Word In Your Ear

Ray Padgett lives in Vermont, first discovered Dylan when he was 16 in the 21st Century and was fascinated and besotted, later launching the newsletter ‘Flagging Down the Double E’s’ and now publishing the enthralling ‘Pledging My Time’, a collection of his interviews with over 40 people who’ve worked, performed and recorded with the inscrutable old rogue. Both the book and this fast-moving, whip-smart and very funny conversation are revelatory and highly recommended, the podcast shedding light on …

… the daily life of Bob Dylan – eg the piles of gifts he routinely receives and the security men who scour his vacated hotel rooms to remove anything that could be nicked and put on eBay.

… the only friend who seemed to co-exist with him on “an equal footing”.

... an eye-witness account of his first performance (aged 13) at a Jewish summer camp in Minnesota.

… the childhood friend who owned a fish business in Duluth and ended up running the Rolling Thunder Revue - as Dylan enigmatically put it, “if you can sell fish, you can sell tickets”.

... the time he went to a business conference and nobody recognised him.

… how he tells musicians to “never play the same thing twice”.

… the chance meeting with Scarlet Rivera – two hours later she was onstage as “my violinist” with Dylan and Muddy Waters.

… multiple examples of his love of spontaneity and the extraordinary way he hires musicians.  

… a rare moment when his career seemed to stall.

… and honourable mentions of Richard Thompson, Paul Stookey, Jim Keltner, Stan Lynch and Jeff Bridges.

Pledging My Time …

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pledging-My-Time-Conversations-Members/dp/B0C6VRBZQC

Flagging Down the Double E’s newsletter …

https://dylanlive.substack.com/about

Tickets for Word In Your Ear live at 21Soho on September 25th here: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/1SwIYJWoHK

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https://www.covermesongs.com/about-ray-padgett

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Its tyres pumped, its engine tuned, its air-con still on the blink, the rock and roll charabanc trundles off on its circuit which, this week, makes the following stops …

… the singer who sold vials of her tears as part of a merchandise range.

… when Billy Bragg entered a Paul Simon lyric in his school poetry contest and only got 7 out of 10.

… why our favourite music still tends to be the stuff we heard in our teens.

… how Bill Graham’s “Electric Ballroom Experience” changed the landscape – “we were out there with no compass”.

… former Kursaal Flyers drummer Will Birch re-watches their ’76 TV film documentary: “There are only two good things about Scotland - the whisky and the road out of there.” “Five autographs? Wasn’t like this at the Carnegie Hall!”

… “creamy mousse with ripe stone fruits, bright citrus and a biscuity length”: home-brewing with Alex James.  

… and how Wreckless Eric’s made a living for 46 years out of just one song.

That Bill Graham interview …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVeuDS0n3XI

Melvyn Bragg introduces the Kursaal Flyers on the BBC’s 2nd House in 1976 …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQKNeWlQzdI&t=11s

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Even podcasts take “annual leave” but we’re back and once again propelling the two-man Pedalo of Enquiry down the rock and roll seafront stopping off at sundry wave-rippled spots, among them …

… what Chuck Berry said about the Clash.

… a band whose keyboard player is the King’s second cousin.

… the song Art Garfunkel sang for years without realising it was about him.

… Billy Connolly’s bicycle gag and other things you couldn’t get away with now.

… Ian Hunter remembering “that little bloke from Beckenham”.

… why Punk was like a religious movement. Guest Paul Burke claims it was a “passing fad and its over-cooked legacy was fashioned by the middle-class media”.

… the Shakespearian echoes of ‘The Boxer’.

… what Bowie would have done if the Laughing Gnome had been a hit.

… how Robbie Robertson lived the life Bob Dylan claimed to have lived and never recaptured the spirit of the first two Band albums.

… Earl Shilton, Norbert Putnam … American session player or remote place in Leicestershire?

… lost TV documentaries about Gene Vincent and the Global Village Trucking Company. 

That Global Village Trucking Company doc …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SNrBey7yQI

Punk’s fake history, Spectator column by Paul Burke …

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/punks-fake-history/

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The mellifluous melody and soaring counterpoint of this week’s podcast were comprised of the following notes …

… Morrissey’s broadside on the treatment of Sinead O’Connor – and her electrifying moment at Dylan’s 30th Anniversary tribute two weeks after she’d torn up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.

… two unsettling events in the later life of Randy Meisner.

… Adele revives the old Las Vegas business model (at about £8m a night).

… the eternal mystery of Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash and his Shea Stadium and Russian shows that never happened.

… how long news took to travel: the Battle of Waterloo (three days), the death of Jim Morrison (two weeks).

… Oppenheimer and why so many films are so long.

… Things It’s Almost Impossible To Accept, No 97: Mick Jagger is 80!

… in 2006 BBC viewers voted Morrissey second in a Greatest Living British Icons poll (Sir David Attenborough was first, McCartney third). Where would he be if they ran they voted tomorrow?

… that photo of Pulp and their 57-strong entourage.

… the time the Troggs turned psychedelic.

… the endless value of the mantra “never apologise, never explain”.

… TV clips from the Lost World of Rock And Roll – Hush tour Australia in 1997 (and pay their road crew $1 an hour);

Quintessence in 1970, ‘the sound of Notting Hill Gate’.  

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Clips:-

Sinead O’Connor at Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert two weeks after she tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeJifOXAnA

Glam-rock roadhogs Hush in 1977 …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Iyytr1AJ4

Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate …

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-getting-it-straight-in-notting-hill-gate-1970-online

Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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Blips on the rock and roll radar this week include …  

… Things You No Longer See, No 97: the celebrity airport arrival shot.

.. do we, in all honesty, need Roger Waters’ re-interpretation of the Dark Side Of The Moon for it is upon us on October 6?

 … is there really an Edinburgh Fringe show called ‘Bald Man Sings Rihanna”, ‘A Shark Ate My Penis’ or ‘In The Court Of The Crimson Ting: Prog Rock in A Reggae Style’?

… a 1976 clip of Elton John as the jobbing pianist on the Morecambe & Wise Show. “Elton John? Sounds like an exit on the motorway.

 … the poignant story of 1968’s lost psych-rock voyagers the Mike Stuart Span and what happened when they became Leviathan.

… the time Hipgnosis put a sheep on a psychiatrists’ couch in the Hawaiian surf and landed a chopper in the Alps to photograph a statue.

… the Scottish stately pile Bob Dylan’s just put on the market.

.. and – with birthday guest Patrick Butler - six theories as to why Steely Dan are hipper now than ever.

The Mike Stuart Span TV clip …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufD0e8tE-UY

Elton with Eric & Ernie …

https://twitter.com/eric_ernie_col/status/1673207024702636033

Roger Waters’ Money redux …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUVmeYgo1Iw

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Pat “PP” Arnold was hired as an Ikette by Ike & Tina’s Revue in 1965 and set off a 2,000 mile tour of America, coming to London a year later to support the Rolling Stones. Offered a record deal by Andrew Oldham, she lived in England for many years becoming “the First Lady Of Immediate” with a wide circle of friends and collaborators including the Small Faces, Cat Stevens, Hendrix, Rod Stewart, Nick Drake and the Bee Gees, all recorded in her memoir 'Soul Survivor'. Here she looks back at:-

… the rigours of the Ike & Tina tours where she was once fined $50 for crying onstage.

… the contrast between “the Chiltin’ Circuit and the Albert Hall.

... supporting the Stones in ’66 and her romance with Mick Jagger “who wanted to walk and talk like a black man”. She taught him how to do the Pony and the Mashed Potato.

… the success of The First Cut Is The Deepest.  

… her unique American take on the Swinging London of the mid-‘60s and quaint English expressions like “taking the piss”, and how an “unsophisticated” girl from the Watts district of Los Angeles saw the bohemian world (eg Chelsea restaurants where you got three sets of cutlery).

… her time with “my brothers” the Small Faces who were “a lot more ghetto than the Stones”.

… and a mention of recent collaborations with Paul Weller and Ocean Colour Scene.

Order Soul Survivor here …

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-Survivor-Autobiography-P-P-Arnold/dp/1788705785

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As Mark Ellen had taken his shrimping net to the coast Alex Gold steps into the breach to talk to David Hepworth about

….how solo acts like Bing Crosby and Bruce Springsteen get to play the common man in a way they never could if they were in a band

….the extraordinary sight and sound of the band called Punch trying to make their name on “Opportunity Knocks” in the vanished land of 1976

….what to do with your wedding ring if you find yourself on the world’s largest cruise liner

….Cat Stevens’ “Father And Son” and a few less exalted things that Dads say.

Don’t miss the amazing Punch doc

http://youtu.be/_DxLtuK3pD4

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In his new biography “Nick Drake: The Life”, Richard Morton Jack set out to correct the misconceptions spread by magazines and former biographies, some ending up on Wikipedia. This involved talking to as many people as he could track down who’d met and remembered him, from key players like Joe Boyd, Francoise Hardy and Drake’s sister Gabrielle to the girl who played the cello on ‘Cello Song and a childhood friend who wrote a poem about him in the school magazine. The result is, by some margin, the clearest and most comprehensive picture of him to date, far more accelerated and self-promotional in the early days than we’d been lead to believe – “not just sitting in his ivory tower singing to the moon” – though it’s still hard to think of a musician worse equipped for the rigours of the music business and having, as Richard perfectly puts it, “a personality fundamentally ill-suited to display”. This covers a wide landscape from his lack of support (no real manager, no agent, no proper PR), the unusual and often disastrous gigs he played, the luckless timing of his record releases (Five Leaves Left out the day Brian Jones died), the mysteries of his love life, his time with John Cale, playing for Mick Jagger in Marrakesh, an awkward Parisian dinner with Francoise Hardy and his eventual decline and withdrawal from the outside world. It’s also a charming portrait of what real life was like in the late ‘60s when evenings revolved around a record deck, overflowing ashtrays and games of Monopoly.

You can order Richard Morton Jack’s book here …

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nick-Drake-Richard-Morton-Jack/dp/1529308089

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Growing up in remote rural Norfolk, crime writer Cathi Unsworth had a Goth conversion, a condition from which, she happily admits, you never fully recover. And never want to. She discovered Dennis Wheatley’s ‘To The Devil A Daughter’, heard Siouxsie & the Banshees on the Peel Show and saw a picture of Robert Smith in a magazine which she stuck by her bedroom mirror to help her construct his spectacular dishevelment. She’s just published ‘Season Of The Witch: the Book of Goth’, a highly entertaining account of the dark side of rock starting out with the Brontes, Edgar Allan Poe and Aubrey Beardsley and heading, via Jim Morrison, Jacques Brel and Nico, to Joy Division, the Cure and the Sisters of Mercy. This is a very funny and self-mocking pod in which you’ll find the following …

… why Yorkshire is “Goth’s Own Country”.

… the secret ingredient in Mac McCulloch’s vertical hair.

… Nick Cave - “the Dark Lord of Goth Music” (©️ the Daily Mail) – at the Coronation.

… Lee Hazlewood’s advice to Nancy Sinatra when recording Goth staple These Boots Are Made For Walking.

… “changing into fishnet tights in the bogs at school”, rival pop gangs, mooching about in graveyards and a mate “who used to sit up trees reading Dennis Wheatley and summoning Satan”.

.. the joy of crimpers and backcombing.

… “spreading the virus” at the Batcave.

… the inventor of the term Goth and the key Gothmothers and Gothfathers.

… local folklore about hellhounds in Norfolk.

… her first gig, the York Rock Festival in 1984 featuring the Bunnymen, Sisters of Mercy, Spear of Destiny and the Redskins: “Gothtopia”!

… “Beer Girls and Beer Boys” and why it was best to avoid them.

… dark Satanic mills.

… and the greatest Goth record ever made.

Order ‘Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth’ here …

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Season-Witch-Book-Cathi-Unsworth/dp/1788706242

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Filling the spinnaker of enquiry on the careering, two-mast schooner of rock and roll this week you will find …

… the prog drummer who made a fortune.

... did Brian Wilson bring a horse into a recording studio? Or write a symphony for drums? Or have an idea involving a hen in tennis shoes?

… why the New York Times review of the new Wham! documentary is ridiculous and wrong.

... the eternal allure of The Larry Sanders Show – “Madam, I killed a man like you in Korea!”

… the curse of identity journalism.

… the most influential British DJ of all time.

… Kenneth Tynan’s exquisite profile of Johnny Carson in the New Yorker and the dark art of being a TV chat show producer.

… the mathematical certainty that every review you ever write will eventually resurface. “Nothing will be forgotten - the afterlife is always longer than the first flush of success.”

… was there ever a briefer ‘fashionable’ moment than that of Guns N’ Roses?

… the great new expression for being drunk – “overserved”.

Watch that deathless Renia clip here …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv0VyHHEj2s&t=11s

Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon for early - and ad-free! - access to all of our content!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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