A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

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

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

(more…)

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

(more…)

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

(more…)

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

(more…)

An announcement of this year’s pledge week. To sign up to the Patreon, visit http://patreon.com/andrewhickey

Transcript

Welcome to Pledge Week 2024.

For those who don’t know — perhaps you’ve only recently started listening to the podcast — this podcast is entirely funded by people backing me on Patreon, the crowdfunding site, and so occasionally I’ll do a pledge week, where I remind people about this and encourage people to sign up.

The main benefit you get for signing up to the Patreon, other than the knowledge that you’re supporting an independent creator, is bonus episodes. There’s one of these with every main episode, and sometimes random other ones as well. They’re shorter episodes than the main episodes — I say at the end of each main episode that they’re ten minutes, and that’s how they started out, but often in more recent years they’ve been twenty-five minutes or more, sometimes as long as an hour, as they’ve grown in the same way the main episodes have grown.

These bonus episodes are about artists who for whatever reason don’t fit into the main narrative I’m telling. Sometimes they’re a massively important artist, but one who never interacted much with the rest of the music world and made their own path, and so they don’t feed into the larger story. Sometimes they’re an obscure artist who never had much success at the time but gained a cult following after their death. Sometimes they’re just a personal favourite of mine who I can’t really justify devoting a main episode to. Sometimes they’re someone who made great music but had a boring story that wouldn’t be worth spending a long time over, but I can tell the highlights, and sometimes they’re someone who made terrible music but had a fascinating story. And sometimes they’re people who I would cover in a main episode but who there’s simply not enough information about to tell the story in any detail.

There are lots of reasons for artists being covered in the Patreon but some of the episodes I’ve done for that have been among my favourites.

Anyway, anyone who signs up to the Patreon as a backer for $1 or more gets access to every single bonus episode I’ve done, and continues to get access to new ones as long as they’re a backer.

Now I have to emphasise this time round that that is “for $1 or more”. For some reason known only to themselves, the people at Patreon recently decided it would be a good idea for their crowdfunding site which exists as a way for people to pay artists they want to support, if they put in a compulsory free tier on every account where you pay nothing, and to make that the default that people see. So if you sign up, you see “Sign up for free!” If you sign up for free you won’t get anything.

But if you sign up for $1 a month, you’ll get somewhere in the region of two hundred bonus episodes — and if you want you can cancel right after you download them all, and you’ll have only paid one dollar. I won’t be annoyed at that — that’s the deal here. I know times are tough and sometimes a dollar is a lot. If you sign up for higher tiers, you get copies of most of my old books as ebooks, and new print books when they come out (though it’s been quite a while since a new book came out — the person who was proofing and indexing the next book based on the podcast got sick with long covid and I’ve been having to do that myself while doing my other work, but that should be out sooner rather than later, and you’ll get access to all the past ebooks straight away). People on all tiers also get occasional blog posts from me — gig reviews, occasional updates about my work process, and so on. But the main extra you get is the bonus podcasts.

So for the next five days, tomorrow through Saturday, I’m going to post five of those bonus podcasts to the main feed, to give you a free taster of what these bonus episodes are like. If you like what you hear, you can sign up at patreon.com/andrewhickey — there’ll be a link on the blog post associated with this, as there is with all of the episodes.

And one more thing I need to stress — *only sign up for the Patreon if you can afford it*. My listeners are currently very generous, and I am making a good income from this podcast now. I have to do these pledge weeks to keep the numbers up and make sure new listeners know what’s on offer, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they are under any obligation to pay me a penny. And times are tight enough that many people genuinely can’t afford even a dollar a month.

But if, after you’ve paid your living expenses, helped out any needy friends, given to proper charities, put away something in savings, and all the other important uses for money, you do have a dollar a month or more left over, and you like the sound of the bonus episodes that will hit the feed this week, why not sign up to the Patreon? There’s a lot more where they came from.

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This episode looks at the whole career of Sly and the Family Stone, from their first rehearsal until today.

Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

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For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This week we take a short look at the formation of Sly and the Family Stone, and in a week’s time we’ll look at the group’s career after they formed.

Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

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For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we’re looking at the career of Marvin Gaye from 1963 through 1970, as well as his duet partners Mary Wells, Kim Weston, and Tammi Terrell, whose tragically short life comes with a great many content warnings.

Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode, on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly

And if you just can’t get enough of me talking, I’ve also guested this week, with Tilt and Gary from The Sitcom Club, on our friend Tyler’s podcast Goon Pod, talking about the 1974 film Man About The House.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

(more…)

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”. This week we take a short look at the song’s writers, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the first released version by Gladys Knight and the Pips. In two weeks time we’ll take a longer look at the sixties career of the song’s most famous performer, Marvin Gaye. This episode is quite a light one. That one… won’t be.

Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Bend Me Shape Me” by Amen Corner.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

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