History Ago Go

Hard rock in the 1980s was a hedonistic and often intensely creative wellspring of escapism that perfectly encapsulated―and maybe even helped to define―a spectacularly over-the-top decade. Indeed, fist-pumping hits like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” are as inextricably linked to the era as Reaganomics, Pac-Man, and E.T.

From the do-or-die early days of self-financed recordings and D.I.Y. concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy, to the multi-Platinum, MTV-powered glory years of stadium-shaking anthems and chart-topping power ballads, to the ultimate crash when grunge bands like Nirvana forever altered the entire climate of the business, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock's Nothin' But a Good Time captures the energy and excess of the hair metal years in the words of the musicians, managers, producers, engineers, label executives, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and hangers-on who lived it.

Featuring an impassioned foreword by Slipknot and Stone Sour vocalist and avowed glam metal fanatic Corey Taylor, and drawn from over 200 new interviews with members of Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Winger, Warrant, Cinderella, Quiet Riot and others, as well as Ozzy Osbourne, Lita Ford and many more, this is the ultimate, uncensored, and often unhinged chronicle of a time where excess and success walked hand in hand, told by the men and women who created a sound and style that came to define a musical era―one in which the bands and their fans went looking for nothin’ but a good time…and found it.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Pantheon Rum Barrel Aged Imperial Brown Ale, Ale Asylum Brewery, Madison, Wisconsin

BOOK:  Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion
https://www.amazon.com/N%C3%B6thin-But-Good-Time-Uncensored/dp/1250195756/ref=sr_1_1?crid=15STBUREYJM6D&dchild=1&keywords=nothin+but+a+good+time&qid=1621906497&sprefix=nothin+but+a+good+time%2Caps%2C178&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Rob and Chuck discuss the interesting tale of how Quincy, Illinois was "officially" designated the Lattice Fries Capital of the World in a federal court.  Chuck explains how he got involved in a court case where two large food wholesalers were in a dispute over who invented the waffle cut or the lattice fry.  After sampling the evidence and finding some old menus it was determined that the patent that was issued in Washington for the waffle cut fry to a company out west was invalid.  The patent was issued in 1980, but they found lattice fries had been sold in the Gem City going back to the 1920s.  From Eddie Spickler and the Ritz restaurant to Sprout McClean Quincy had been serving lattice fries for decades.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

GUEST:  Chuck Scholz

HSQAC WEBSITE:  www.hsqac.org

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

It didn't take long for freshman Congressman Stephen A. Douglas to see the truth of Senator Thomas Hart Benton's warning: slavery attached itself to every measure that came before the U.S. Congress. Douglas wanted to expand the nation into an ocean-bound republic. Yet slavery and the violent conflicts it stirred always interfered, as it did in 1844 with his first bill to organize Nebraska. In 1848, when America acquired 550,000 square miles after the Mexican War, the fight began over whether the territory would be free or slave. Henry Clay, a slave owner who favored gradual emancipation, packaged territorial bills from Douglas's committee with four others. But Clay's "Omnibus Bill" failed. Exhausted, he left the Senate, leaving Douglas in control. Within two weeks, Douglas won passage of all eight bills, and President Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850. It was Douglas's greatest legislative achievement. This book, a sequel to the author's Stephen A. Douglas: The Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1843, fully details Douglas's early congressional career. The text chronicles how Douglas moved the issue of slavery from Congress to the ballot box.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  The Calling Double IPA, Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City, MO

BOOK:  Stephen A. Douglas, Western Man: The Early Years in Congress, 1844-1850
https://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Douglas-Western-Man-1844-1850/dp/1476673764/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=stephen+a+douglas+western+man&qid=1621369013&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

CLIPS: Illinois Stories featuring Stephen A. Douglas interpreter Gary DeClue

The definitive history of the world's most popular drug.  Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "Coffee Crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third-wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs. As the scope of coffee culture continues to expand, Uncommon Grounds remains more than ever a brilliantly entertaining guide to the currents of one of the world's favorite beverages.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Maple Breakfast Stout, 14th Star Brewing Company, St. Albans, Vermont

BOOK:  Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
https://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Grounds-History-Coffee-Transformed/dp/1541699386/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=uncommon+grounds%5C&qid=1621225780&sr=8-2

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had slaughtered more than 700,000 Americans and left intractable wounds on the nation. After a morning of rain-drenched fury, tens of thousands crowded Washington’s Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term. As the sun emerged, Lincoln rose to give perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history, stunning the nation by arguing, in a brief 701 words, that both sides had been wrong, and that the war’s unimaginable horrors―every drop of blood spilled―might well have been God’s just verdict on the national sin of slavery.

Edward Achorn reveals the nation’s capital on that momentous day―with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians―as a microcosm of all the opposing forces that had driven the country apart. A host of characters, unknown and famous, had converged on Washington―from grievously wounded Union colonel Selden Connor in a Washington hospital and the embarrassingly drunk new vice president, Andrew Johnson, to poet-journalist Walt Whitman; from soldiers’ advocate Clara Barton and African American leader and Lincoln critic-turned-admirer Frederick Douglass (who called the speech “a sacred effort”) to conflicted actor John Wilkes Booth―all swirling around the complex figure of Lincoln.

In indelible scenes, Achorn vividly captures the frenzy in the nation’s capital at this crucial moment in America’s history and the tension-filled hope and despair afflicting the country as a whole, soon to be heightened by Lincoln's assassination. His story offers new understanding of our great national crisis and echoes down the decades to resonate in our own time.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  1861 Lager, Lincoln Beer Company, Burbank, CA

BOOK:  Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Drop-Blood-Lincolns-Inauguration/dp/0802148743/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=every+drop+of+blood&qid=1620783299&s=books&sr=1-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

A new biography of the intellectual father of Southern secession—the man who set the scene for the Civil War, and whose political legacy still shapes America today.

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union—and arguably set the nation on course for civil war.

Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as some observers connected the strain of radical politics he developed to the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right, and as protests over racial injustice have focused on his legacy. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is even more broadly significant than these events suggest, and that his story is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising Calhoun from the mainstream of American history, he argues, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Evil Twin Red IPA, Heretic Brewing Company, Fairfield, CA

BOOK:  Calhoun: American Heretic
https://www.amazon.com/Calhoun-American-Heretic-Robert-Elder/dp/0465096441/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VOURJK6H7XH2&dchild=1&keywords=calhoun+american+heretic&qid=1620356405&s=books&sprefix=calhoun+am%2Cstripbooks%2C258&sr=1-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows. Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.”  A surprise discovery—that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex—leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance—material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  She'Brew RBG Milkshake IPA, Shmaltz Brewing Company, Troy, New York

BOOK:  Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
https://www.amazon.com/Plunder-Memoir-Family-Property-Treasure/dp/132850803X

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

The hymn—as poetry, as craft, as a tool for worship and philosophy—was a vital art form throughout antiquity. Although the Homeric Hymns have long been popular, other equally important collections have not been readily accessible to students eager to learn about ancient poetry. In reading hymns, we also gain valuable insight into life in the classical world. In this collection, early Homeric Hymns of uncertain authorship appear along with the carefully wrought hymns of the great Hellenistic poet and courtier Callimachus; the mystical writings attributed to the legendary poet Orpheus, written as Christianity was taking over the ancient world; and finally, the hymns of Proclus, the last great pagan philosopher of antiquity, from the fifth century AD, whose intellectual influence throughout western culture has been profound.

Greek Poems to the Gods distills over a thousand years of the ancient Greek hymnic tradition into a single volume. Acclaimed translator Barry B. Powell brings these fabulous texts to life in English, hewing closely to the poetic beauty of the original Greek. His superb introductions and notes give readers essential context, making the hymns as accessible to a beginner approaching them for the first time as to an advanced student continuing to explore their secrets. Brilliant illustrations from ancient art enliven and enrichen the experience of reading these poems.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Athena #4 Pink Boots 2021 Russian Imperial Stout, River Styx Brewing Company, Fitchburg, MA

BOOK:  Greek Poems to the Gods: Hymns from Homer to Proclus
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520302877/greek-poems-to-the-gods

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

CLIP:  Ancient Greek Music: Hymn to Dionysos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wUxktO1OQ

From Dr. Annie Gray, presenter of BBC2's Victorian Bakers - What does it mean to eat like a queen? Elizabeth gorged on sugar, Mary on chocolate and Anne was known as 'Brandy Nan'. Victoria ate all of this and more. The Greedy Queen celebrates Victoria's appetite, both for food and, indeed, for life. Born in May 1819, Victoria came 'as plump as a partridge'. In her early years she lived on milk and bread under the Kensington system; in her old age she suffered constant indigestion yet continued to over-eat. From intimate breakfasts with the King of France, to romping at tea-parties with her children, and from state balls to her last sip of milk, her life is examined through what she ate, when and with whom. In the royal household, Victoria was surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, secretaries, dressers and coachmen, but below stairs there was another category of servant: her cooks. More fundamental and yet completely hidden, they are now uncovered in their working environment for the first time. Voracious and adventurous in her tastes, Queen Victoria was head of state during a revolution in how we ate - from the highest tables to the most humble. Bursting with original research, The Greedy Queen considers Britain's most iconic monarch from a new perspective, telling the story of British food along the way.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Hand of the Queen Barleywine Ale, Ommegang Brewing Company, Cooperstown, New York

BOOK:  The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria
https://www.amazon.com/Greedy-Queen-Eating-Victoria/dp/1781256837/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+greedy+queen&qid=1618791902&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

CLIPS:  Jake Morley - Graceland (Paul Simon Cover) | Sofar London - Check it out it is incredible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kac_IOUIzDI

Leonard Cohen - Queen Victoria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7opwenLcR0

The first biography of the great Shawnee leader in more than twenty years, and the first to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States.

Until the Americans killed Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But award-winning historian Peter Cozzens now shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader--admired by the same white Americans he opposed--it was Tenskwatawa, called the "Shawnee Prophet," who created a vital doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that unified the disparate tribes of the Old Northwest. Detailed research of Native American society and customs provides a window into a world often erased from history books and reveals how both men came to power in different but no less important ways.

Cozzens brings us to the forefront of the chaos and violence that characterized the young American Republic, when settlers spilled across the Appalachians to bloody effect in their haste to exploit lands won from the British in the War of Independence, disregarding their rightful Indian owners. Tecumseh and the Prophet presents the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat--the two most significant siblings in Native American history, who, Cozzens helps us understand, should be writ large in the annals of America.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Tippecanoe Common Ale, The Lafayette Brewing Company, Lafayette, Indiana

BOOK:  Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation
https://www.amazon.com/Tecumseh-Prophet-Shawnee-Brothers-Defied/dp/1524733253/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1LHGHNDA8DF57&dchild=1&keywords=tecumseh+and+the+prophet&qid=1618618276&sprefix=tecumseh+and+the+p%2Caps%2C181&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

CLIP:  So Live Your Life – Chief Tecumseh (A Native American Poem)- Read by Shane Morris.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QageNN-V8rY