Rock N Roll Archaeology

Remembering the late great Jeff Beck, the guitarist’s guitarist. An innovator and an iconoclast with a bold experimental spirit, Jeff left his unique stamp on hundreds of great songs.

Songs

• Jeff Beck: “Diamond Dust,” from Blow By Blow
• Jeff Beck: “Blue Wind,” from Wired
• The Yardbirds: “Stroll On,” from the soundtrack to Blow Up
• Jeff Beck with Bones UK: “The Revolution Will Be Televised” from Loud Hailer
• Jeff Beck: “Freeway Jam,” from Blow by Blow
• Bill Haley and The Comets: “Rock Around the Clock,” single released 1955
• Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen: “Hot Rod Lincoln” from Lost in the Ozone
• Stevie Wonder: “Looking for Another Pure Love,” from Talking Book
• Jeff Beck, “Thelonius,” from Blow by Blow
• Jeff Beck, “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” from Blow by BlowCredits
• Author Dennis Hartley voiced by Doug Herzog

In Memoriam

• Chip Isaac tribute charity: Bay Area Border Relief. https://www.bayareaborderrelief.org/

Podcasts

• Rock N Roll Archaeology, Chapter 21: Guitarmageddon
• Rock N Roll Archaeology, Chapter 8: Meet the Beatles, Part 2
• Deeper Digs in Rock: Bones UK

Books

• Martin Power, Hot Wired Guitar:The Life of Jeff Beck, 2014

Online Sources

• The Alchemist: RIP Jeff Beck – Digby's HullabalooJeff Beck's favourite guitar solos
• How Jeff Beck made Stevie Wonder go No. 1 with 'Superstition'

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Content warning: Here at RNRA, we don’t hide our views. At all. But when it comes to politics, we try not to be in-your-face about it either. Our little slogan is “Just tell the story, and the point will get made.”This time though, we’re a little more overt, we’re letting it rip just a little bit. This particular burr has been under our saddle for a while now.Now: on with the show.

Summer Time is Shorts Time! RNRA Shorts, that is!

So...here’s a thing. Sometimes we visit Right Wing World online, that’s usually how it starts.On these expeditions we’ll sometimes run into some whinging about “Woke Progressives” cancelling right wing culture and entertainment, or just griping in general about perceived left/liberal bias in popular culture.They’re not totally wrong about that. They’re right, just for the wrong reasons, and we’ll explain why.It’s not just complaining they do. We also see a lot of co-opting and outright stealing. And when they take Rock music and culture and dishonestly try to repurpose it, try to make it serve the conservative agenda, well...unintentional hilarity ensues.So we’ll do some roasting, but we’ll also do some thinking out loud, talk a little about the how and why, and even delve into the deeper history of...the Art of the Steal.

Enjoy!

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Songs

Parliament Funkadelic: “One Nation Under A Groove”

Thomas Dolby: “Pulp Culture”

Ted Nugent: “Stranglehold”

Ted Nugent: “Hey Baby”

They Might Be Giants: “Your Racist Friend”

Neil Young: “Rockin’ in the Free World”

Woody Guthrie: “This Land is Your Land”

Trey Parker and Matt Stone: “America, Fuck Yeah”

Toby Keith: “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue”

Living Colour: “Cult of Personality”

Stevie Wonder: “He’s Misstra Know It All”

Green Day: “American Idiot”

Sources

Apocalypse Now: “Mangoes and Tigers” Scene (Retrieved from YouTube)

Roy Edroso Breaks it Down Substack (Paywalled. Roy writes a lot about this issue, and we think he’s really astute–and hilarious.)

The Five Most Repellent Things Ted Nugent Has Ever Done | Rocks Off

Music News: Why can't musicians get politicians to stop playing their songs?

The President’s Shock at the Rows of Empty Seats in Tulsa - The New York Times

American Cringe: Why can’t the contemporary right make art?

Episode 5: The Ballad of Bob and J.R. — Pantheon Podcasts

A Defence of Poetry

Voice Talent

Darryl Alber as blogger Cameron Summers

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We start with a tragedy, then a cautionary tale of the world not ready for a band. We then find more positive inspiration from an artist who delivers a huge seller. We end with a legend.

Janis Joplin dies just before releasing her magnum opus, “Pearl.” A band called Fanny is ready to rock, but a culture poisoned by the patriarchy isn’t yet ready to accept them. Carole King makes Tapestry, a sincere, modest, and deeply personal album that hits huge and becomes a milestone for women. We complete the story with a profile of one of the giants of 20th Century Music, Joni Mitchell. We discuss her artistic and commercial peak in the early 70s with “Blue,” “For the Roses,” and “Court and Spark.” We admire all of these women for kicking down the door, and we celebrate the progress we’ve made since them, but there is still a long way to go.

Now for some general remarks about the research and writing.

To the best of our ability, we tried to center women in this chapter. We’ll leave it to the listener to decide how we did with that.

There’s a diversity of opinion about this, but we think it’s fair to say the second wave of feminism hits the crest during the period we are covering, and it is not at all a coincidence that women really start to make big and important contributions to Rock Music right around this time too.

Roe vs Wade was decided right around here, about fifty years ago. We are painfully aware of the US Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe, stripping many millions of American women of their fundamental human rights to bodily autonomy and medical privacy.

As we move forward with our chapters, we will document that half century of regressive backlash and how it got us here; it’s part of the story. Like we often say, Rock N Roll reflects back on, interacts with, and affects the larger society. And vice versa. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, it seemed like the progress would be permanent, and that more progress was on the way. Some of us were naive enough to believe that. We would do well now to remember the words of the anti slavery activist Frederick Douglass, way back in 1857:

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Songs

• Janis Joplin: “Move Over,” from Pearl, 1971
• Janis Joplin: “Mercedes Benz,” from Pearl, 1971
• Janis Joplin: “A Woman Left Lonely,” from Pearl, 1971
• Janis Joplin: “Buried Alive in the Blues,” from Pearl, 1971
• Janis Joplin: “Pearl,” from Pearl, 1971
• Janis Joplin: “Get it While You Can,” from Pearl, 1971
• Janis Joplin: “Me & Bobby McGee,” from Pearl, 1971
• Fanny: “Blind Alley,” from Fanny Hill, 1972
• Fanny: “Hey Bulldog,” from Fanny Hill, 1972
• Fanny: “Ain’t That Peculiar,” from Fanny Hill, 1972
• Fanny: “Cat Fever,” from Charity Ball, 1971
• Fanny, “Butter Boy,” from Rock and Roll Survivors, 1974

Collage of Carole King Songs:

1. One Fine Day - Chiffons
2. Will You Love Me Tomorrow - The Shirelles
3. The Locomotion - Little Eva
4. I’m Into Something Good - Herman’s Hermits
5. Pleasant Valley Sunday - The Monkees
6. Up on the Roof - Drifters
7. Don’t Bring Me Down - The Animals
8. Take Care Good Care of My Baby - Bobby Vee
9. Chains - Beatles
10. Just Once in My Life - Righteous Brothers.
11. Go Away Little Girl - Steve Lawrence
12. Oh No Not My Baby - Dusty Springfield
13. One Fine Day - Carole King

• Carole King: “You’ve Got a Friend,” from Tapestry, 1971
• Carole King: “I Feel the Earth Move, from Tapestry, 1971
• Carole King: “It’s Too Late,” from Tapestry, 1971
• Carole King: “Beautiful,” from Tapestry, 1971
• Carole King: “So Far Away,” from Tapestry, 1971
• Carole King, “Tapestry,” from Tapestry, 1971
• Joni Mitchell, “California,” from Blue, 1971
• Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game,” from Clouds, 1970
• Joni Mitchell, “All I Want,” from Blue, 1971
• Joni Mitchell, “You Turn Me on I’m a Radio, from For The Roses, 1972
• Joni Mitchell, “Free Man in Paris,” from Court and Spark, 1973
• Joni Mitchell, “Raised on Robbery,” from Miles of Aisles, 1974
• Joni Mitchell (with The Band), “Coyote,” from The Last Waltz, 1978
• Herbie Hancock (with Wayne Shorter, and Corrinne Bailey Rae), “River” from River: The Joni Letters, 2007
• Joni Mitchell: “Help Me,” from Court and Spark, 1973

Voice Talent

• Richard Evans as L.A. County Coroner
• Stephanie Pena as Alice Echols
• Stephanie Meyers as the voice of Creem Magazine
• Amanda Morck as Meredith Ochs
• Christy Alexander Hallberg as the voice of th...

We’re putting down a marker with this episode, and the follow-up: the highest highs and the lowest lows of the entire Rock Era occurred in 1969. It’s a year so big, we had to cut it in two, in order to serve it up properly.

We start in January, with The Beatles on The Roof, a 42-minute outdoor concert that definitely warmed up the neighborhood of Mayfair, London, England. Then we catch up with their friends and rivals, The Rolling Stones.

The Stones broke out HUGE in 68 and 69, the beginning of an incredible five-year run: from Beggars Banquet on through to Exile On Main Street. Peak Stones, the sweet spot for the World’s Greatest Rock N Roll Band.

Brian Jones is out, Mick Taylor is in. We talk about how that happened, and how it impacted the Stones’ sound and attitude. Another influence starts seeping in: American Country Music, thanks to Keith’s new best buddy, Gram Parsons.

Brian’s tragic--and still unexplained--demise changes the Hyde Park Concert from a coming-out party into a memorial service. Emotion and conviction carry the day, and Hyde Park sets a very high and hopeful bar; it’s an early example of How To Successfully Pull Off A Really Big Concert.

During that “Moon-Crazy Summer” of 1969, NASA pulls off something really big. It’s the single greatest feat--so far--of human exploration: The Apollo 11 mission to the moon and back. We look at the moon landing through the Rock N Roll lens; we’ll talk about space travel, science fiction, and fantasy...in books, film, television, and most of all, in Rock Music.

Then David Bowie, with his lifelong knack for being ahead of his time, said take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

And we did.

And in just a short time we got used to it, became a little jaded about it.

That comes later. Here and now in the summer of 1969; stardust, golden, billion year old carbon...got to get ourselves back to the garden.

We’ll open Part Two at Yasgur’s Farm in upstate New York, and we’ll light a candle in the rain.

Head over to Pantheon Podcasts for full show notes.

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