of nominations…there was buzz about Justin Bieber, Jay Z, Alicia Keys, Bruno Mars, Lady Antebellum…. Finally, after more than three hours of awards and speeches and performances, it was time to present album of the year…the presenter was Barbra Streisand, who, earlier in the evening, was feted with the “musicares person of the year” honour—a big deal… She stepped onstage with the envelope….the crowd buzzed… “it’s gonna be Katy Perry” ….”No way! They’re gonna give it to Eminem!...”Are you crazy? Lady Gaga has this sewn up”… Babs opened the envelope and—well, just listen… Didn’t she sound so confused?...let’s listen again…and note the long pause as she stares at the printing on the card as if she doesn’t know what to do… Twitter exploded…I mean, it just melted down with indignation, outrage and hate…“The Suburbs?”…by who?...what’s an “Arcade Fire?….never heard of them…you people are Grammy…how come I don’t know who they are?....no one knows who they are…who the hell is Arcade Fire!” It was epic....and for those who still don’t get it, hang on…we can fix things for you…or at least try to… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve ever been responsible for managing a group of people, you’ll understand when I say, “humans are complicated” …as much life experience you may have, you will always, always encounter folks who have gone through lives that are much different from yours… You consider your life normal…they consider their lives normal, too…but the gulf between these senses of what’s “normal” can be huge… It all depends on your upbringing, your current environment, your family life and your state of mind…no judgements here: those are all statements of fact… When you’re a rock star, the definition of “normal” changes…living in your celebrity bubble skews things…when compared to civilians, things can quickly become abnormal—although because of your bubble, you don’t realize it…it’s like as usually, even though those on the outside find your life very weird… But even by the standards of rock star normal—which pretty weird to begin with—the life of Scott Weiland was off the charts…I mean, when a guy like slash takes you aside and says “dude, I’m worried. You’d better take it easy”—you know that you’re dealing with some extraordinary circumstances… This is the life and death of Scott Weiland, part 3…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all react differently when we hear that a celebrity has died…if it’s someone whose work has managed to touch us in a particular way, the loss can really hurt… Our idols aren’t supposed to be life-sized…they’re something bigger than that…maybe not immortal, but somehow not subject to the day-to-day things we have to deal with…. It really, really bothered me when Joey Ramone died…it hurt when Kurt killed himself…and when Amy Winehouse OD-ed, it affected me even though I wasn’t what you’d call a big fan… A lot of people were similarly affected by the death of Scott Weiland…if you grew up in the 90s, his was one of the great voices of that era….and even though you knew about all his problems—drugs, alcohol, mental health issues and all the rest of it—you didn’t want to believe that things might end up going very badly for him…but deep down… So, what happened with him?...and I’m not just talking about his final days…I mean “what happened to him over the years that put him on this path towards dying in the back of a tour bus?”…. As I said when we started this investigation, this is going to take a while…this is Scott Weiland, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The layout of a tour bus is standard…first, you have the driver’s compartment…behind that is an area where everyone can hang out…a couple of tables, some seating, a fridge, a stove, a microwave and an audio-video system connected to a big-screen TV… Next is a hallway lined with sleeping bunks, usually about three per side…after that, a bathroom and maybe some shower facilities…and finally, we come to the rear bedroom… Here you’ll find a double bed, more seating, another TV and few more amenities… Sometime on December 3, 2015, Scott Weiland entered the back bedroom on his tour bus, which was parked outside a country inn and suites hotel northwest of Minneapolis…he wanted to rest up before that night’s show at the medina ballroom that night…he never came out alive… After 8:00 that night, police were called…there were reports of an unresponsive male, perhaps suffering from an overdose…it was Weiland—and by the time help arrived, he was long dead… The fact that scot weiland had died wasn’t the biggest surprise…it was that he had managed to live to 48…the man lived—and let’s be charitable—a colourful life…unfortunately, those colours were pretty dark… And he was well aware of it…this is a guy who published an autobiography until the title “not dead yet and not for sale”…the first-ever stone temple pilots single was called “dead & bloated,” which features the lines “I am smellin’ like the rose that someone gave me on my birthday deathbed”…Scott was always well aware that he wasn’t living the safest kind of life… At the same time, though, Scott Weiland was one of the great voices to emerge out of the 90s…he was up there with Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley and Eddie Vedder… But who was he?...and how did it eventually come to end in the back of a tour bus in snowy Minnesota?...let’s do what we can to find out… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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