Your Brain on Facts

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It's the return of our occasional series, We Can't Have Nice Things. This week, we look at radio contest and promotions that went badly wrong, often at the draft stage. Free nude wedding anyone?

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 02:45 Radio Luxembourg's Ice Block Challenge

06:02 Bait & switch

10:12 Rules are rules

17:36 Review and news

20:40 No accounting for taste

22:15 Library of Chaos

27:27 Good, better, breast

30:08 Playing matchmaker 

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

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Music: Kevin MacLeod, Bobby Richards .

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Not all heroes wear capes.  Some wear leather jackets with chains, long hair, and lots of eyeliner!  Today we look at three times heavy metal musicians said "We're not gonna take it" and defended the freedom of speech, but were they "Breaking the Law" and just "Howl(ing) at the Moon"?

0:42 Twisted Sister vs Congress

17:07 Reviews and news

19:58 Ozzy Osbourne's Suicide Solution

26:20 Judas Priest, Better Than You

28:28 Subliminal back-masking

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. 

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod,

It’s not unusual for the business side of the music business to include trips to the courthouse.  Usually, these are for copyright infringement, someone else ripping off your schtick.  In the halcyon days of 2005, the band Slipknot was moved to sue, of all people, Burger King for their commercial with a fake band, all in scary masks and costumes, called Cock Rock.

The best way to describe the 1980’s would be to say, you had to see it to believe it.  Weird times, man.  If we weren’t panicking about Russia, we were moral-panicking over Satanic things like heavy-metal music and Dungeons and Dragons, the things that make life worth living and were supposedly at the core of wildly rampant crises of child sex abuse and teen suicide.  In the red corner, the busy-body buzzkill today is Tipper Gore, then-wife of then-congressman Al, who had it in her head that rock music was a huge threat to the bedrock of society.  Feel free to picture Helen Lovejoy [sfx clip].  And in the blue corner, an unlikely hero in the form of Dee Snider, front man of oh so typical larger than life hair metal band Twisted Sister.  

The trouble started when Tipper bought her 11-year-old daughter a copy of the album "Purple Rain," the smash-hit album from the *R-rated film, both courtesy of *Prince.  And Tipper was shocked, *shocked to hear inappropriate lyrics.  She clearly did not know his body of work.  "Darling Nikki" was a bridge too far, and if you know, you know.  With bra cups brimming with righteous indignation, Tipper gathered like-minded, and I’m assuming bored, wives of senators, cabinet members, and prominent businessmen to for the Parents Music Resource Council or PMRC.  But this wasn’t censorship, the PMRC wanted everyone to know.  It was just about helping parents make informed decisions.  They wanted to see music rated like movies, with warnings for the R-rated stuff.

Critics pointed out that that was easier said than done.  The Motion Picture Association of America rated about 350 movies a year. By contrast the Recording Industry Association of America saw 25,000 songs a year being released in those days.  To focus their efforts, the PMRC threw down the gauntlet on the "Filthy Fifteen," a list of songs from the likes of Madonna and Sheena Easton to AC/DC and Judas Priest, that were part of what Gore called "the twisted tyranny of explicitness in the public domain." I did a Thundercats burlesque number to one of the songs.  Care to guess which one? 

While the PMRC wasn’t an official government anything, the record industry needed to stay on their good side.  They were lobbying for a tax on blank cassettes, absolutely besides themselves over the idea of losing money to tape dubbing.  Four members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation were all married to PMRC members.  This was enough for the RIAA to cross the street to get away from the principles of free expression in hopes of getting the blank-tape tax.

When the Senate committee called for hearings on this issue.  Arguing for totally’not’censorship, you guys, were PMRC members, child-health experts, and religious figures.  Standing up for their rights as musicians was an interesting trio – Twister Sister’s Dee Snider, folk singer John Denver, and I would not insult him by trying to affix a label, gonzo rock god Frank Zappa.  We don’t know how many musicians were invited, but they were the only ones who showed up.

Anyone else who was invited missed the chance for a lot of press – the hearing room was packed with reporters and tv cameras til the fourth estate were packed in like sardines.  PMRC husband Sen. Hollings played their hand right away, referring to the music in question as "porn rock," saying "If I could find some way to constitutionally do away with it, I would."  I bet he’s fun at parties.  Sen. Paula Hawkins waved off concerns about artists' rights of free expression under the First Amendment as she waved away the idea of parental responsibility, and bemoaned rock music becoming much more explicit in the 30 years since Elvis.  A 2012 study by Elizabeth Langdon at Cleveland State University found that music has indeed grown more explicit in its sexual content, but "the sexual attitudes and behaviors (and related outcomes) of adolescents do not appear to be following suit at the national level." 

When it came time to make their case before the government, Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, wife of then-Treasury Secretary James Baker, testified on behalf of the PMRC.  Album art, a much bigger part of the whole music buying and enjoying process.  Remember liner notes with all the lyics?  It was like Christmas!  Those albums that had Playboy, Boris Vallejo, or Saw vibes on their jacket were used as evidence.  A local pastor read salacious lyrics about bondage, incest, and "anal vapors"...to unrestrained tittering and laughter.  A child psychiatrist testified that David Berkowitz, the serial killer called "Son of Sam," was known to listen to Black Sabbath. sigh  You shouldn’t be allowed to get a degree without understanding the difference between correlation and causation.  

Then the defense took the stand.  Rally, lads!  Zappa was up first, looking as not Frank Zappa as I ever saw, with short hair and a suit.  "I've heard some conflicting reports on whether or not people on this committee want legislation. I understand that Senator Hollings does." Sen. James Exon butted in, saying he might support legislation that makes the music industry "voluntarily" clean up its act, which Zappa astutely pointed out is “hardly voluntary." [sfx clip]

"The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years, dealing with the interpretation and enforcement problems inherent in the proposal's design.  It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC's demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation."

He took dead aim at the inherent conflict of interest and said the whole issue was a facade for "trade-restraining legislation, whipped up like an instant pudding by the Wives of Big Brother."  Chef kiss.  The senators were less impressed.  Thankfully the next at-bat was Ivory soap clean, openly devout Christian John Denver, or as Dee Snider later described him, "mom-American-pie- John-Denver-Christmas-special- fresh-scrubbed guy." 

Despite his broad appeal, Denver was no stranger to censorship, which he warned the PMRC was approaching.  "Rocky Mountain High," one of his biggest hits, was banned from some radio stations for drug references that weren’t actually there.  "What assurance have I that any national panel to review my music would make any better judgment?" Denver asked the senators.  A "self-appointed moral watchdog," he argued, was antithetical to the ideals of a democratic society, the sort of thing you saw in Nazi Germany.  Denver then excused himself from the hearing because he had a meeting with NASA in hopes of becoming the first civilian in space.  Not a word of a lie.  Luckily, he didn’t make the cut; the flight in question was the catastrophic last flight of the Challenger.

With the opening acts out of the way, it was time for the headliner, Dee Snider, who quite plausibly believes [1] “the PMRC — or the senators whose wives were in the PMRC — invited me to make a mockery out of me in front of the world."  When Snider walked in, they probably thought they’d gotten their wish.  He was wearing his “dirtbag couture” – jeans, a tank top, sunglasses, and voluminous bottle-blond hair.

But Dee Snider wasn’t the airhead they were expecting.  He introduced himself as a married father, a Christian, and neither drinks nor does drugs.  He’d brought his Army and NYPD veteran father with him. (Zappa brought his kids, Moon Unit and Dweezil because they were Twisted Sister fans.)  He addressed Tipper personally for her misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his song "Under the Blade," which they claimed was about S&M and rape, citing the lyrics “Your hands are tied, your legs are strapped, a light shines in your eyes/You faintly see a razor's edge, you open your mouth to cry.”  Snider countered was about their bassist Eddie Ojeda having surgery, literally going under the knife.  "Ms. Gore was looking for sadomasochism and bondage and she found it," indicating the bondage was a metaphor for fear. Snider later wrote for the Huffington Post that he enjoyed the "raw hatred I saw in Al Gore's eyes when I said Tipper Gore had a dirty mind." 

Snider highlighted another accusation from Tipper Gore, "You look at even the t-shirts that kids wear and you see Twisted Sister and a woman in handcuffs sort of spread-eagled."  This was a complete untruth.  Twisted Sister "never sold a shirt of this type; we have always taken great pains to steer clear of sexism in our merchandise, records, stage show, and personal lives. Furthermore, we have always promoted the belief that rock and roll should not be sexist, but should cater to males and females equally."  He challenged Tipper to produce any such shirt and when asked about it again by Senator Al Gore, Gore clarified for the record that "the word 't-shirts' was in plural, and one of them referred to Twisted Sister and the other referred to a woman in handcuffs." Snider stuck to his guns insisting Tipper was referring to Twisted Sister before Senator Gore changed the subject.

During Snider's testimony, Senator Ernest Hollings from South Carolina asked him about different perceptions of obscenity and vulgarity. He read part of a Supreme Court verdict in the Pacifica Case involving the Federal Communications Commission (famous for the role George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" played in it). In the case, the Supreme Court ruled that "Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home. The individual's right to be left alone, plainly outweighs the first amendment rights of an intruder."

They still hadn’t figured out who they were dealing with.  Snider pointed out there was a difference between the airwaves”  as opposed to a person going with their money to purchase an album to play in their room, in their home, on their own time. The airwaves are something different." 

Sen. Al Gore opened his questioning of Snider by asking what the initials of their fan club “S.M.F.” stood for. 

[x] "It stands for the Sick Motherf------ Friends of Twisted Sister," Snider testified.

"Is this also a Christian group?" Gore asked, to a smattering of laughter.

"I don't believe profanity has anything to do with Christianity," Snider said.  I could watch replays of that hearing all day.

[y] "The beauty of literature, poetry, and music is that they leave room for the audience to put its own imagination, experience, and dreams into the words," Snider testified.  "There is no authority who has the right or the necessary insight to make these judgments. Not myself, not the federal government, not some recording industry committee, not the PTA, not the RIAA, and certainly not the PMRC," Snider said. [sfx clip?]

When it was said and done, it's unlikely that many minds were changed by the hearing. Although, despite the protestations to the contrary, quite a few senators and witnesses had explicitly argued in favor of government action.  No laws were passed, but they still got results.  The RIAA agreed to work with the PMRC on labeling objectionable content with a bold black and white sticker reading "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics."  So the rockers kinda lost, but they were awesome and I’m counting it as a moral victory.

That black and white sticker was worse than a Scarlet Letter.  Huge retailers like Walmart would not sell "labeled" records, period, cutting out a huge slice of the marketplace for "labeled" artists. Some smaller stores were threatened with eviction if they stocked "labeled" records.  The city of San Antonio barred "labeled" artists from performing.  Maryland and Pennsylvania debated requiring retailers to keep it in an "adults-only" area of the store.  Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra was prosecuted in California over "Distribution of Harmful Material to Minors."

But musicians would have the last laugh.  The explicit lyrics sticker very quickly went from mark to shame to selling point.  Retailers realized the money they were missing out on and began stocking the albums.  Teens and young adults would often buy albums *because they had the warning.  In fact, if you were hard-cord or counter-culture or punk in any way but didn’t have a warning label, scoff!  There was also a shed load of reaction music, including Danzig’s only mainstream hit. [sfx clip] Nowadays, not only have our buying habits changed, but our standards have too.  

MIDROLL

CW: The following section is about news events subsequent to suicides, without going into too much detail about the suicides themselves.  If that’s not where your head is today, no worries, we’ll catch up next week.

In 1986, Sharon Osbourne called her management client and husband Ozzy Osbourne that he had to get on a plane as fast as possible and get to LA.  Like a phone call from a movie, she refused to tell him why, but demanded he go now.  Ozzy landed in LA into the loving embrace of a batallion of reporter’s microphones and those stupidly bright news camera lights, asking him how he responded to the suicide.  What Sharon could have taken 10 seconds to explain to him was that the previous year, 19 year old John McCollum was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his California bedroom.  The album Blizzard of Oz which he’d allegedly been listening to for at least six hours straight, was still spinning on the stereo turntable.  McCollum’s parents believed Osbourne was responsible, that his song “Suicide Solution” was a proximate cause of their son’s death.  Okay, that was about 20 seconds, but I stand on my statement.

In their lawsuit, McCollum’s parents claimed that there were hidden lyrics in the song that incited John to kill himself, with messages like “get the gun and try it, shoot, shoot, shoot.”  Osbourne countered that the song wasn’t about a solution as in an answer, but a solution as in a liquid, specifically the one he was at the time slowly killing *himself with, and which has killed AC/DC’s Bon Scott, alcohol.

[ozzy 1] "Suicide Solution wasn't written about, 'Oh that's the solution, suicide.' I was a heavy drinker and I was drinking myself to an early grave. It was suicide solution," Ozzy said later.  "Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker. Suicide is slow with liquor. That's what I was doing for a long while.”  

The plaintiff’s case was that the song Suicide Solution should be exempt from the first Amendment’s freedom of speech.  In the US, you’re free to express any viewpoint or feelings, up to a point – it is not legal to directly incite specific, imminent actions which cause harm to others.  That’s hard to prove and virtually every attempt to hold an entertainer responsible for allegedly inciting action has failed.  One notable exception, and a replacement for the tired old ‘you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater’ example is that of radio disc jockey The Real Don Steele, who told listeners to hurry as quickly as they could to a certain Los Angeles address to win a prize.  This is 1970, only two years after seat belts became mandatory, and people were getting in crack-ups, and one motorist who had no idea what was happening was killed.  In a case still taught in law schools everywhere, his family sued and the California Supreme Court ruled in their favor.  I really could do a whole episode just on radio promotions going terribly, terribly wrong.  At issue in the McCollum case was not whether there actually were hidden lyrics, but whether such lyrics are protected speech or incitement to violence.  If successful, the McCollum lawsuit would have had sweeping consequences for artists in every medium, potentially holding them liable for the actions of those who watched, read or listened to what they’d created.  At the very least, it would have made Ozzy too big a liability for any record label or concert promoter to associate themselves with, and it’s not hard to imagine that that pariah status would spread to other metal bands.

[ozzy 2]“I feel very sad for the boy, and I felt terribly sad for the parents. As a parent myself, I'd be pretty devastated if something like that happened. And I have thought about this, if the boot was on the other foot, I couldn't blame the artist."

The suit wasn’t just about Suicide Solution; they also blamed the song Paranoid.  Data point of one, but I can disprove that one by sheer force of math; it’s probably my most-listened-to Ozzy or Sabbath song, with the very Un-Sabbath Laguna Sunrise as a close second.

Plaintiff’s counsel Tom Anderson claimed McCollum had been a normal, happy well-adjusted young man, who listened to ″Suicide Solution″ for hours before killing himself, and that a low-frequency hum on the record, only audible if you were using headphones as McCollum had been, had caused him to be more susceptible to the song’s hidden message.  Attorneys for CBS, Ozzy’s record label and party in the suit, argued that Osbourne was no more responsible for a listeners’ actions than Shakespeare would be for Hamlet’s soliloquy, Tolstoy for Anna Karenina throwing herself under the wheels of a train, or the producers of “M.A.S.H.” for choosing “Suicide Is Painless” for its theme tune.  When Judge John Cole dismissed the case, spoiler alert, he left room for the plaintiffs to appeal over the mysterious hum, which they did; the appellate judge upheld the dismissal.

This wasn’t the last time a fan’s suicide resulted in legal action.  The family of another young man brought a similar lawsuit against Osbourne in 1986. Their case was also unsuccessful.  

5 years later, CBS was back in court, though this time it was Judas Priest who found themselves in the dock, but with a pseudoscience twist.  In December 1985, 20-year-old James Vance and 18-year-old Raymond Belknap of Nevada, concluded a day of drinking, drugs, and heavy metal with an alleged suicide pact by means of self-inflicted shotgun fire.  Belknap died instantly, while Vance survived for a further three years, though without the lower half of his face, before eventually succumbing to complications.

The two families subsequently alleged that Priest had placed subliminal messages throughout 1978’s Stained Class album, inciting fans to kill themselves.  The worst offender on the album was Better By You, Better Than Me, where messages like ‘Let’s be dead’ and ‘Do it’ were smuggled in by means of backmasking.  Let’s hop out of the shallow end for a deep dive here.  Backwards-masking or backmasking an intentional recording in which a message is recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward.  It goes all the way back to the 70’s, the 1870’s, when Thomas Edison discovered the novelty of playing recorded music backwards.  The beat generation of the 50s started to purposely include reverse audio into their music and artists continued to play around with it for decades.  The Beatles deliberate [...].  This splashed fuel on the Paul-is-dead urban legend/conspiracy theory with supposed messages like “Paul is dead, miss him, miss him,” in “I’m So Tired” and “turn me on, dead man” in Revolution 9.  Audiophiles kept an ear out for it, but it didn’t come to wide public knowledge until the 80’s.  These days, Easter eggs and hidden goodies are shared on social media and YT, but back then, it was conservatives ruining cassettes and vinyl records by playing them backwards in church, community meetings, local access television, whatever venue they could get.  They claimed that the backwards speech could subliminally influence the listener when listening to the music in the normal way.  They found backmasking in everything from Elvis to Led Zepplin.  Supposedly Stairway to Heaven contained Satanic commands like “here’s to my sweet Satan,” “serve me,” and “there’s no escaping it.”  

Audio Engineer Evan Olcott claims that backmasking or finding phonetic reversals is purely coincidental in which the spoken or sung phonemes, a fancy word for individual speech sounds, seem to form words.  Our brains make sense of our environment, or they try, any road, and that can mean convincing themselves that garbled sounds are actually words.  There’s a key to claims of backmasking and it’s priming, telling the listener what they’re going to hear.  [sfx example]  

Backmasking is supposed to work subliminally, meaning literally below the threshold of sensation of consciousness.  In theory, subliminal messages deliver an idea that the conscious mind doesn't detect.  For those too young to remember Tyler Durden’s projectionist hobby, the prime example of subliminal messages is a single frame of text slipped into a video, which *has been used on TV by both corporations and political candidates.  Whenever one of these comes to light, there is always much contention, yet thoroughly negligible results.  If you can find a properly organized scientific study that bears out claims that messages you don’t know you saw can influence people’s behavior, call us here in the studio.  Until then, I plant my banner on the hill of It’s Utter Crap.

At the time, Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton said: “It’s a fact that if you play speech backwards, some of it will seem to make sense. So I asked permission to go into a studio and find some perfectly innocent phonetic flukes. The lawyers didn’t want to do it, but I insisted. We bought a copy of the Stained Class album in a local record shop, went into the studio, recorded it to tape, turned it over and played it backwards. Right away we found ‘Hey ma, my chair’s broken’ and ‘Give me a peppermint’ and ‘Help me keep a job’.”

At one point, frontman Rob Halford was called upon to actually sing part of the song while on the stand, which he looks really uncomfortable doing without so much as a metronome to accompany him.  “It tore us up emotionally hearing someone say to the judge and the cameras that this is a band that creates music that kills young people. We accept that some people don’t like heavy metal, but we can’t let them convince us that it’s negative and destructive. Heavy metal is a friend that gives people great pleasure and enjoyment and helps them through hard times.”

Eventually, the case against Judas Priest and their label was dismissed.  The judge did agree that you could hear words other than the printed lyrics, but these were “only discernible after their location had been identified and after the sounds were isolated and amplified. The sounds would not be consciously discernible to the ordinary listener under normal listening conditions”.

And that’s… Slipknot filed a copyright infringement suit claiming Burger King misappropriated their images. The King fired back that Slipknot didn’t invent masked rockers, the post-apocalyptic gas masks aesthetic, or white guys with dreadlocks and, therefore, had no copyrights to claim. Ultimately, I guess they all realized they had more important things to do and the case was dropped.

Sources:

https://johndenver.com/about/biography/#:~:text=He%20then%20became%20a%20leading,during%20take%2Doff%20in%201986.

https://www.ranker.com/list/dee-snyder-speech-parents-music-resource-center/melissa-sartore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_(Danzig_song)

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/dee-snider-pmrc-interview-2015/

https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/musicandsuicide/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/judas-priest-suicide-lawsuit-subliminal-messages/

https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-a-suicide-pact-was-almost-the-end-of-judas-priest

https://pop.inquirer.net/106559/the-auditory-phenomenon-called-backmasking-unmasked

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/backward-message-songs/

https://www.livescience.com/does-subliminal-messaging-work.html

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/an-ozzy-osbourne-fan-commits-suicide

https://www.kerrang.com/ozzy-osbourne-the-suicide-solution-controversy-and-what-the-song-actually-means

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-20-mn-4460-story.html

https://apnews.com/article/05b56baebdc9ceaff3433f50fc941298

https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-a-suicide-pact-was-almost-the-end-of-judas-priest

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1758714.html

https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/287706/that-time-slipknot-sued-burger-king-over-coq-roq-chicken-fries-commercial

https://loudwire.com/remember-when-slipknot-sued-burger-king/

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/backward-message-songs/

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear leather jackets with chains, long hair, and lots of eyeliner! Today we look at three times heavy metal musicians said "We're not gonna take it" and defended the freedom of speech, but were they "Breaking the Law" and just "Howl(ing) at the Moon"?

0:42 Twisted Sister vs Congress

17:07 Reviews and news

19:58 Ozzy Osbourne's Suicide Solution

26:20 Judas Priest, Better Than You

28:28 Subliminal back-masking

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. 

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross.

It's another one of those episodes all about a topic that sounds totally mundane and boring!  Where did apples come from?  Was Johnny Appleseed real?  Why does planting apple seeds lead to disappointment?  And why are some apples considered intellectual property?

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. 

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, Tabletop Audio, and Steve Oxen. 

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What’s more wholesome and iconic than an apple?  In the Bible, Eve ate an apple and now half of us have to have periods and crap.  In fairness to apples, the Bible just says “fruit” and it was Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that declared the fruit was an apple because the Latin word for apple, m-a-l-u-s, is also the word for evil.  There’s the Greek myth of Atalanta, who would only marry the man who beat her in a footrace, so Aphrodite helped a Melanion cheat by dropping golden apples that she stopped to pick up.  An apple fell on the head of Isaac Newton, leading to the discovery of gravity – prior to that, everyone weighed a lot less.  The record label that gave the world the Beatles and one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world use an apple as their logo.  [tiktok] Bonus fact: The Apple computer logo has a bite taken out of it so it isn’t mistaken for a cherry, which I don’t think would really have been so great a danger, and is *not a nod to Alan Turing, the famous mathematician who helped Britain win WWII but was hounded by that same government for being gay and took his own life with a poisoned apple.  Steve Jobs and co repeatedly said they wished it was that clever.

We say something is “as American as apple pie” and even though Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed apples “the American fruit,” the tasty, sweet malus domestica as you’re used to it is about as native to North America as white people.  That’s not to say there was nothing of the genus malus in the new world; there was the crabapple, a small, hard, exceedingly tart apple, which is better used for adding the natural thickener pectin to preserves than anything.

The story of apples actually begins in Kazakhstan, in central Asia east of the Caspian Sea.  Malus sieversii is a wild apple, native to Kazakhstan’s Tian Shan Mountains, where they have been growing over millions of years and where they can still be found fruiting today.  There’s evidence of Paleolithic people harvesting and using native crabapples 750,000 years ago, give or take a week.  The original wild apples grew in ‘apple forests’ at the foot of the snow-tipped mountains, full of different shapes,sizes and flavors, most of them bad.  Kazakhstan is hugely proud of its fruity history.  The former capital city of Almaty claimed the honor of ‘birth place of the apple’ about 100 years ago.  Seems a suitable sobriquet since the name ‘Almaty’ was previously recorded as ‘Alma-Ata’ which translates from Kazakh as ‘Father of the Apples,’ though in Latin Alma means mother or nurturer, which feels more fitting but that’s beside the point.

This origin story was not without controversy, but what am I here for if not to teach the controversy?  In 1929, Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov first traced the apple genome. He identified the primary ancestor of most cultivars of the domesticated apple to be the ancient apple tree: Malus sieversii. There used to be some controversy over this, but it has since been confirmed, through detailed DNA testing, and a full sequencing of the genome, as recently as 2010.

It was probably birds and traveling mammal species that initially transported apple seeds out of Kazakhstan long before humans started to cultivate them – by eating the apples and then pooping out the seeds.  By 1500 BC apple seeds had been carried throughout Europe by the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans.  Bloody Romans.  What have they ever done for us?  I mean apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans really ever done for us?  Oh yeah, apples.  The Romans discovered apples growing in Syria and were central in dispersing them around the world from there, using the Silk Road as a means of transport from East to West.  Romans were a fair hand at grafting, taking a cutting from one apple variety and attaching it to a rootstock (young roots and trunk) from another tree – more on that later.  As such, the Romans started to grow apples in Europe and Britain that were bigger, sweeter, and tastier than any before.  Let’s not forget variety.  There are a whopping 2,170 English cultivars of malus domestica alone.  

Apples arrived in the new world first with the Spanish in the warm bits and then with English settlers in the cooler bits, which when I say it sounds like it was done on purpose.  Ask an American child how apples spread across the nascent US and they’ll tell you it was Johnny Appleseed.  We tend to learn about him around the time we learn about “tall tales,” i.e. American folklore –stories like the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, or John Henry, who could hammer railroad spikes in ahead of a moving train – so it can be a little tricky to be sure if Johnny Appleseed is real or not.  Don’t feel bad, a friend of mine just learned that narwhals were real the other year when she wanted to be one in a cryptid-themed burlesque show. 

Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman, was a real person, though naturally some aspects of his life were mythologized over time.  Details are sparse on his early life, but we know that Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774 and planted his first apple tree trees in the Allegheny Valley in Pennsylvania in his mid-twenties.  He then began traveling west through Ohio, planting as he went.  These were frontier times.  We’re talking about a good 70 years before the transcontinental railroad, so much of the area he went through did not yet have white settlers in it, but Chapman seems to have a knack for predicting where they would settle and planting nurseries in those spots.  Chapman was also a devout follower of the mystical teachings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and he tried to spread Swedenborgian doctrine as well.  People were open to some parts of it, like kindness to all animals, even the unpleasant ones.

The apples that Chapman brought to the frontier were completely distinct from the apples available at any modern grocery store or farmers' market, and they weren't primarily used for eating, but for making hard apple cider.  Cider was a mainstay item for the same reason people drank beer at breakfast, because it was safer than the water supply.  This didn’t actually apply as much in the not-yet-destroyed frontier as it had back in London, but old habits die hard. 

I’ve often wondered why cider is such a staple beverage in the UK, but only resurfaced in the last 20 or so years here in the States, where we have to specify hard cider” because the word “cider” normally means a glorious, thick, flavorful unfiltered apple juice you only get in the fall.  It’s thanks to the colossal failure that was that “noble experiment,” Prohibition, when some people didn’t like drinking and told the rest of us we couldn’t either.   "Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider," writes Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. "In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water."  The cider apples are small and unpleasant to eat, so they were really only good for cider-making.  As such, during Prohibition, cider apple trees were often chopped down by FBI agents, effectively erasing cider, along with Chapman's true history, from American life.

But Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman wouldn’t know anything about all that.  Within his own lifetime, tales of his activities began to circulate.  Most of these focused on his wilderness skills and his remarkable physical endurance.  Chapman cut an eccentric figure.  He wore a sack with holes for his head and arms rather than a proper shirt and after he’d worn through multiple pairs of shoes, he gave up and went barefoot.  Perhaps his most distinct feature, the one always included in drawings, apart from a bag of apple seeds, is his soup pot, just about his only possession, which he wore on his head like a hat.

Starting in 1792, the Ohio Company of Associates made an offer of 100 acres of land to anyone willing to make a homestead on the wilderness beyond Ohio's first permanent settlement.  These homesteads had to be permanent; no pitching a tent and saying ‘where’s my land?’  To prove their homesteads were the real deal, settlers were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years.  Since an average apple tree took roughly ten years to bear fruit, you wouldn’t bother unless you were in it for the long haul.  He might have looked like a crazy hermit, but Chapman realized that if he could do the difficult work of planting these orchards, he could sell them for a handsome profit to incoming frontiersmen.  “On this week’s episode of Frontier Flipper, Johnny plants an orchard…again.”  Wandering from Pennsylvania to Illinois, Chapman would advance just ahead of settlers, cultivating orchards that he would sell them when they arrived, and then head to more undeveloped land.  

That was very clever.  What wasn’t clever was Chapman growing apples from seed at all.  This is the bit about grafting, in case you were jumping around looking for it.  Statistically, at least one person was really waiting for this part.  Apple trees don’t grow “true-to-type,” as WSU tree fruit breeder Kate Evans explains. That means that if you were to plant, for instance, Red Delicious seeds in your backyard, you wouldn’t get Red Delicious apples, not that you’d want to, but more on that later.  Boy, what a tease.  Instead, planting and breeding means matching a scion to a rootstock.  The scion is the fruiting part of the tree – most of what you actually see. The rootstock is everything that goes in the ground, as well as the first few inches of the trunk.  Buds from one variety are attached to the rootstock of another and they grow into a tree that will produce apples.

But matching up the scion and rootstock isn’t enough to grow good apples. You also need a tree to act as a pollinator.  “If you don’t have good pollination, you can end up with misshapen or small unattractive fruit,” says Jim McFerson, director of the Wenatchee extension. Up to ten percent of an orchard can be pollinators, and most today are crabapple trees.  Apple trees cannot normally pollinate themselves.  Unlike, say, peaches, which can and do self-pollinate, predictably producing peaches virtually identical to the parents, the viable seeds (or pips) will produce apples which don’t resemble the parents.  This requirement for pollination is how there have come to be so many varieties in the world, at least 20k and that’s a conservative estimate.  

For context, there are only two varieties of commercial banana and just one kiwifruit. 

Grafting was an established way of propagating apples and was commonly done in New England, so why didn’t Chapman do that?  Apart from the fact that it’s easier to travel with just seeds and planting is faster than graftering, as a member of the Swedenborgian Church, Chapman was forbidden from cutting two trees to cobble together a new tree and it was thought to make the plants suffer.  John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1845, having planted apple trees as far west as Illinois or Iowa.   A century later, in 1948, Disney solidified his legend with an animated version of his life.  The cartoon emphasized his Christian faith, but conveniently left out all the Swedenborgian stuff.

MIDROLL

Speaking of varieties, as well we might, what would you guess the most popular apple variety has been for the past, say, 70 years?  The apple whose name is half-lying but unfortunately it’s lying about the important half, the Red Delicious.  They are the most iconic apple across most of the world.  Don’t believe me, just check emoji packs in other countries.  Their appearance is the whole reason these apples exist, with their deep, even red color and dimpled bottom that look so enticing in the produce department; it’s also the reason they suck and are terrible.  They taste of wet cardboard and have the mouthfeel of resentment.  Their flavor and texture were sacrificed for botanical vanity and shippability.

Even apple growers hate them.  Mike Beck, who tends 80 acres of apples at Uncle John’s Cider Mill, admits he grows some Red Delicious to add color to some of his ciders, but he won’t eat them. 

The Red Delicious was first called the Hawkeye, and one Jesse Hiatt found it growing as a random sapling on his Iowa farm around 1870.  The fruit that eventual tree produced was sweet and fruity, but it wasn’t red, rather red and yellow-striped, like an heirloom tomato.  Of course, back then, those were just called tomatoes.   It was introduced to the market in 1874 and the rights to the Hawkeye apple were sold to the Stark Brothers Nursery, whose owner thought it was the best apple he’d ever tasted.  By 1914, Stark’s renamed the variety Red Delicious, and over time, produced a fruit with less yellow and more red year over year.  It also gained its buxom top-heavy shape and five little feet nubs on the bottom.

As with any product, it took a hefty shovelful of marketing for Red Delicious to gain a following, but gain it did.  Current estimates have Red Delicious being 90% of the apple crop at one point.  That point happened in the 1950s, thanks to that force of nature, changes in buying habits.  PreWWII, people would buy food right from the farm or at farmers markets, then the modern grocery store, with its cold storage, and the refrigerated truck courtesy of Frederick Jones.  Bigger stores need to move more product and a big pyramid of shiny, sports car red apples by the front window will really bring the punters in.  Growers could sell them to packers, who in turn sold them to those grocery store chains, which also fueled a change in their taste.  Orchardists bred and crossbreed the Red Delicious to get that perfect shape and color, uniformity and resilience to handling and shipping; they just left off tiny considerations, very minor concessions really, like taste and texture.

But there’s change a-foot again.  People began to realize you can have an apple in your pack lunch or the big bowl at the fancy hotel reception desk that you’d actually want to eat.  Now we’re all about those Sweet Tangos, Braseburns, and Honeycrips.  Unwilling or unable to admit defeat, however, the Red Delicious is still out there.  But like a lot of has-beens, its seeing more success abroad than at home, and they’re exported to the western Pacific Rim, Mexico and parts of Europe.   

Apart from random saplings popping up randomly, new varieties of apples take a lot of people a lot of time and effort, to say nothing of a robust research & development budget.  Take Washington State University Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center, for example.  In 1981, now-retired horticulturist Bruce Barritt set out to create an apple bred for flavor and long storage instead of appearance, to compete with the Fuji from Japan and the Gala from New Zealand.  Like breeding animals, you start with two parents with known traits, then selectively breed for the ones you want over the course of several generations.  You have to have the patience of a Buddhist monk, since apple trees take four to five years to bear fruit and you know whether or not it worked.  Barritt needed that patience to eventually create the apple that actually made mainstream, even international, news in 2019 – the Cosmic Crisp.  These are no small potatoes, either.  There’s probably a French language joke in there.  The marketing budget alone is $10 million.  A $10mil marketing budget….for an apple.  

Cosmic Crisps are mostly a dark-ish red with yellowy speckles reminiscent of stars.  The website, did I mention it has its own website, says [commercial read] “The large, juicy apple has a remarkably firm and crisp texture. Some say it snaps when you bite into it!  The Cosmic Crisp® flavor profile is the perfect balance of sweet and tart, making it ideal for snacking, baking, cooking, juicing or any other way you like to enjoy apples.”  Hire me for voiceovers at moxielabouche.com for lightning-fast voiceovers because I was one time hit by lightning.

The first Cosmic Crisp seed began in 1997 with pollen from a Honeycrisp flower, applied by hand to the stigma of an Enterprise.  Racy stuff.  Honeycrisp as we know are lovely and Enterprise apples were known for disease-resistance and long storage life.  Storage life is important because an apple has to be as good in late spring as it was when it was picked in the fall, as most to all of the apples you buy are.  Yep, all apples are picked at once and sold for months to come.  Holding up in winter storage is one of malus domestica’s best features.  If that bothers you on principle, though, don’t look up harvesting oranges for juice – it’s positively depressing.   

After two years of greenhouse germination, the very first Cosmic Crisp trees were planted, and a few years later after that, fruit happened.  That was when, according to Barritt, the real work began.  He’d go through the orchard, randomly picking apples and taking a bite. “Most were terrible, but when I found one with good texture and flavor, I’d pick 10 or 20 of them. Then I put them in cold storage to see how they would hold up after a few months,” he told PopSci in 2018.  Barritt’s team would compare the apples for crispness, acidity, firmness, how well it stored, and on and on anon, to determine which trees to cross with which and start the cycle all over again.  They weren’t testing only Honeycrisp and Enterprise, but lots of crisp varieties – Honeycrisp is just the one that worked.  It took until 2017, a full 20 years after the first seeds went in the ground, for Cosmic Crisp trees to become available to growers, to say nothing of the fruit reaching the public.  The project actually outlived Barritt’s participation, when he retired back in 2008 and turned everything over to WSU horticulture professor Kate Evans.

There’s still the question of why, why spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars to create a new apple?  This wasn’t about developing a product to sell and make money, it was about saving an entire region’s industry.  The pacific northwest farmed Red Delicious apples like there was no tomorrow and in the 90’s, tomorrow got real uncertain.  In the last three years of the decade, farmers lost around $760mil with fields full of fruit fewer and fewer folks wanted to fork over their funds for.  That was the problem that Barritt set out to solve.  They needed an apple that had it all - movie star good looks, full of flavor with a crunchy bit.  By the end of 2019, Washington farmers were growing 12,000 acres of Cosmic Crisp trees and there’s talk of Cosmic Crisp’s having a strong chance at taking over the market.

If you have a bit of land and want to grow your own Cosmic Crisp, you going to have to wait even longer than usual.  It’s only available to grower in WA for the first ten years to give the growers an advantage.  Remember, you can’t plant seeds and get a tree that gives you fruit like the one you ate to get the seeds.  Don’t worry, just five more years.  

But you can’t, like, own a tree man.  I can but that’s because I’m not a penniless hippie.  Sorry, Futurama moment, but the point still stands.  Because this is America and we’ve never seen a person, place, thing, or idea we didn’t want to legally own and monetize.  We’re talking about patents and before I go any further, do you have any idea what a pain it is to search for apple patents and *not get results about Apple the company.  According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, “a plant patent is granted …to an inventor … who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. The grant, which lasts for 20 years from the date of filing the application, protects the inventor’s right to exclude others from asexually reproducing, selling, or using the plant so reproduced.”  So if you make a variety of plant that no one else has ever made, or at least no one has patented, you have ultra-dibs for 20 and no one else is supposed to breed, sell, or do anything else with plants of that variety.

Plant patents became a thing in the early 1930’s, a fine time in American agriculture *sough*dustbowl*cough* first granted to Henry Bosenberg for a CLIMBING OR TRAILING ROSE (USPP1 P).  Since then, thousands of plant patents have been granted, and that includes apples.  Apples as intellectual property.  The beloved Honeycrisp was patented in the late 1980’s by the University of Minnesota.  The Honeycrisp blossomed in popularity, pun allowed, among consumers, both grocery shoppers and growers.  Nurseries would sell the trees to anyone who called and ordered one, but since it was patented, buuuut growers would have to pay a royalty of one dollar per tree to the University of Minnesota until the patent has expired.  With an average size of 50 acres per orchard and 36 trees per acre, that only comes to $1800, which isn’t too, too bad.  A much tighter rein was kept on University of Minnesota’s patented MINNEISKA, which produces the SweeTango apple.  Only a small group of apple growers has been given license to grow this variety of apple and they have to pay royalties as well.  UM also has multiple trademarks registered, so anyone who tries to sell an apple under that name or a similar one may find themselves in court.  Now how about them apples?  Hey, at least I waited until the end.

Sources:

https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/horne-creek-farm/southern-heritage-apple-orchard/apples/apple-history/origins-apples

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-mysterious-origin-of-the-sweet-apple

https://www.theorchardproject.org.uk/blog/where-do-apples-come-from/

https://www.britannica.com/story/was-johnny-appleseed-a-real-person

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appleseed-brought-applesand-booze-american-frontier-180953263/

https://www.nwpb.org/2017/05/03/want-to-grow-an-apple-tree-dont-start-with-apple-seeds/

https://www.popsci.com/story/diy/cosmic-crisp-apple-guide/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/red-delicious-apples-suck_n_5b630199e4b0b15abaa061af

https://suiter.com/how-do-you-like-them-apples-enough-to-patent-them/

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/30/526069512/paradise-lost-how-the-apple-became-the-forbidden-fruit

https://www.businessinsider.com/cosmic-crisp-apple-washington-state-scientists-2020-11

https://suiter.com/how-do-you-like-them-apples-enough-to-patent-them/

People used to say "If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you," but they really should have said, "I have some lovely acres in the Republic of Poyais you can buy, but you have to act now!" Presenting one of my favorite con artists ever, the man who declared himself prince of a South American country that didn't exist, Gregor MacGregor (yes, that's really his name).

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Remember back in episode 155, Hate to Burst your Bubble, we talked about, among other things, the Florida real estate boom and bust of the 1920s? It’s where we get the phrase, “if you believe that, I have some real estate in Florida to sell you.” 100 years before that, we could have been saying, “I have some acreage in Poyais to sell you.” Never been to Poyais? Trust me, it’s amazing. The weather is always perfect, sunny and warm. Located along the eastern coast of present-day Nicaragua and Honduras, the soil of Poyais is so fertile, you can get three harvests of corn a year. The trees are heavy with fruit and the forests teem with entrees in the form of game animals. If you look into the rivers, you’ll not only see water cleaner and more pure than you’ve ever seen in your life and more fish than you could hope to catch, but in the river bed, the sparkle of gold fills your eyes, not from flecks and dust, but nuggets as big as walnuts, just laying there, waiting for you to scoop them up. The only thing missing is settlers to develop and leverage its resources to the fullest. Wanna get your share? Better hurry; hundreds of people are investing all their savings in a piece of the perfect Poyais. All you have to do is [] to the Cazique or prince. Who is the prince of this equatorial new world paradise? A Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor.  

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There are four Sundays a month, but more than a dozen days we call "Black Sunday." Here are three -- two forces of nature and one parade of schadenfreude.

02:42 Black Blizzard

12:45 Bondi Beach

24:42 Disneyland

Quote reader: Vlado from It's Not Rocket Surgery

Promo: Remnant Stew

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Who you gonna believe -- me or your lying eyes? Today we look at court cases where people try to avoid taxes by arguing that things aren't the things that they clearly are.

00:50 Tomato

08:18 Jaffa Cakes

17:48 Hydrox vs Oreo

37:40 X-Men

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Our Patrons have a nose for good topics, so today we 

07:04 Smells and space 

14:40 Ham-sniffer

21:17 It's the pits

30:48 Aromatherapy

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

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Music: Kevin MacLeod, and The Mini Vandals.

 Sources:

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/premium-iberian-ham-sniffers-are-tired-from-sniffing-so-much-ham

https://www.rd.com/article/outer-space-smell/

https://www.gentside.co.uk/food/spains-ham-sniffers-prepare-for-a-hectic-season-sniffing-800-hams-daily_art8817.html

https://www.rd.com/article/outer-space-smell/

https://www.rd.com/list/foods-banned-space/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EBdhpSh7_I&ab_channel=Mashable

https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/emergency/chemical_terrorism/cyanide_tech.htm

https://science.howstuffworks.com/nasas-sniffer-job.htm

https://theconversation.com/six-curious-facts-about-smell-128533

https://www.verywellmind.com/why-do-we-associate-memories-so-strongly-with-specific-smells-5203963

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/smell-disorders

https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-food-taste-bad-on-airplanes.html

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/sfa/aac/silver-snoopy-award

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/smell-disorders#2

https://theplaidzebra.com/odour-tester-chocolate-taster-strange-careers-diverge-traditional-9-5/

https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/coverstories/this-job-stinks-from-one-who-knows/article_66ce8eb0-7066-51be-8081-be9bcc24c8be.html

https://www.statista.com/topics/5174/essential-oils/

https://www.verywellmind.com/why-do-we-associate-memories-so-strongly-with-specific-smells-5203963

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-smelling-test-the-genetics-of-olfaction-2192370.html

https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/blog/essential-oils-cats/

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health/expert-answers/aromatherapy/faq-20058566

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Why did no one tell me about Moms Mabley?!! Hear about her and other 'living loud and proud' ladies (Dorothy Parker, Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead) on this International Women's Day.

01:00 Tallulah Bankhead

13:00 Mae West

23:00 Moms Mabley

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

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Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. and/or Chris Haugen.

Sources:

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/204532%7C103917/Mae-West/#biography

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mae-West

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/52283/13-things-you-might-not-know-about-mae-west

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/04/this-day-in-history-mae-west-is-sentenced-to-10-days-in-prison-for-writing-directing-and-performing-in-the-broadway-play-sex/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tallulah-Bankhead

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/05/real-cruella-de-vil-tallulah-bankhead

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/09/theater/theater-the-pain-behind-the-laughter-of-moms-mabley.html

https://dorothyparker.com/gallery/biography

https://bookshop.org/books/your-brain-on-facts-things-you-didn-t-know-things-you-thought-you-knew-and-things-you-never-knew-you-never-knew-trivia-quizzes-fun-fa/9781642502534?aid=14459&listref=books-based-on-podcasts

https://www.mamamia.com.au/tallulah-bankhead-cruella/

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