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Liberace appeared on Hackleman’s radio show on KTRH in Houston in 1968. Hackleman’s granddaughter, Liss LaFleur, preserved her grandfather’s reel-to-reel tapes and we helped bring this interview to life.

Jay Kent Hackleman was one of the first talk show radio hosts in Houston, TX beginning in the 1950s.

Now what is this, this garb?

Men’s clothes are becoming kind of mod, I suppose you might say. They’re becoming more colorful and more flamboyant, and the male peacock is beginning to show his true plumage.

This necklace arrangement that you have on here, this costume? What is that?

It’s called a bib. Takes the place of a tie.

It’s not the kind of bibs I remember. What is made… Is that gold?

It’s 18 karat gold and…

Heaven’s sake.

… Russian lapis lazuli.

That’s a beautiful thing.

You must realize that I once was poor myself. I worked to get where I am today and I’ve worked hard to spend $100,000 a year on my clothes and I’ve worked hard to earn $3 million a year. I deserve what I get because I worked for it. I was born and raised during Depression Years when we were on County relief and we all went out and we hustled. we worked. I worked in a restaurant, I washed dishes. My mother worked in a cookie factory. My father worked in a factory. So anyone that dares begrudge what I have today, just better get off their duff and do something about it to do something for themselves as well as their country. I feel that I have a perfect right to spend my money the way I damn please.

I don’t profess to be a healer, a minister, a priest. I feel as an entertainer I can do more good for the world than I would if I were a soapbox orator or a self-made politician. I was, some years ago, privileged to have an audience with Pope Pius XII and later with Cardinal Cushing, and both of these men likened my work, dealing with the public in all parts of the world, to the work that they were trying to do from the pulpit. So I feel that if entertainment is that important, the media, then it’s my duty, not only to mankind but to God, to fulfill the promise that I carry on this work. If someone, for instance, can forget their pains and their ills and their strife by watching any performer then I think this work is worthwhile, yes.

You have found a niche that you are perfectly comfortable with?

I’ve found my bag, yes.

If I were President.

Here we go. In the first place, you’d have campaign buttons with chandeliers, I mean candelabras on them.

No

No you wouldn’t.

I would spend the money that is spent on wars every 20 years and spend it on giving people work. Let them build roads, bridges, buildings, schools.

In a way though, you’re being contradictory, aren’t you? Because a few moments ago you were suggesting that people get up off their duffs and do these things themselves and pull it up by their bootstraps.

People who sit back and wait for somebody to take care of them are the people that I am speaking of. These are the people that if shown a way, can be useful to our society.

Well, Mr. President, what about those who are shown and don’t pay any attention?

Well, then, I guess they’re just basic criminal people that don’t belong in our society.

People in show business who are interested in politics, like Ronald Reagan, fare so well because they do know the magic of dealing with the public. This is something that can’t be taught in a book. If they can produce after they’ve won over the public. If you can live up to your ballyhoo, you’ve got it made.

You talk about politics, I wonder, have you really ever given it any thought, huh?

No.

Seriously now? Representative or sheriff or something?

I don’t think I would be a good politician. I kid about it when I get a standing ovation. Sometimes I’ll say, “I may run for Governor,” but it’s strictly a joke.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Liss LaFleur

National Archives of The Netherlands

Allan Warren

Alan Light via Flickr

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This interview was recorded Bette Davis’s home in 1963 and originally aired on Eder’s syndicated radio show.

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Shirley Eder was a longtime showbiz columnist and tv and radio personality based in Detroit

There’s always that old excuse here, this is not the time to do a picture like that. The public doesn’t want it now. Well, I don’t think the public knows what they want until they see it. I really, really think it’s exactly like saying to your child, “What would you like for dinner?” You don’t know until they see it. The public can’t say what they want to see. It’s up to us to decide and hope to God they like it.

You have courage of your convictions. You have courage to say what you want to say.

I never said anything that was unprintable. Never said anything just for the sake of being, you know, startling. They were always just opinions about things that one encountered as one went through life, you know?

But I was always terribly outspoken and just always said what I thought in as much as I knew about it. They say that in Hollywood one can’t do that, but I think honesty counts in Hollywood just as much as it does anywhere else. I think it’s just too much trouble to be dishonest and keep up with yourself, you know. There’s simpler roads to say what you think then you haven’t got to always check as to what you said to one person and what you said to another. I think this would be exhausting actually. One can be respected with the truth in Hollywood just as much as anywhere else you know or else I wouldn’t have had a career.

Do you feel that being…. let’s forget modesty and let’s be honest. Do you feel that having a certain amount of intelligence as you do, is sometimes a hindrance in your field?

As a female I think it’s a terrible hindrance in business. I think it’s a terrible hindrance for any female to have a lot of intelligence in private life, but I think in business sometimes it’s even worse because there’s deep resentment. No question about it, from the male side of the business. We all work for men. You know they’re the people in charge and I think they find women easier who haven’t the ability to think for themselves or stand up for themselves. One can make more enemies as a female with a brain I think. No question about that; among the opposite sex but I don’t think in business it matters whether you’re a man or a woman if you can do your job and have a brain.

Bette Davis, when you come home from studio after having to fight in a man’s world was it difficult to come home and then really be a woman?

No, because whether it was difficult or not I worked very hard at it. I think I worked much too hard at it because I went way overboard the other way of proving I was definitely just a female, and trying to divide up the two. Of course, it should never be attempted because it cannot be done. It’s impossible. It’s too much work. It’s ridiculous. But I must say I did try because I believe one should be a woman at home, you know. Actually, I think business women are better women at home, if you want to know the truth because you do understand what goes into a day’s work out in the world, a very nerve-racking affair. And that’s what life boils down to in the long run anyway. That’s all marriage is, is a great, great, wonderful communion of interest and a friendship. They don’t seem to want it to be that simple. I don’t know… [LAUGHS]

I think men have got to change an awful lot. I think somehow they still prefer the little woman. They’re just staying way, way behind and so as a rule I think millions of women are very happy to be by themselves, they’re so bored with the whole business of trying to be the little woman, when no such thing really exists anymore. It just simply doesn’t. This world’s gone way beyond it. The real female should be partly male and the real male should be partly female anyway. So if you ever run into that in either sex you’ve run into something very, very fine, I think.

We’ll have to start a whole new sex.

Well there is a new sex starting I think that is neither man nor woman. It’s a very independent male creature that lives alone, and a lot of independent females who live alone. It’s all very sad but it’s much easier for both sexes to do it this way nowadays. I have often said, “If men found out how to give birth to children they’ll never propose again.” You know it’s really The way the world is going. There’s no question about it. [LAUGHS]

There’s no writing for women anymore, this is the truth. There is none.

Women have always been the glamor part of the industry. I don’t understand that.

Women are the essential part of the theater but the writers are not writing about women. I think they’re too perplexed about the whole female situation probably. The world’s all full of thoughts about wars and space, and tragedies to the world. That’s what writers are thinking about because that’s what the world is thinking about. It’s very sad because that’s when we could use entertainment like mad to forget all of this, but there seems to be no subjects that they write about.

Bette Davis I think you are very kind to let me come up here.

No, I love seeing you.

It really is a pleasure seeing and talking with you. I don’t often get this kind of joy from an interview. Thank you very much.

I’ll have to take you and show you my birch trees now.

Good, and this is Shirley Eder thanking Bette Davis, wishing her well, and returning us to Radio Central.

Born on April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Davis died of breast cancer on  October 6, 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

Davis made her film debut in 1931 and made her last appearance on screen in 1989 in Wicked Stepmother.

She appeared in nearly 100 films during her career and was nominated for 10 Oscars between 1935-1963, winning two Academy Awards.

Warner Brothers suspended Davis for turning down roles in the 1930s.

”It’s odd that people remember me best for my evil roles since I played so many other kinds of characters,” Davis said. “But villains always have the best-written parts.”

“I think it’s our own business what we do. Who has the right to say ‘You can’t smoke’? Makes me smoke more!” – Bette Davis in 1988.

Davis married four times, had a daughter, Barbara, and adopted two more children, Margot and Michael.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Courtesy of Shirley Eder’s children, Toni and John Slotkin

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This interview was recorded in Los Angeles in January 1980. Michael Jackson required John to ask his questions to then 13-year old Janet Jackson who relayed them to her brother before he would answer.

Listen to the full interview: RocksBackPages.com

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John Pidgeon is a longtime journalist, author and music historian. Learn more

I hate labels because it should be just music. I don’t see anything wrong with disco. You can’t dance to [imitates guitar thrashing sound] or… Call it disco. Call it anything. It’s music. Would you call “She’s Out of My Life” disco? “Off The Wall”, “Rock With You”… I don’t know. It’s music to me. It’s like you hear a bird chirping. You don’t say: “That’s a bluejay. This one is a crow.” It’s a beautiful sound. That’s all that counts. Listen to it. You watch them soar in the skies. It’s just beautiful.

Does he work very hard on his dancing?

Janet Jackson: He just… oh the question. Do you work very hard on your dancing? [laughs]

I should but I don’t. [laughs] I just… whatever you see me do is spontaneous reactions on stage. It’s nothing planned. It’s nothing that I got in the room and tried to think of hard. It just happens through feeling.

Does he actually find it hard to keep from dancing when he’s in the studio?

Janet Jackson: [laughs] Yeah, I think so.

[laughs] Yeah that isn’t my problem. I’m just dancing around…

Janet Jackson: Can’t keep still…

Yeah, hard to keep still. Moving around from the mic. [laughs]

My singing it’s just.. I’ll just say it simple as possible: it’s just godly. Really it’s just… When I was small I didn’t really know what i was doing. I just sang and it came out sounding pretty good. I just do it and it happens. It’s… I can’t explain it or… It’s no real personal experience or anything that makes it come across. Just a feeling and God, I’ll say. Mainly God.

You hear us talk about the peacock a lot because the peacock is the only bird of all the bird family that integrates every color into one. That’s our main goal in music. When you go to our concerts and you see every race out there and they’re all waving hands and they’re holding hands and they’re smiling and dancing. All colors. That’s what great. That’s what keeps me going. [laughs]

I do believe deeply in perfection. I’m never satisfied. I’ll cut a track or something and I come home and I say: “no, that’s not right. We gotta to do it over it’s not right.” And then go back and back and back. Then when it’s finally out, you say: “darn it. I should have done this.” It’s number one on the charts you’re still screaming about what you should have done. If you’re satisfied with everything you’re just going to stay at one level and the world will move ahead. [laughs] That’s not good either.

When Michael’s in the studio, is it important for him to go for a vocal straight away or does he kind of build up to doing the one?

Janet Jackson: When you’re in the studio does it… Do you, ah… do you have to go for a vocal straight away or do you have to build up to it?

No I do vocals pretty quick. But for instance “Ben” I did in one take. I went right in and cut it. I said: “want to do another one?” The guy said: “no, no, it was great.” I said “was it?” That was at Motown. I’ll never forget that little apple box I stood on because I couldn’t reach the microphone. My name was written on it and it’s sitting at Diana Ross’s house now. She has all my little doodling papers I would draw and write.

A lot of people have been overexposed. It’s true. Where people are fed up. I pray that that never happens with me. I just don’t like being on a lot of different things or being everywhere because I get kind of embarrassed. But I think secretly and privately there is… I mean really deep within there is a destiny for me and just for me to stay on that track and follow it. I really believe and feel I am here for a reason and that’s my job, you know, to perform for the people and if they accept it that I am rewarded. If they want to put me up on that pedestal I feel even better.

Was it through the Wiz that Michael Jackson got to work with Quincy Jones?

Janet Jackson: Was it to do with The Wiz that you got to work with Quincy?

Yes. That was… I met Quincy before at Sammy Davis’s house a long time ago. But the real meeting with Quincy, the real marriage, was the Wiz project. We really got to know one another. We worked beautifully together. Ah, so well.

And, ah, I called Quincy up one day and said: “Quincy, I’m ready to do an album, a solo album. But I want a real good producer to work with me.” I said: “can you recommend somebody?” I wasn’t trying to hint around at all. I wasn’t. I didn’t think about him. He said: “Smelly.” He calls me “Smelly.” He said: “Smelly: why don’t you let me do it?” I said: “ahhhh… that’s a great idea.” I started giggling and he said: “why don’t we start.” Next week we got together. We started planning and that’s how “Off The Wall” came about.

John Pidgeon remembers his interview with Michael Jackson:

It was dusk by the time I drove through the unguarded gates of 4641 Hayvenhurst Avenue. … A woman I recognised as Shirley Brooks appeared under the porch light. … Shirley was a publicist for Epic Records, and we’d met before. As we shook hands, she told me I looked tired. … I waded through the shaggy ivory carpet, chandeliers twinkling on either side like lights in an elfin grotto, until, just as we were about to enter the next room, Shirley slowed, then stopped me with her arm.

“One thing,” she said, as if it was an insignificance she had overlooked and just remembered, “you don’t mind if his sister sits in on the interview, do you?”

Already aware of a distant figure on a marshmallow sofa, I shook my head readily.

“Of course not, Shirley,” I assured her with a smile. “What’s her name?”

“Janet.”

“Janet,” I repeated.

“Oh, and one more thing…”

Shirley paused, to ensure she had my attention. Anticipating another trivial afterthought, I wasn’t ready for the bomb Shirley was about to drop.

“If you could direct your questions to Janet, she’ll put them to Michael.”

My mouth opened and I turned to query this extraordinary request, but the arm that had been barring my way was behind me now, launching me through a double doorway and down several carpeted steps into the presence of he-who-must-not-be-addressed-directly, while I struggled to convert a confused backward glance into a great-to-meet-you grin, and wondered whether I was permitted to say hello face to face or expected to channel my greeting via the kid sister too.

Michael Jackson stood up. I stuck out my hand and so did he. I held his flimsy fingers carefully, fearful that I might hurt him. He was stick thin, with fine skin and hairs that had never seen a razor sprouting feebly here and there on his cheeks and chin. He still had his own nose, brown skin and an afro, as Off The Wall’s cover shot confirms.

The voice that welcomed me was tremulous. When I turned to say hullo to Janet, she grinned as if this might all be a game. Michael sat down again, and I perched on a hassock between brother and sister, separated by the glass top of a low table. …

Then I leaned across the table, waving the microphone like a metal detector in front of me, unsure where to point it. I found out later that I wasn’t the only interviewer who had been asked to go along with the wacky ritual of using thirteen-year-old Janet Jackson as a conduit for questions.

* * *

… I was barely listening to Michael’s answers, which were consistently unilluminating. It quickly became clear that he had little understanding either of the history of black music or of his place in it. In almost every interview there are moments when things are said that allow you to put a tick against a list – there’s my opener, that’s the closing observation, more ticks for key points commented on between – but the second reel was already underway and, as yet, there had been none from Michael. Not a single killer quote. …

Aware that I couldn’t expect insights, I knew nonetheless that I had what I had come for: the voice of Michael Jackson on tape.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Michael Jackson

“Rock With You”

“Off The Wall”

“Ben”

The Jackson 5 “The Love You Save

Mike Salisbury

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Christine recorded her conversation with Meryl Streep in 2008 for a profile she wrote for Entertainment Weekly.

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Christine Stines is a Los Angeles-based arts journalist who spent fifteen years covering Hollywood.

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You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but Earl Blackwell finally died, and I was on his blacklist every year for being the worst dressed person.

Oh, was he some sort of society columnist or something?

Blackwell’s list every year is the worst dressed people in America. I was a regular on that list. Anyway.

The thing that was relentless for me here was how you look. I just… I couldn’t put up with it. I mean, it just drove me crazy.

But you chose a whole career that is pretty concerned with that stuff.

It wasn’t the career I chose. The career I chose was a drama major in college, at Yale, when I played a 90-year-old woman. One of my most celebrated roles. Then I played a really fat person. I played a lot of different things. That’s how I thought I loved to wrangle my talent, my need to express myself. I like to do it that way.

I never thought I was somebody that would be on the cover of magazines in fashions, wearing fashions. It’s like not me. But that is what movie stardom entails. I always wore my own clothes a lot of the time, in interviews. In the marketing of a movie. I could…

Are these your own clothes?

Actually this is not. These are mine. These shoes are mine. But I missed … I got famous before you had to do all this stuff. I went up for King Kong. I remember that.

That would have been fun.

Jessica Lang’s part. Dino De Laurentiis, he was sitting there. He was meeting all these girls. I came in. I had really tried to look nice. His son was sitting in the room, and Dino spoke to him in Italian. I know Italian, studied Italian. So he said, “Why do you send me this pig. This woman, she’s so ugly.”

Oh no!

So I looked at him and I said, “brutta”.

What does that mean?

“I’m very sorry that I disappoint you”. He was so used to treating girls like bimbos. Of course, he would never imagine that a blond person would speak Italian.

I found my knitting bag just last week, and in it was a half-finished sweater for a boyfriend, long gone, and the knitting book, the knitting pattern which was in Women’s Day Magazine, 1967. I looked through this magazine and I just couldn’t believe it. I showed it to my daughters and they were screaming.

Because the second page, big, great big ad, “Join the only profession where you can make as much as a man. Be an accountant.” Yeah. There was a column called, “What Men Say About Women.” “The worst thing that a man can do to a woman is to let her get on top. They asked us in so many different ways not to let them, and if we don’t, they’re happier, and we’re happier.” Just a really different world. It’s hard to explain that to people.

Sometimes you look out the window and you look at all the windows, and think inside very single one of them is somebody with some huge, weird, terrible problem, some great jokes. There’s a lot of lives worth embodying. It’s very exhilarating to step into somebody else’s shoes. It’s very humbling to imagine somebody else’s really life and their pain. It’s my drug.

Well, I mean, I have so much doubt. I am an actor.

But you’re connecting with people so much right now.

That’s a great thing. Because I have a lot to say about the world, clearly. Only I can’t put together, as you can see, a clear sentence about it all, but through the work I can say what I think.

Academy Awards: 3  Golden Globes: 8  Emmys: 2  SAG Awards: 2

At the Tribeca Film Festival, it was announced that Meryl partnered with the organization New York Women in Film and Television to fund a Writer’s Lab for female filmmakers over 40. Find out more about the initiative here.

Before Hollywood became known as a boys’ club, they were some remarkable female pioneers who helped turn the film industry into a world-changing force. Meet these women on our blog.

Meryl recently sat on a panel with Selma filmmaker Ava Duvernay and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and addressed representations of women (or lack thereof) in popular culture:

“This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we’re little girls—we read all of literature, all of history, it’s really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we’re so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that’s what we’ve done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it’s all fellas, you know?”

Meryl has made a career out of playing strong female characters – complex women who expressed a range of emotions, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Here are some favs:

Julia Child – Julie and Julia

Margaret Thatcher – The Iron Lady

Miranda Priestly – The Devil Wears Prada

Isak Dinesen – Out of Africa

Karen Silkwood – Silkwood

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Shutterstock

Vincent Luigi Molino via Flickr

Yale Repertory Theatre

Vassar College Drama Dept. Archives

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This conversation was recorded on December 17, 2012 before a live audience at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, as part of the Happy Talk series.

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Simon Critchley is Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York.

I would definitely say pleasure is not happiness. Because I think I kill pleasure. Like I take too much of it in, and therefore make it un-pleasurable, like too much coffee, and you’re miserable. I do that to pleasure often. So I don’t… There is no pleasure that I haven’t actually made myself sick on.

I have thought a lot about this actually in my life lately to be honest, and have gotten nowhere with it, in a way that… meaning that there’s a period of time in your life where I kind of look back and I think, “Was I happy? Or was I just not aware?” It seems like a very basic question, but I really do think you reach a time where you go, “I don’t know.” It really does up-end a lot of things in your own life and in your own mind” But in my life now I think, I have three children and I think I’m happy when I’m with them and they’re okay. When I see them enjoying each other in front of me, and then they let me enjoy them in turn. That brings a feeling which I would say is happiness. Now I don’t know why. I mean I do know why, obviously, on the surface because they’re my kids, but it is a certain thing that happens, and I’m like, right now. Right now. This is it.

But there are moments when something else creeps in there. And I’m not conscious of the love. I’m conscious of something else, which happens to be my own childhood. So all of a sudden, they start to reflect something other than what I hoped my childhood to be. Being with a kid always takes you to being a kid somehow, and they really are showing me a childhood I might not have had in some way. But if something else creeps in, it becomes a different kind of reflection. It’s of your shortcomings, your inadequacies, your incapabilities, your powerlessness, and on and on and on, which wakens up a whole other thing. That’s what I mean about happiness. Does it mean it ends, it ended? That gets so discouraging to me, about well, “What is this thing?”

You know how people always say life is short. That’s kind of the phrase. Life is short. Time is short. And it does. As we get older, time does quicken. It’s long, and it’s long pertaining to that thought, that the past is not done with you because you can’t rid of it. And so therefore, it just starts to drag. You get a glimpse of what you might have wanted, or what it could’ve been, and you can start to have it right here in your life now, but then the past does creep in pretty quickly. And that is a very difficult one, on how to keep it there and not have it kind of ruin it.

If we’re so keen on being happy, why do we spend so much time in the dark watching actors as brilliant as you portraying miserable creatures? What’s going on there?

Any great novel that I can think of is actually drawing a character or narrative in such a way that is so brutally honest, in a way that you’ve thought, “oh, God, I never would have put it that way, but that’s it.” All of the sudden you come across it in a book, in such a way that you’re relieved that somebody actually got it down on paper. And you’re grateful because it is that awful or that brutal. And therefore, that memorable. And that’s why I’m talking to you about it, because if I don’t allow people to somehow identify with the worst inside themselves, they never have a chance at actually walking out with that person in their heart, or in their minds. They’re too easy to dismiss. It’s like it might not be the thing they’ll admit to a friend, you know what I mean. But if you’re honest, you kind of probably do. I do, and I know I can’t be that wildly different from everyone in this room. You know what I mean. I identify with a lot of things that I’ve done in the movies. It doesn’t mean I’ve literally done them. It’s identify with them. I identify with their source.

That’s the thing with meditation too, right? If you meditate, every day, and you really get into meditation, meditation is actually coming right up to the lip of death and saying, “I’m here. I’m scared. I’m here.” That that’s life. If you can actually live in that place, that’s what happens. Right? It’s the same kind of thing that learning how to die, is therefore learning how to live.

Okay. So, happy?

Oh, God. When I am sitting out there I’m like, “I am the stupidest man in the room and I am about to step up on that stage.” That is what I think at that time and I go, Tthat has a lot to do with what we are about to talk about.” You know that I would think that. You know that I am going to talk about something that anyone would ever have to take seriously enough to incorporate into their own thoughts. But… so don’t listen.

Hoffman and Director Paul Thomas Anderson collaborated on five of Anderson’s films: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and The Master

“When I saw him for the first time in Scent of a Woman, I just knew what true love was. I knew what love at first sight was. It was the strangest feeling sitting in a movie theater and thinking, ‘He’s for me and I’m for him.'” – Anderson speaking shortly after Hoffman’s death

Hoffman was born on July 23, 1967, in Fairport, New York, a suburb of Rochester. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mom raised Hoffman and his three siblings on her own. In accepting the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2006, Hoffman said:

“My mom’s name is Marilyn O’Connor and she’s here tonight, and I’d like if you see her tonight to congratulate her, because she brought up four kids alone and she deserves a congratulations for that.”

Watch his acceptance speech.

Hoffman won his Oscar for playing Truman Capote in the 2005 film, Capote. But it’s an Oscar that almost never was.

Hoffman had to be talked into taking the role by director Bennett Miller. Hoffman and Miller were friends going back to their college days, but Hoffman was unconvinced that he would be able to play the diminutive Capote, given his much larger physical size and presence.

Hoffman was first exposed to the work of playwright, Arthur Miller, as a kid when he watched a local production of Miller’s All My Sons. After suffering a wrestling injury in high school, Hoffman turned to acting. He would end up getting the tortured lead of Miller’s seminal play, Death of a Salesman. Decades later, Hoffman again played Miller in the 2012 Broadway revival.

In 2008, he talked to the New York Times about that formative experience discovering Arthur Miller’s work:

“I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists. When I saw ‘All My Sons,’ I was changed — permanently changed — by that experience. It was like a miracle to me. But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.”

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Never ending story (Scappare di Casa) / CC BY-NC 3.0

Lungfish (Eet) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Railroad’s Whiskey Co (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 3.0

Everything Is Changing (Noi) / CC BY 3.0

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The conversation was recored on June 3, 1987 during the writing of Off the Record–Smith’s oral history of rock and roll. He interviewed more than 240 music artists and executives.

In 2012, he donated a trove of 238 hours of interviews on cassette tapes to the Library of Congress. Listen to the full interview catalog.

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If it’s wearing a pink hat and a red nose, and it plays a guitar upside down, I will go and look at it. You know I love to see people being dangerous.

There was a real feeling of inadequacy in that era. I never really felt like a rock singer or a rock star or whatever. I always felt a little bit out of my element which is a ridiculously high falutin way of looking at it. Now, from my standpoint, when I look back, I realize that from ‘72 through to about ‘76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

 You had a zillion records and the lifestyle, everything.

But the lifestyle and everything. Anything that was going out there that had anything to do with being a rock and roll singer, then I was hey let’s go for this, let’s see what it is like.

I read a quote, somebody called you a surreal cartoon character brought to life.

It was, sort of. Ziggy was. I mean he was half out of sci-fi rock and half out of the Japanese theater.  The clothes were, at that time, simply outrageous. And simply… Nobody had seen anything like them before.

Was there a point where people did not take your music seriously because you were doing theatrics?

I think I moved out of Ziggy fast enough so as not to be caught by that one. Because most rock characters that one can create only have a short lifespan. They are one shots, they are cartoony. And the Ziggy thing was worth about one or two albums before I couldn’t really write anything else around him or the world that I wanted to sort of put together for him.

I am a moderately good singer. I am not a great singer but I can interpret a song, which I don’t think is quite the same as singing it.  So I was never unaware of my strength as an interpretive performer but writing a song, for me… it never rang true. I had no problem writing something for Iggy Pop, or working with Lou Reed, or writing for Mott the Hoople. I can get into their mood and what they want to do, but I find it extremely hard to write for me. So I found it quite easy to write for the artists I would create, because I did find it much easier having created a Ziggy, to then write for him. Even though it was me doing it. I was able to sort of distance myself from the whole… yeah, well it can become very complicated.

There is a psychological name for that.

Yes. It is. Fucking with the fabric of time there. It did bring a whole sackful of its own inherent problems with it.

Do you have an affection for some of these characters that you have created as you look back?

I think the only time I get sort of nostalgic about any of that stuff at all is if I see the old videos or I see a bit of the Ziggy Stardust concerts or whatever. No, other than that I do not think I am cold about them, but I think it’s work done.

I think that is an actor’s attitude too.

I think you have to. Otherwise you start… You get into a danger of getting into the rut and maybe try to perpetuate something that has gone before. A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times. You will fall in and out of favor continually. I do not think it should be something one should be looking for. You should turn around at the end of the day and say I really like that piece of work, or that piece of work sucked. Not, was that popular or wasn’t it popular?

Is it hard being David Bowie?

Not really, not now, no. I do not have the outsider problem. For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It’s far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.

I went to one of the first art-oriented high schools in England. I had a very excellent teacher, Peter Frampton’s father who really kind of is quite an inspiration. I went into the visual side of an advertising agency and I was doing pasteup jobs and small designs for raincoats and things like that. Awful, absolutely awful.

Maybe you should have kept it….

Well, if all this goes down the tubes …

You can always …

Get on Madison Avenue with the best of them. I think those days are over. But it did give me an unbridled interest in art. It goes through your entire life.

David Bowie was born on January 8th, 1947 in the Brixton section of London.

He got his start in music playing saxophone as a teenager.

While in school, one of his favorite teachers happened to be Peter Frampton’s father.

Bowie’s right eye has a permanently dilated pupil after he was punched in the eye during a fight with school friend over a girl.

He feared being confused with Davy Jones of The Monkees so he changed his name to Bowie–inspired by the knife developed by the 19th century American pioneer Jim Bowie.

Bowie started his own mime troupe in the late 60s

On July 3 1973, David Bowie announced the retirement of his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, on stage at London’s Hammersmith Odeon Theatre. “Not only is this the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do,” Bowie told the crowd. His band didn’t get the memo.

John Lennon co-wrote and sang back up vocals on Bowie’s hit Fame.

Sir Bowie? He turned down the offer of knighthood from the Queen in 2003. “I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that,” he said. “I seriously don’t know what it’s for. It’s not what I spent my life working for.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Kaitlin Prest

David Bowie

“Ziggy Stardust”

“Moonage Daydream”

“Lady Stardust”

Adam Bielawski

Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

CBS Television

Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, Parlophone

David Bowie “Life on Mars” Video, EMI

Old Grey Whistle Test, BBC

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This conversation was recored on March 25, 2007 at the 92Y in New York City. Watch the full interview at 92Y On Demand.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a founding editor of Ms. magazine, writer, lecturer, social justice activist, and the author of ten books.

I was miscast in my first big part on Broadway. One night after the show, there was Mel Brooks wearing a merchant marine pea jacket. He looked striking in it.  I said: “Hello, hello, how nice to meet you.”  My goodness, you look so wonderful in that pea jacket.”  He said, “Yeah, they used to call them urine jackets, but they didn’t sell.”

When I was 7-1/2 or 8 years old, my mother had a heart attack. This heavy-set doctor brought her home, told her some things while she was lying in bed.  Then came out to see me. Then he grabbed me by the arm.  It was summer, hot day and the sweat was dripping off of his face and falling onto my cheeks.

He said: “Don’t ever get angry with your mother because you might kill her.”  He was not very psychologically oriented.  But the other thing he said was: “Try to make her laugh.” And that was a huge thing although I didn’t realize it at the time.  For the first time in my life, I tried consciously to make someone else laugh.  I knew I was very successful when she’d run to the bathroom and say: “Now, look what you’ve made me do.”

When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.  I think that’s where the courage to make people laugh came from, but I didn’t want to be a comedian. I wanted to be an actor.  Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That’s what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn’t funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

When I was 18 and the hormones were raging and I was at school, University of Iowa I suddenly felt the overwhelming compulsion to pray.  I must have prayed for 20 minutes or so. I didn’t know what I was praying about, but I was feeling guilty about something. The next day or two, it was 30 minutes. Then it was an hour, then two hours. To skip ahead to the end of the 7-1/2 years of analysis, I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her’s.  I didn’t think I had the right.

If you ask an actor: why do you want to act?  I don’t think most of them know the real reasons.  After 7-1/2 years of analysis, I have a fairly good idea why.  My analyst said it’s better than running around naked in Central Park isn’t it?

I was offered the part of Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. When the director came to my house I said: “Well I like the script except when the audience sees Willy Wonka for the first time, I want to come out of the door with a cane and limp my way to the crowd. And they are like: ‘Oh, Willy Wonka, oh he is a cripple. Oh, my god, who thought…. I never knew that.’ And they quiet down, quiet down and Willy Wonka’s cane gets stuck in a brick and he starts to fall forward and he does a forward somersault and jumps up and the crowd cheers and applauds.” And the director said: “What do you want to do that for?” I said: “because from that time on no one will know whether I’m lying or telling the truth.” He said: “you mean if i say no, you won’t do the picture?” I said: “I’m afraid that’s the truth.”

If the bell goes off when I read a script I say I’ve got to do this, but the bell hasn’t gone off for a long time because I’m tired of movies that are just based on special effects, on the F-word and “you mother F” and the F-ing. I’m being very polite.  But it’s the truth. I haven’t read anything that I really wanted to do for so long.  Now, I find it’s much more comforting to sit in my study, write starting at 10:30 or so, come out after an hour and a half, get a quick kiss from my wife, make a cup of tea, go back in, write, come about for lunch go back until 3:30, quarter to 4 and then call it a day.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Kaitlin Prest

Johnny Ripper “Cloudhead”

Jan Meyer “Stung By A Bee”

Joachim de lux “Du fond de l’abîme”

National Archives of the Netherlands

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For this episode, we used two of the five interviews Smith did with John Lennon and Yoko Ono between 1969-71. One took place at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s apartment in the West Village in New York City. The other interview was done over the phone while the couple was in Montreal during their famous Bed-In.

We discovered these interviews in the Smith Tapes archive.

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Howard Smith was an Oscar winning film director, broadcaster and journalist for The Village Voice. TheSmithTapes.com

People seem to be having a lot of trouble getting along with each other, I mean couples. Both of you seem very, very close.  What’s your secret?

I can’t give you the formula for meeting the person that you’re going to love,  but it’s around, you know.  And it happens.  I mean it happened to me at 29 and Yoko Ono at 32.

Yoko: Whatever.

And it’s a long wait, you know, I didn’t think it was…  I thought it was an abstract thing, you know, when I was singing about all you need is love.  I was talking about something I hadn’t experienced.  I had experienced, you know, love for people in gusts, and love for things and trees and things like that, but I hadn’t experienced what I was singing about. It’s like anything, you sing about it first or write about it first, and find out what you were talking about after.

Yoko: Well, I never thought that it would happen in this late stage of my life.  I mean, I just sort of, I was starting to give up hope, you know, that kind of thing, you know.  Becoming very cynical and all that.  But it happened and it’s very, very, very good.

It’s no good having, being with people you can dominate all the time.  Or being with someone who can dominate you all the time.  Because either one is boring.  But if you’re with somebody who’s got a ticking mind, which was the best part about being with the Beatles when they were ticking, is they were ticking, you know?  But it began to slow down.

But with Yoko Ono, it’s like living with 4 or 5 people…. [laughs] It’s far out.

Yoko: Well we do say, four of us are getting along very well these days aren’t we? Or something like that.

That’ll do. they’ll have us put away.

Marriage thing itself, as an official ceremony seems to have somewhat gone out of style. How come you decided to go through with a regular marriage?

Because we turned out to be romantics.  I mean we went through the whole intellectual bit about marriage, you know, where it’s a bit of paper and some guy gives it to you.  And that’s all true.  But when he gave it to us, it was very emotional, you know, and it wasn’t even a, we couldn’t even get a nice vicar or a bishop, you know, to do it. It’s completely against what we thought, what I thought intellectually, I thought well it’s never again, forget about this one.  You know, what a joke, what a joke it all is.  And the next minute, I’m standing there and she’s crying and it’s like we’re soft kids, you know.  So we’re romantic, and it made a difference.

Can there be such a thing as being too close? Can that actually… Because in your case it doesn’t seem that way.

Like stifling each other then. You see we’re both mind people, you know. So to be apart, we don’t have to physically be apart.

Yoko: Exactly. You have to say that.

I just said it.

Yoko: Oh, alright.

I just said it. Ding dong, ding dong. Next round.

Yoko: But the point is this is an interesting example….

Well they’re all brought up to think that a couple, you mustn’t give a child too much love, a couple mustn’t be together too much, it’s good for the husband to be working in America while the wife’s in Brazil. You know, we don’t believe all that jazz. That’s just some social Christian jazz that someone must have laid on us a few generations ago. And you can’t give a child too much love and if you love somebody, you can’t be with them enough. There’s no such thing. We don’t want to be apart.

I just like TV, you know. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.

Yoko: The complexity of it is incredible, you know.  So you can see, observe TV on many levels actually, many different levels.

I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely. One minute it’s the saint, the next it’s a rocket, or Vietnam. It’s very surreal. I leave it in on whether I have the sound on or not.

Yoko: You don’t have to go to India any more. You know, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just be here.

It’s like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I’ll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar. Apart from Yoko Ono.

All You Need Is Love

“They were playing, All You Need is Love earlier on [the radio] and I was saying to Yoko, ‘I still believe all you need is love, you know.’ But I don’t believe that just saying it is going to do it, you know. I still believe in the fact that love is what we all need, what makes us all so desperate, [inaudible], or whatever the word, neurotic, etc, etc. But I still believe there’s many ways of getting to that situation, you know. There’s a lot of changes in society to come before we can ever get to a state of even realizing that love is what we need, you know. But I still believe in it, and there are some rude cracks about oh Beatles sang All You Need is Love, but it didn’t work for them, you know. But nothing will ever break the love we have for each other and I still believe all you need is love [crosstalk] I don’t have to live with three guys to prove that love is the basic necessity of all of us, you know.”

Mind People

“And because we are mind people, I thought it was because I was an only child, but what I had stepsisters, I lived alone. I always tripped out on my own or in books or something like that, you know. But she had sisters and brothers, but she was a different age group from them so she was pretty lonely. I guess it’s that, you know. We’re both conceptual people in a way, and it’s that. So we don’t have to be apart to get away from each other. And we really like being together all the time. And what about Sonny and Cher and Liz and Richard? I don’t think they’re ever apart, you know.”

He was born on October 9, 1940, in Liverpool during a German air raid in World War II.

Lennon was a choir boy and a boy scout while growing up.

He got his first instrument from a bus driver: a harmonica.

In the summer of 1956 he crossed paths with Paul McCartney.

Lennon reportedly met Yoko in 1966 at one of her art gallery shows in London.

John and Yoko recorded their first album, Two Virgins, in 1968–two years before the Beatles broke up.

The couple married on March 20, 1969 in Gibraltar. During their honeymoon, they held their first “Bed-in for Peace” at the Amsterdam Hilton.

Lennon fought the U.S. government to avoid deportation in the early 1970s.

Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman outside his New York City apartment on December 8, 1980. He was 40 years old. Remarkably Lennon had signed an autograph for Chapman earlier that same day.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

“Love”

Written by John Lennon

Performed by Priscilla Ahn

Courtesy of In a Tree, Inc.

By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing

“Love”

Written & Performed by John Lennon

Courtesy of Capitol Music Group

under license from Universal Music Enterprises

By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing

“Oh, Yoko”

Written & Performed by John Lennon

Courtesy of Capitol Music Group

under license from Universal Music Enterprises

By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing

“Love”

Written by John Lennon

Performed by Beck

Courtesy of Fonograf Records

By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing

The Smith Tapes

National Archives of the Netherlands

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Barney interviewed Johnny Cash in October 1996. You can hear the full interview at Rock’s Backpages.

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Barney Hoskyns is an author and is the editorial director of Rock’s Backpages, the online library of pop writing.

I’ve always hung out with long-hairs. I’ve always hung out with people of that ilk. I’m one of the originals. I had sideburns down to my chin in ’50- For a while there I did. When I started my own TV show in Nashville in ’69, I had a group called The Who on as guests and I forget which one of them said, “Thank god we got somebody on television with long hair,” talking about me. You know. Although it wasn’t all that long.

Do you really need to tour so much? Do you need to work so hard and drive yourself so hard?

For my soul I do. Yeah, for my soul. It’s a gift. My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God and I always believed it. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon. So I don’t want to do that. You know I just hope and pray I can die with my boots on. I’ve been in hospital beds and I don’t want to end it up there.

I went through a period that I didn’t want to sing those old songs again. I finally decided that I was really cheating them and myself. And I started singing all the old ones with gusto and lust. Like I loved them. Those songs, I Walk the Line and Folsom, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Ring of Fire. They’re part of me. They’re an extension of me when I get in front of that microphone. They’re a part of me going through that mic, you know, to that audience. They feel it and they know it if I feel it, you know. They’ll turn it right back to me, the appreciation. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what performing is all about, is sharing and communicating.

Do you think… Could you have ever been a preacher? Were you ever tempted to-?

No. I think in my world of religion, you’re called to preach or you don’t preach. Called by God to preach. I never been ordained by God to preach the gospel. I have a calling, it’s called to perform and sing. I think gospel song is a ministry in a way, you know. gospel music. gospel music is so ingrained into my bones, you know. I can’t do a concert without singing a gospel song. It’s what I was raised on. It was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

I was going to ask you how the pain is in your jaw these days.

It’s pretty severe.

Really? All the time? Constant?

Almost all the time, yeah.

How do you-?

Except when I’m on stage.

Really?

Yeah.

That’s miraculous that it just leaves you. Yeah. Power of music I guess.

Yeah, I pray for that and it works. It doesn’t alter or hinder my performance.

It must be a struggle to have to take pain killers at the same time, to be able to regulate them-

I don’t take them. I can’t take them. It’s like an alcoholic. he can’t drink. I can’t take pain pills.

You must be very brave to-

No. I’m not very brave because for five years I didn’t try to take the pain. I fought it. I had a total of 34 surgical procedures on my left jaw. Every doctor I’ve been to knows what to do next, too. To relieve me of pain, I don’t believe any of them. I’m handling it. It’s my pain. I’m not being brave either. I’m not brave at all after what I’ve been through, I just know how to handle it.

When you look at yourself in the mirror do you feel like an American icon when you look at yourself in the mirror?

God, what a question. Shit. I see the pimples on my nose and I see the fat jaw from the pain where it’s swollen or thinning hair or whatever. Icon? No. I don’t see him. He’s not in my mirror.

You don’t see the John Wayne of rock and roll?

No. … Thanks anyway.

Do you look back now and think, “Wow, dressing in black was one hell of a smart career move?”

No, I never thought about it. How does it help me? I don’t know. What good’s it do? I’m so uncomfortable wearing colors in public. I really am. Even denim. If I’ve got a day off in a town, I want to go out for a walk I’ll put on denim. But almost everything I’ve got the black on.

I was interested to know whether you ever talked about gospel music with Elvis?

Oh yeah. That’s all we talked about. Well that wasn’t all, we talked about girls too. Yeah, Elvis and I, a lot of shows we would sing together in the dressing room and invariably we’d go to black gospel. We knew the same songs. We grew up on the same songs.

Cash was born on Feb. 26, 1932, in Kingsland, Arkansas. He had six siblings and his family raised cotton.

After high school, Cash headed to Detroit and found work in an automotive plant before enlisting in the Air Force.

Cash put together his first band, the Landsberg Barbarians, while stationed in Germany.

After his discharge in 1954, Cash moved to Memphis to make it in the music business.

Cash could do a mean Elvis impersonation.

“I Walk the Line” hit number 1 in 1956 and sold over 2 million copies. Cash couldn’t read music and composed songs in his head. He recorded 1,500 songs in his career.

By the 1960s Cash was playing 300 shows a year.

He and his first wife, Vivian, named their first daughter, Rosanne, after Cash’s nicknames for Vivian’s boobs: Rose and Anne.

The Johnny Cash Show aired on ABC from 1969-71 and featured everyone from Louis Armstrong and The Who to Ray Charles and Pete Seeger

Cash credits his second wife June, whom he married in 1968, with helping him stay off drugs.

Johnny Cash died from complications of diabetes on September 12, 2003. He was 71.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Johnny Cash

“Folsom Prison Blues”

“Do Lord”

“Ring of Fire”

Robert Sebree | sebreephoto.com

Heinrich Klaffs via Flickr

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Christine interviewed Heath Ledger while walking through his Brooklyn neighborhood in the fall of 2005. It was recorded on microcassette. Christine’s profile of Heath Ledger ran in Entertainment Weekly

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Christine Spines is a Los Angeles-based arts journalist who spent fifteen years covering Hollywood.

Michelle was saying how great it was to live in those trailers on this.

Oh, yeah.

That it was very romantic.

It was really beautiful. Yeah it was very romantic. We were suddenly thrown into a little husband-wife situation. Our bed, honestly, was no bigger than that little round table there. My legs would hang off this far at the end. But it was worth it. And it was comfortable, somehow.

Yeah, you guys really were that couple.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was sweet. It was very, very sweet. I could have stayed like that for years. It was very, very, very sweet.

You’re fidgety.

Exactly. Fidgety. My nervous energy is usually the easiest form of energy to tap into. It’s a pattern for me, going into any job carrying a certain level of anxieties and doubt, self doubt, fears toward my inabilities and not being able to… I fooled them, or I can’t do this. I’m not an actor. I shouldn’t be here. I think everyone goes through that. I certainly do, and I recognize it as a pattern. I recognize it as necessary because without it I wouldn’t try as hard to overcome it.

You have to be willing to be manipulated in the first place because you can either recognize that in your director and then fight it because you don’t trust them, but I’m not going to let them manipulate me. Or you think they’re on to something and that they’re manipulating something out of you which is interesting and new.

So you kind of go with it. There’s as much self manipulation as there is directorial. I mean in terms of trying to convince yourself to believe the story and believe your characters. To me, I believe acting truly is harnessing the power of belief.

I find just hanging out more useful than rehearsal time. I really don’t like to rehearse at all. I think getting to know someone and gaining someone’s trust, the people you’re working with around you, is really important, particularly when you find yourself in such vulnerable positions in the story.

People generally express more in between their sentences when they’re not speaking. Words are usually there to disguise who someone is or what they’re feeling. So sometimes words are too complicated and they over-intellectualize moments –

Well they’re a crutch, that’s what they are.

Yeah, and they’re red herrings, too.

If having true love and love that is expressive and free outside of work affects a project where you have to be restrained and in denial and fixed and closed off. This doesn’t mean you go out and just destroy your love outside of your life and kind of mirror your movie.

We’re actors at the end of the day. I don’t take it home with me. My experience outside of work, I love… when I hear wrap, it’s the most exciting part of my day. I’m the first to have my make-up off, in the car, out. I’ve gotta go home. I want to get back to my life. I love it back there.

Was Ang [Lee] in the mix, or –

Ang was our next door neighbor! I remember one morning waking up and Michelle and I were making coffee and having a cigarette. Going down to sit on the little stairs of our tiny little trailer. And then our eyes kind of come to and start adjusting to this cold morning. Ang is like sitting on a park bench in front of us. You can kind of make out that he’s holding something and you can hear this sound. Then you realize he’s sucking the eyeballs out of a fish. And his son had caught rainbow trout in the river and is eating the lips and eyes off of the face of the fishes at 5 o’clock in the morning.

Ang is so fascinating!

Yeah. But he’s not alone. There are hundreds of millions of people that do that. I’m just not into eating  fish face!

Heath Andrew Ledger was born on April 4, 1979 in Perth, Australia.

He earned a nomination for an Academy Award for his role in Brokeback Mountain.

“It’s like a Catch-22: I feel good about dying now because I feel like I’m alive in her, you know, but at the same hand, you don’t want to die because you want to be around for the rest of her life.” – Ledger speaking after the birth of his daughter.

Ledger died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in New York City on January 22, 2008.

His family accepted Ledger’s posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Fastest Man on Earth (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 3.0

Ring The Bell (Instrumental) (YACHT) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The Raggedy Anns “Birds are the Eyes” – written by Tom Beecham

Shutterstock

kimberleyfrench.com

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