A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

This episode is the first of a two-parter on “Space Oddity”, and the early career of David Bowie. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a two-hour and twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “I Started a Joke” by the Bee Gees . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on all streaming platforms. The single best source on Bowie’s early work is Rebel Rebel by Chris O’Leary. This is an adaptation of parts of O’Leary’s great blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame , but expanded and updated significantly. Other books used for this and all other Bowie episodes include Starman by Paul Trynka, David Bowie a Life by Dylan Jones, The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, The London Boys by Marc Burrows, and Ziggyology by Simon Goddard. Information on Zoroastrianism came from Zoroastrianism: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jenny Rose. The version of Thus Spake Zarathustra I referenced here is the version translated and with an introduction by RJ Hollingdale. Because Bowie’s early work was scattered among a lot of different labels, there is no comprehensive collection of his juvenalia — each label has released collections of the four or five tracks they own. However, The Shel Talmy Recordings contains a full album worth of recordings and demos. The most comprehensive collection of Bowie’s Deram work is this sadly out-of-print double CD . This single-CD version is cheaper and contains most of the important material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon . Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, this episode contains discussion of sexually transmitted infection, mental illness, and prejudice against sex workers. Knowledge of what’s to come in the future can have a funny effect on a project like this. Currently, we’re still in 1969, and over the next few episodes we will be looking at a lot of records that could be seen in one way or another as “the end of the sixties”. Depending on which episode you want to consider the true end, we’ll be leaving the sixties somewhere between song 189 and song 192 — by which time we’ll be well into the spring of 1970 — while the next song is in some ways wrapping up some loose ends from the fifties. Maybe those records felt like “the end of the sixties” at the time, though I doubt it, but what I do know is that here, before the end of the sixties, is where the seventies start. (Some might argue we’ve already seen the start of the seventies with Led Zeppelin, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them, but to my mind Led Zeppelin are a continuation of things that had already begun in the sixties, whereas David Bowie, when he finally became big, seemed like something totally new and different.) Realistically, though, absolutely nobody at the time would have thought of Bowie as the future. There were all sorts of new sounds on the charts in 1969 — the swamp rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival or Tony Joe White, the psychedelic soul of the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, the horn-driven rock of Blood, Sweat, and Tears — which a listener might have pointed to and said “that’s what music is going to sound like in the seventies” (and to an extent they would have been right — all of those strands of music were popular and influential throughout the decade). But nobody would have guessed that possibly the most consequential record to be released that year would be a novelty track that seemed for a couple of years as if it would be a one-hit wonder, a song by a chancer who had been trying and failing to get any kind of success in the music business for half a decade, written in imitation of the Bee Gees (a band who themselves seemed already to have passed their commercial peak, but who would also have an outsized impact on the decade to come) and featuring a prominent instrumental part played on a toy that had been a brief fad. Yet somehow, that would turn out to be the case. So let’s look at the start of the seventies, before we go forward in time to the end of the sixties… [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Space Oddity”] One of the things people always mention about David Bowie is that he was born twelve years to the day after Elvis Presley, and while he didn’t quite define the seventies in the same way that Elvis had defined the fifties, he’s the only artist who comes close in that much more fragmented decade of media. But of course, Elvis himself was still around for much of that time, and we’ll be looking at what he was doing when we get to the next song. But one thing that’s worth noting is that he made a return to live performance after nearly a decade away from the stage, and for much of the rest of his life, his opening music would be this: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley/TCB Band, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”] That’s the opening to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, one of the most famous compositions of the late nineteenth century. The piece takes its name from a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, usually better known in English under its translated name, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and the piece is in three movements, each divided into three sections, mirroring and titled after the sections of Nietzsche’s work — Sunrise, Of the Backworldsmen, Of the Great Longing, Of Joys and Passions, the Song of the Grave, Of Science and Learning, the Convalescent, the Dance Song, and Song of the Night Wanderer. Thus Spake Zarathustra is the most difficult work by Nietzsche, a writer who is not generally known for being an easy light read even at his simplest, and it comes towards the end of his career. He wrote several books after it (many of them about how he had fallen out with his former friend Richard Wagner, a composer who had greatly influenced Strauss) but within three years of completing it, he stopped writing forever. This is because in 1889 the tertiary syphilis which he had suffered with for much of his adult life caused him to have a breakdown, and he spent the remaining eleven years of his life slowly deteriorating and suffering from dementia. (It should be noted here that medical diagnosis in the nineteenth century was not as advanced as it is today, and that some historians have raised doubts as to the cause of Nietzsche’s illness in recent years. I’m by no means an expert and wouldn’t want to say for sure that it was definitely caused by anything, but from my limited understanding he was diagnosed with syphilis many years before the onset of the dementia that killed him, and it was certainly an extremely common illness then, and most of his symptoms match those of tertiary syphilis.) It has been suggested by many that the illness affected Nietzsche’s philosophy before the breakdown which led to the end of his career, and this seems to me to make a lot of sense. I am not, I think, a particularly unintelligent person or especially impatient with difficult books, but Thus Spake Zarathustra is a very, very difficult book to follow, and not in a way that I find especially rewarding. I spent some years working on a psychiatric ward, and the book does indeed have some similarities to the way several of the patients on the ward used to talk, with leaps of logic and changes of subject based on some internal logic that they believe to be self-evident but which is anything but to the audience. However, something being the work of someone suffering from a mental illness is no reason to dismiss it — mentally ill people are capable of great art and often have important perspectives that we should be more willing to listen to. And certainly while Nietzsche is very, very difficult reading, his work has inspired a great deal of important music. As well as Strauss’ piece, Mahler set a poem from the book as part of his third symphony: [Excerpt: Gustav Mahler, Third Symphony, Fourth Movement] and Delius wrote A Mass of Life, setting text from the book: [Excerpt: Delius, A Mass of Life] So, what does Thus Spake Zarathustra say? Well, people have been arguing for over a century about its meaning, and a music history podcast is not going to definitively answer that question, but here’s what I think it’s saying. Nietzsche has his main character, the prophet Zarathustra, come down from the mountain where he’s been living for a decade, and announce that God is dead and denounce Christian morality. Zarathustra keeps having discussions with allegorical figures (some based on real people like Wagner or Schopenhauer, the philosopher who most influenced Nietzsche), gaining disciples, renouncing the disciples, and going back to his mountaintop. In the course of these discourses he expounds on two main ideas (among many other smaller ones). The first is the Superman — Zarathustra says “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss” and “Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!” Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman is of a creature beyond current concepts of good and evil, someone who embodies his concept of the “will to power”. According to Nietzsche speaking through Zarathustra (there are of course arguments about how much of what Zarathustra says is what Nietzsche believed, but I think we can say he agrees with most of it) all living things want, more than anything else, to have power over others, and all progress is created by gaining power over others. The hypothetical future superman will be, to use the title of another work of Nietzsche’s, Beyond Good and Evil, and will be as much different from humans as we are from apes. Nietzsche also seems to have believed (as many in the late nineteenth century did) in a form of evolution closer to Lamarckianism than Darwinism, in which evolution can happen to a limited extent in one lifetime in an individual, and in which acquired characteristics, not just inherited ones, can be passed on to future generations. Mortals living right now have the potential to be, if not the superman, a step closer to it than they already are. This idea became hugely influential in all sorts of directions. Most notoriously, Nietzsche’s ideas about the superman and the will to power became some of the pseudo-intellectual framework for Nazism (though it should be noted that while Nietzsche held many abhorrent ideas he spent much of the last part of his active life explicitly arguing against antisemitism and German nationalism — though in ways which look from a twenty-first century perspective still extremely antisemitic.) They also, though, influenced a lot of culture, particularly science fiction. Obviously the comic character Superman is indirectly inspired by the idea, as in a more highbrow sense is George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. And somewhere in the middle are things like the work of Olaf Stapledon, the socialist philosopher and science fiction author who influenced the transhumanist movement and whose creation of homo superior, a next stage of human evolution clearly inspired by Nietzsche, in his novel Odd John influenced everything from the X-Men to Arthur C Clarke. The other main idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, an idea which is to my mind best dramatised by, of all things, the Monkees film Head and the song from it “Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)”’: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?”] While the idea of the superman points to a belief in progress of a sort (not a kind of progress I personally find very appealing, but one that definitely sees a future that’s distinct from the past), the eternal recurrence is the opposite. Nietzsche (in the voice of Zarathustra, but again it seems to be something Nietzsche himself believed) claims that everything that has happened before will happen again, in exactly the same way, saying: “if you should die now, O Zarathustra: behold, we know too what you would then say to yourself … ‘Now I die and decay … and in an instant I shall be nothingness … But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur – it will create me again! … I shall return … not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life … to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth and man, to tell man of the Superman once more” When the concept of the eternal recurrence is first introduced, Zarathustra reacts with despair, but later he embraces it, saying “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return! you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, O that is how you loved the world,you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time: and you say even to woe: ‘Go, but return!’ For all joy wants – eternity!” Nietzsche believed that the superman would want everything to be exactly as it is and to last eternally, and thus would love the idea of eternal recurrence because all things, both “good” and “bad” would recur infinitely. He was less interested in whether the idea was true or false than in the emotional reaction it caused — despair that you’d be doomed to repeat the worst moment of your life forever, or joy that you’d repeat the best. And Zarathustra’s progression from despair to joy is presented as a positive thing. While there are many ideas in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche said that the idea of eternal recurrence was the most important and the central idea of the work. The character of Zarathustra himself is an interesting choice for Nietzsche’s protagonist, because Zarathustra is believed to have been a real historical person from around three thousand years ago — or at least in much the same way as Homer is the name attached to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, Zarathustra is the name attached to the Gathas, one of the oldest surviving texts in any Indo-European language, written roughly contemporaneously with the Hindu Vedas, with which they share some similarities. The word Gatha, in the Avestan language in which they are written, means “song”, and if Zarathustra is indeed their author, he may be the earliest songwriter of whom we have any record (we say there is no first anything, and of course there have been songs as long as there have been people to sing them, but it does seem likely that any songs written before Zarathustra’s time have evaded preservation. [Excerpt: Dr Rashin Jahangiri, “Ahunavaiti Gatha”] The Gathas still exist, even though they were created in an oral culture that had not yet become literate, because they were passed down through generations as the central core of the liturgy of a religion, usually known in English as Zoroastrianism, though its believers generally refer to it as Mazdayasna, meaning worship of Mazda — Mazda meaning wisdom and being part of the name of their highest deity Ahura Mazda, Lord of Wisdom. Now, I’m not going to go too deeply into the beliefs of Zoroastrians, although they’ve come up before — in the episodes on Pinball Wizard — and will come up again when we get to Queen, because Freddie Mercury is undoubtedly the most famous Zoroastrian of modern times. But it’s worth having a quick look at them because of just how different they are from those of the character of Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s book. Now, before I begin with this there’s an important thing to say here. Zoroastrianism is a real living religion with a few hundred thousand adherents, mostly in India, Iran, and North America. I don’t — as far as I’m aware — know any Zoroastrians personally, as it’s an extremely small religion, so everything I’ve learned about it has been from books and the Internet, and usually written by Western scholars of comparative religion, not by Zoroastrians themselves (Zoroastrians are, by and large, opposed to proselytising their religion, and so there’s not a lot of stuff by them aimed at outsiders). This means that even more than when I’m talking about other cultures I don’t belong to, I may get stuff very wrong. So please don’t rely on anything I say here, and I apologise for any offence caused to any Zoroastrian listeners by what follows. But also, when we’re talking about Zoroastrianism in the context of Zarathustra himself, we have to recognise that Zarathustra lived about three thousand years ago, as best we can tell (the latest estimates place him about 500 BCE, the earliest at about 2000 BCE, but most seem to agree he lived in roughly 1000), and the beliefs of the religion have changed over the millennia, as they have influenced and been influenced by contact with other religions. The basic belief of Zoroastrianism is that the universe was created by a benevolent, omniscient but not omnipotent being called Ahura Mazda, which means Wise Lord. From Ahura Mazda emanated several other divine beings called Amesha Spentas, which help him run the universe. If you’re more familiar with the Abrahamic faiths, as most of my listeners are likely to be, you can think of these as like angels, although a better comparison for those familiar with the Kaballah might be the Sefirot (and those of you more familiar with Tolkien than with real-world religion might think of these as like the Ainur created by Iluvatur). There is also a being called angra mainyu or Ahriman. Where Ahura Mazda represents goodness, truth and order, Ahriman represents evil, falsehood, and chaos. He creates evil equivalents of the Amesha Spentas, known as devas. Ahura Mazda is engaged in a war with Ahriman, who is the source of all badness in the world, and enlists humans on his side in this great cosmic battle. At the end of time, a saviour known as the Saoshyant, born to a virgin, will raise the dead. Ahura Mazda will win the battle with Ahriman, and evil will be defeated. All resurrected humans will wade through a river of molten metal which will not hurt the good but will burn away the sin of the evil, leaving everyone pure and immortal. There is debate as to how to interpret the texts, and whether Ahriman was created by Ahura Mazda at the same time as the Amesha Spentas were created, or whether they have always coexisted. Likewise there is debate as to whether they should be considered equal in strength and importance, or whether Ahura Mazda is the superior in power as well as morality. I believe that the current consensus among Zoroastrians is that Ahura Mazda preexisted Ahriman and is more powerful, but I could be misunderstanding what I’ve read. But crucially, in the nineteenth century the consensus among religious scholars in the West was that Zoroastrians believed that Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are equal and opposite, and that while Zoroastrianism had influenced most of the great monotheistic religions it was actually a dualistic religion in which good and evil are personified and equal. [Excerpt: Dr Rashin Jahangiri, “Ahunavaiti Gatha”] And so the reason that Nietzsche chose to use Zarathustra as his character is not because he thought the historical Zarathustra held the beliefs he attributed to his character, but in fact it was the opposite. He explained in his final book Ecce Homo: “Zarathustra was the fi

This episode is on “Frownland” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, and is the third part of a trilogy following the episodes on the GTOs and Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “The Tra-La-La Song (One Banana, Two Banana) by the Banana Splits . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This episode follows on from the episode on the GTOs. These two make up two parts of a three-part story, and I’m hoping to have part three, on Captain Beefheart, up before the end of the month. This episode is on “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Song to the Siren” by Tim Buckley . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Some of you will have seen me talk in the past about a site called The Daily Tism, a satirical news site by and for autistic people which is run by some friends of mine, and which I’ve written the odd piece for. (Perhaps you haven’t, in which case I’ll say again now, if you’re autistic yourself and/or you like really funny satirical news articles, you should head to http://thedailytism.com and read their stuff, and then go and back their Patreon at https://patreon.com/thedailytism ). Well, a little under a year ago I was chatting with my friend Sara Gibbs, one of the co-runners of that site, who is an amazing comedy writer who’s written for all sorts of TV and radio stuff (if you’re in Britain you’ll undoubtedly have heard or seen her work — she’s had credits on The Now Show, The News Quiz, The Mash Report, Have I Got News For You, Dead Ringers , and many more, though now she concentrates on The Daily Tism), and we were talking about how much we enjoy things that really use the potential of the audio medium. When it’s done well there’s nothing like it in the world. Anyway, we talked, and Sara said “What I’d really like to do is this ” and I said “ooh yes… and you could do this !” Sara said “Oh yes, and if I did that then I could do this as well!” and I replied “and then you could…” and soon by bouncing ideas off each other we’d come up with the concept for a really, really, interesting show. Sara, being the comedy writer in the conversation, then went off and made it a reality. She worked for months and turned that basic idea we’d had together into a fully-fleshed out eight-episode sitcom, writing eight wonderful scripts and creating some fabulous characters and a whole world for them to live in, and rounded up an incredible cast and crew, to create the world’s first (we think this is a first something, for once!) sitcom by and for autistic people. She’s done an amazing job and created something very very special here. We’ve also got some very surprising celebrity guests making cameos, whose names have been announced to The Daily Tism’s backers if you’re curious, but who we’re otherwise keeping a surprise for now. The show stars The Daily Tism co-editor Sarah Amero (voicing two characters), Alasdair Beckett-King, John Butler, The Daily Tism writer Guy Kelly, Stuart Laws, Georgia Mackenzie, Lizzie Schenk and Abigail Weinstock, with appearances by Gabby Hutchinson-Crouch and Grace Jarvis, and is produced by Sara Gibbs with Hare Lockwood and Sarah Amero, and directed by Sara Gibbs with Sarah Amero. We’re having a live launch for it on Zoom on Sunday the 26th July at 6PM BST, which you can find more details of at https://www.patreon.com/TheDailyTism/posts/you-are-invited-162380067 — dress code is “autistic red carpet”. After that the whole season will be dropping early and ad-free for selected tiers on the Daily Tism’s Patreon, or it’ll be available weekly on all the normal podcast platforms. Check https://allmylinks.com/itsasuperpower for links to the show on various platforms, or search It’s a Superpower??

This episode took longer than normal to come up because, as you’ll see from the episode itself, I’m releasing it simultaneously with the next episode, on Frank Zappa. These two make up two parts of a three-part story, and I’m hoping to have part three, on Captain Beefheart, up before the end of the month. There will also be, between this and the next episode on the feed, a trailer for an exciting project I’m a minor part of. This episode is on “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes” by the GTOs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “My Pal Foot-Foot” by the Shaggs . Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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