LONER LEGENDS IV brings us to the end of SEASON SIX with a new installment of the central music pillar of the cast.⛲️

I'd been saving covering one of the greatest songwriters of all time for a few years now so its a relief to finally get to tell the story of the great RAMASES... check out his record 'Space Hymns' immediately!. The second genius on the list for today is Gary Davenport... check out his record 'Scattered Thoughts' immediately! And then for a special feature I flew out to Portland and interviewed the great Jed Bindeman who runs a killer record store called 'Little Axe' and two different labels called "Freedom to Spend" and "Concentric Circles". Jed is one of the deepest cassette diggers in the world and has uncovered vast amounts of private tapes, found the artists and issued these records for the first time on LP. He's put in a very special kind of work, a labor of love similar to this podcast, that will help people slowly realize there's a massive universe of art thriving fully outside of the central capitalist stream.

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This will probably be the only sequel episode Drifter's will ever do on one artist... solely because Nick Drake has such a dense story that had never fully been told until this new book arrived ("Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack"). Pat Sansone (Wilco, Autumn Defense) joins Emil again to hash out the more difficult, back half of Nick's story and provide some light on just how quickly Nick had become mentally ill by the time he recorded Pink Moon. Joe Boyd fittingly gets the last word on Drake's legacy and helps us understand how his disappearance inadvertently set up the autonomy of the space we meet these timeless records in.

Important footnote!:: the super legend that Pat refers to in his intense story at the end of this cast is Ahmet Ertegun :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmet_Ertegun

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 If something has changed you irrevocably in the past, its a kind of betrayal of yourself to not re-visit it and try to understand why. For this one I wanted to pull in one of the most sensitive and present people I know to help me out (Pat Sansone of Wilco & Autumn Defense) and he really rose to the test. I think we were able to bring Nick Drake's day to day world into focus with the excitement we felt over this new, unprecedented book in hand called 'Nick Drake : The Life' by Richard Morton Jack. This episode could function as a new kind of category I could roll out every once and awhile that's basically a full-on 'Existential History' deep-dive into someone who's true nature has been hiding in plain sight while they've been somewhat misunderstood. I feel strongly that musicians themselves should be the ones exploring the emotional terrain of the great fallen musicians because we're part of a kind of family who's given everything to be sacrificed on this altar... a beautiful but heavy gamble for sure. Maybe its a bit of the overall mission statement of this podcast to try and re-define how we see the actual humanity that lies behind art instead of just kicking back and being entertained by it. And this kind of study can also function as an expose of what it is to be a human in general. Hustling, sweating, dreaming, failing miserably and worrying endlessly... We can see ourselves in Nick Drake in many ways.. for better or worse.

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"The Terrorists II" arrives to balance out the Mellow Soldiers of Season Six with a bit of history on resistance music and the avant-garde.

 It appears to be a natural part of evolution that there are dead spots and valleys in growth, where we just have to WAIT for better ideas while people take urine baths and try out experimental blood-letting procedures. So it's an important task to sweep through culture every now and again to point out that there's some massive amounts of bullshit in our bloodstream that seem to be there voluntarily.

 The central concept of this cast needed a name & that term ended up being "NECRO-NESIA"... an idea that means when a culture starts hitting an evolutionary dead end, it tends to turn back & consume "classic" moments of itself... forgetting to move forward at all, while having too much fun enjoying the fruits of its most obvious arrival points. So its a kind of opium addiction to GREAT MOMENTS of capitalism... and the cyclical bastardizing of art into entertainment.

Does Sabrina Carpenter bring anything that wasn't already a basic tenet of the Britney Spears product 25 years ago?... 'The Terrorists II' proposes that we are living in an era where we've become unaware that all culture is becoming THROWBACK culture with no conscience of it's self-consumption.

 It follows that the 'Ranger' of culture becomes extremely bored of being surrounded by a lackluster celebration of things that have already happened before... and must take to the farther edges of the earth to seek out new & less stale information. This cast is in GREAT appreciation of those types... while trying to point out that just because the rides at the carnival are FUN, it doesn't mean there isn't a world of depth out there that still needs our attention to keep paving an evolutionary path.

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This cast ties together the 90's era of our story to the current ERA.💫 (if you want some XTRA background you can re-listen to the episodes 'Moving to LA' & 'Moving to Portland' as those two set this one UP.)

The opening catches listeners up to Portland, Oregon in 1999 and the emotional STATE of things... but this cast could ultimately be called "The beginning of GRAILS".

The bottom line is that one often has to throw everything out the window to open up a new horizon of possibilities. And that horizon, by definition, can often begin with a pathetic and destitute situation by LAW. But from that desert floor,, grow the WEEDS that become the terrain in every hero's journey rite?

 This cast features a couple very special guests... Alex Hall (Grails co-founder, who's living out in Malmo, Sweden) weighs in on the frame by frame situation from his perspective. And then Emil & Alex realize that they didn't so much 'start' Grails but that their mutual friend Brad Adkins (who introduced them) forced them to start the band against their WILL. So not only do you often begin the dream out in the desert with no food or water,, but sometimes there's a GUN to yr back too.🔥🚣‍♂️🔥

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 For the first episode of SEASON SIX, we have the LONGEST Drifter's episode of all time!

...this may have something to do with the fact that Emil gets drunk at the end in a quest to fully articulate his true feelings about one of his favorite underdogs. "Mellow Soldiers" had to be born to explore the dark & often unintentional side of the soft rock we've all grown up with.

...The SOLDIERS at hand for this episode are largely :

*Art Garfunkel - the reigning king of insincerity..

*Rupert Holmes - the nasa scientist that might've guided pop music to entirely new geographies of deeper & subtler content...

*Country - an obscure folk-rock band who's two songwriters came from fascinating chess-piece positions and then suffered two drastically different fates..

*Charles Manson - the reigning king of candlelit, acoustic guitar crooning andddddd murder..

*Christie - the power pop band that nearly united the continents under one banner of sick azzz choruses...

 >> HAPPY NEW YEAR & welcome to SEASON SIX✨🔦✨

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Ever since he heard the Trigger Cut 7" in high school, Emil has been a big fan of Stephen Malkmus' contributions to the American underground. Emil stopped by Stephen's house while visiting Portland a few years ago and had a rare conversation about his younger years and early experiences in Pavement.

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Ron & Emil recently began a ritual of Sunday brunching at the same family restaurant they worked at back in 1992. After a pleasant brunch Ron is granted his customary 'hard cider' and the mics are fired up. Questions were posed by listeners on Patreon and, while Ron is initially shocked that he's gotten fan mail, his storied wisdom comes rolling out just the same. It begins with the unwrapping of some rare 8-track tapes Emil's just added to his collection, which to Ron's astonishment and inevitable arousal, contains the entire Bob Dylan discography. And then when the cider eventually starts hitting, Ron regales the true, unknown story behind his friendship with the, now un-locatable, "Ecstasy Damaged Chef".

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"LONER LEGENDS III" is the final episode of Season Five & features::

*an overview of Eden Ahbez & the writing of Nature Boy*

*a difficult dive into the dastardly world of John Phillips*

*an overview of Alan Hull's work with Lindisfarne and his solo LPs*

*a section on Basil Kirchin and his pioneering of 'ambient music'*

Thanks so much for listening

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Emil has a mid-life crisis... and records it. This episode is a sequel to "The Outsider", the other purely philosophical episode that anchored Drifter's Sympathy into a hardcore existentialist stance. This cast uses the holy trinity of American Country Music, Taoism and the Twilight Zone to illustrate our fruitless attempt to resolve the perpetually unfinished nature of consciousness itself. In the form of a classic Existentialist thesis, 'Four Walls' puts forward that escapism only erodes what integrity and strength we have... and that the only way forward is straight through the murk & confusion directly. At the very least, you'll never hear the song "Hello Walls" the same again... and at the very best, this cast helps demonstrate why Kurtz's last words in 'Heart of Darkness' are "The horror, The horror."

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