Ongoing History of New Music

The music world went a little weird on February 13, 2011…and I remember it very, very well because I was in a hotel room in Vancouver with nothing to do but watch TV…I think I was coming back from a speaking thing in Victoria and my flight home had been cancelled… I ordered up a club sandwich from room service and lay on the bed watching the 53rd Grammy awards…all the usual suspects were there…lady gaga, whose album “the fame monster” had been, well, a monster…six nominations, including best album… Katy Perry…seven nominations for her “Teenage Dream” album…Eminem was back…Rihanna had a bunch of nominations…there was buzz about Justin Bieber, Jay Z, Alicia Keys, Bruno Mars, Lady Antebellum…. Finally, after more than three hours of awards and speeches and performances, it was time to present album of the year…the presenter was Barbra Streisand, who, earlier in the evening, was feted with the “musicares person of the year” honour—a big deal… She stepped onstage with the envelope….the crowd buzzed… “it’s gonna be Katy Perry” ….”No way! They’re gonna give it to Eminem!...”Are you crazy? Lady Gaga has this sewn up”… Babs opened the envelope and—well, just listen… Didn’t she sound so confused?...let’s listen again…and note the long pause as she stares at the printing on the card as if she doesn’t know what to do… Twitter exploded…I mean, it just melted down with indignation, outrage and hate…“The Suburbs?”…by who?...what’s an “Arcade Fire?….never heard of them…you people are Grammy…how come I don’t know who they are?....no one knows who they are…who the hell is Arcade Fire!” It was epic....and for those who still don’t get it, hang on…we can fix things for you…or at least try to… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve ever been responsible for managing a group of people, you’ll understand when I say, “humans are complicated” …as much life experience you may have, you will always, always encounter folks who have gone through lives that are much different from yours… You consider your life normal…they consider their lives normal, too…but the gulf between these senses of what’s “normal” can be huge… It all depends on your upbringing, your current environment, your family life and your state of mind…no judgements here: those are all statements of fact… When you’re a rock star, the definition of “normal” changes…living in your celebrity bubble skews things…when compared to civilians, things can quickly become abnormal—although because of your bubble, you don’t realize it…it’s like as usually, even though those on the outside find your life very weird… But even by the standards of rock star normal—which pretty weird to begin with—the life of Scott Weiland was off the charts…I mean, when a guy like slash takes you aside and says “dude, I’m worried. You’d better take it easy”—you know that you’re dealing with some extraordinary circumstances… This is the life and death of Scott Weiland, part 3…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all react differently when we hear that a celebrity has died…if it’s someone whose work has managed to touch us in a particular way, the loss can really hurt… Our idols aren’t supposed to be life-sized…they’re something bigger than that…maybe not immortal, but somehow not subject to the day-to-day things we have to deal with…. It really, really bothered me when Joey Ramone died…it hurt when Kurt killed himself…and when Amy Winehouse OD-ed, it affected me even though I wasn’t what you’d call a big fan… A lot of people were similarly affected by the death of Scott Weiland…if you grew up in the 90s, his was one of the great voices of that era….and even though you knew about all his problems—drugs, alcohol, mental health issues and all the rest of it—you didn’t want to believe that things might end up going very badly for him…but deep down… So, what happened with him?...and I’m not just talking about his final days…I mean “what happened to him over the years that put him on this path towards dying in the back of a tour bus?”…. As I said when we started this investigation, this is going to take a while…this is Scott Weiland, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The layout of a tour bus is standard…first, you have the driver’s compartment…behind that is an area where everyone can hang out…a couple of tables, some seating, a fridge, a stove, a microwave and an audio-video system connected to a big-screen TV… Next is a hallway lined with sleeping bunks, usually about three per side…after that, a bathroom and maybe some shower facilities…and finally, we come to the rear bedroom… Here you’ll find a double bed, more seating, another TV and few more amenities… Sometime on December 3, 2015, Scott Weiland entered the back bedroom on his tour bus, which was parked outside a country inn and suites hotel northwest of Minneapolis…he wanted to rest up before that night’s show at the medina ballroom that night…he never came out alive… After 8:00 that night, police were called…there were reports of an unresponsive male, perhaps suffering from an overdose…it was Weiland—and by the time help arrived, he was long dead… The fact that scot weiland had died wasn’t the biggest surprise…it was that he had managed to live to 48…the man lived—and let’s be charitable—a colourful life…unfortunately, those colours were pretty dark… And he was well aware of it…this is a guy who published an autobiography until the title “not dead yet and not for sale”…the first-ever stone temple pilots single was called “dead & bloated,” which features the lines “I am smellin’ like the rose that someone gave me on my birthday deathbed”…Scott was always well aware that he wasn’t living the safest kind of life… At the same time, though, Scott Weiland was one of the great voices to emerge out of the 90s…he was up there with Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley and Eddie Vedder… But who was he?...and how did it eventually come to end in the back of a tour bus in snowy Minnesota?...let’s do what we can to find out… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my great accomplishments of the year was the construction of a new home office…after 12 years working on this program in a converted bedroom, I built a full-feature workspace in the basement… Oh, it’s lovely…for the first time since I started doing this program in 1993, all my stuff is in one place…all the computers, all the CD’s and vinyl and books and magazines are all together…it’s a marvelously efficient workspace… This, however, was not an easy project…renovations being what they are, it took a full ten weeks longer than projected…permits, trades, materials—the usual problems…and then there was the matter of all the stuff I had scattered about the house… I feel terrible for Matt and Elisha…they were a couple of interns who had to haul thousands of books—most of them hardcover—out of storage and down into the basement where they had to be sorted by topic, alphabetized and neatly put on the shelves…mat had the horrible duty of filing hundreds of CD’s that I had neglected for a couple of years… And then there were dozens of bankers’ boxes, many filled with forgotten research notes and newspaper clippings…which brings me to this: collectively, me and the interns uncovered a lot of material that has never been used on an ongoing history program…it would be a shame to let all that knowledge go to waste, wouldn’t it?... So here we go…this is third annual office cleanout…it’s another edition of 60 mind-blowing facts about music in 60 minutes… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If anyone were to look at Linkin Park around 2011, there no reason to think that anything was going wrong… In the ten years since the band was formed, they’d sold over 80 million albums…they had millions of fans all over the world…they were in firm control of their career, planning to release a new album every 18 months or so, a schedule they, not the record label, set out… Plus they had time to indulge in all kinds of side projects, some musical, some not—like remix albums, soundtracks, even movies…DJ Joe Hahn had started to direct films …not a bad position to be for a bunch of guys still in their 30s, right?... That was the view from the outside…and for the most part, that rosey view was correct…but if anyone had taken the time to really get to know Chester Bennington, there might have been some warning signs…they would have been subtle, slow-burning, almost undetectable…but in hindsight, something was going on inside, something that would end tragically about six years later… This is the third and final part of our remembrance of Chester Bennington… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a musician dies, there’s a light that goes out in fans…it’s not like we knew this person, you know, personally…but it might feel that we did…that’s because the art they created expressed feelings and concepts and thoughts that we couldn’t articulate ourselves…it’s through their music that we are able to learn more about ourselves…that’s why we need artists… And we often don’t realize how deeply their music affected us and in what ways it has worked into our lives and psyches until that person is gone… We saw this when bowie died...it happened when prince left us…same thing with Chris Cornell and Gord Downie and any other musician you wanna mention…and it happened again when Chester Bennington died… Linkin Park sold tens of millions of records, many on the strength of Chester’s abilities to express how he felt, feelings that resonated with so many others…and now that he’s gone, we’re looking at how he did that on his own, with Linkin Park and with some of his side projects… This is remembering Chester Bennington, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the news first came down on the afternoon of Thursday, July 20, 2017, maybe your reaction was the same as me… “another celebrity death hoax…it’s gotta be because this doesn’t make sense”…but it as the minutes ticked by, it was soon obvious that it wasn’t a hoax…but it still didn’t make sense… By the end of the day, everything was confirmed…Chester Bennington, vocalist with Linkin Park, was not only dead, but dead by his own hand…what?... This guy was the frontman for a band that has sold somewhere around 100 million records...he was drafted in to sing for Stone Temple Pilots for a couple of years…he having fun with a couple of side projects…he dabbled in acting…and he had a loving family with six—six—kids… What happened?...and even though the news came during a long string of musician deaths, this one was one of the most shocking…totally unexpected… Let’s see if we can’t sort out what we can…and as we do, we’ll remember Chester Bennington…this is part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As someone who churns out tens of thousands of words a week—everything from emails to blog posts to business documents to these radio scripts—I’ve developed a fascination with words and, for whatever reason, names…especially the origins of names… The study of word origins is “etymology”…and the study of name origins is “onomastics”… Take, for example the name Ignatius…this is an ancient name dating back to the Etruscans, the civilization before the romans…a lot of dudes were named “Ignatius” over the centuries… When Spanish came along, it morphed into Ignacio, which was often abbreviated to “Nacho”…fast-forward to 1943…Ignacio Anaya lived in Piedras Negras, which is just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, home to a U.S. military base… One night some American soldiers came to his restaurant looking for something to eat…with almost nothing in the kitchen, he wiped something up featuring deep-friend tortillas cut into triangles, covered in cheese and served pickled jalapeno peppers…the soldiers loved the improvised snack so much that they named it after their host: Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya… But there’s another part to the Ignatius story….back over in Europe in Bavaria, Ignatius transformed into Ignatz…the short form for that was “Nazi”…this is how “Nazi” came to denote a backwards peasant from the Bavarian countryside… This is the same part of Germany that gave rise to a political party called “nationalsocializmus” led by a guy called Adolph Hitler….those who thought Hitler was a clown, abbreviated “nationalsocializmus” to “Nazi” as a way of calling the party a bunch of boobs…it was a taunt, an insult… But Hilter and his crew turned everything around and took the term “Nazi” as their own and—well, things turned out badly for the planet… But isn’t that kind of cool?...there’s a connection between something as diverse as German fascists and a plate of junk food that’s great for hangovers… What if we apply this sort of scholarly etymological and onomastical research to the names of musical groups?...let’s do that…hang on…a lot of data is about to come your way… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not that long ago, if you wanted to make an album, you needed rent a big, expensive recording studio…in addition to paying an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly rate, you need to pay for a producer, an engineer or two, all the recording tape you used and any catering that was required…it could get very expensive very quickly… But that was okay because back then, the music industry was awash in money…your label would happily advance you the money to cover your recording costs because they were just going to take it out of profits derived from the future sales of that album… Because there was so much money to be made, a lot of big, expensive recording studios were built…some were in big centres like New York, L.A., and London…others were chateaus out in the countryside or maybe on an exotic island…even a medium-sized city could boast half a dozen solid studios…. These days, it’s possible to make a very good-sounding album on a laptop in your bedroom…heck, I know of some people who have made credible-sounding records on their smart phones… But this doesn’t mean that big-time recording studios are now irrelevant…there are some things, some sounds and some needs that require a dedicated recording studio environment…but then there are those facilities that have been forced to shut down, killed by the massive changes to the music industry and the high cost of maintaining a studio when bookings are down… Still, there’s something really, really cool about recording studios, places where Legendary songs and iconic albums were created…and I’d like to take you on a tour some of these studios and listen to some of the music that was made within those walls…some of these places are still with us while some are only memories… Legendary recording studios, past and present… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices