Ongoing History of New Music

The last few years have been rough for music fans…Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Prince and a dozen more have left us…2017 has also had its share of loss…Chuck Berry…Gregg Allman…Chris Cornell—and now Chester Bennington of Linkin Park…  A new ongoing history show about Linkin Park is on the schedule for the fall…but in light of the events of the past week, we’ve pulled out an older show dating to 2008…this tells the story of Chester and Linkin Park to that point… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being in a band seems straightforward…you pick up some instruments and start playing…but it’s much more complicated than that…the music that you end up making is influenced by so many outside forces…where you grew up…what music you listened to as a kid…what music you listen to now…the city in which you’re writing songs…the city in which you’re recording those songs… All these factors (and more!) Affect the music you make…but how?...and fans love this stuff…they love to know what other bands influenced their favorite musicians…it’s all part of the understanding and discovery of music… The Foo Fighters know this…and they set out to document all the stuff that goes into one particular album: Sonic Highways…eight songs recorded in eight different cities…and not only did they make a record, but they made an HBO tv series documenting the whole process… Here’s how it worked:  the band set up in a new city for each of the eight songs on the record…they’d hang out, talk with musicians from that city…and then at the end of the week, Dave would sit down with a transcription of the conversations he’d had and then sort of cut’n’paste words and phrases from those conversations into what would become the lyrics for that song…and then the band would get to work on the song… It was a very, very interesting way to make a record—and the process also laid bare the influences that went into writing these songs as well as digging into the influences that made each member of the foo fighters who they are as musicians and who they are as people… I had a chance to talk to the whole band about all the different things that make the Foo Fighters the Foo Fighters… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all done something that we’ve later regretted...it seemed so right at the time, you know? In hindsight, though, it turned out to be really, really dumb… Maybe we were misinformed or lacking all the information we needed…maybe it was emotion or ego that prompted us down that path… or maybe we just disobey what our gut was telling us… “Hey! What’s that big wooden horse outside the city gates! Let’s bring it inside!”…that kind of thing… Prohibition…New Coke…the Ford Edsel…the U.S. invasion of Iraq…. Or the doofuses at mars refusing to allow M&M’s to be used in the movie “ET”…that’s why Elliott ended up using Reese’s Pieces… Listen, everyone has regrets, right?…the best we can do is minimize the number we have...so how can we do that?...the first thing we can do is study the mistakes of other people…if Hitler had learned anything from Napoleon and not decided to invade Russia during the winter, what kind of world would we be living in now? Then there all the bad decisions we’ve seen in the music industry…Elvis agreeing to do all those bad movies…Decca turning down a chance to sign The Beatles…Van Halen hiring Gary Cherone… Those are the famous boneheaded moves…but what about the worst career moves in the history of Alt-Rock?...glad you asked…here are ten of them…listen and learn… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are many ways to clear or expand your mind to allow creativity to flow, stress to dissipate and peace to descend on the mind and body…exercise, meditation, prayer…but that takes exertion, practice and devotion…what if there was a simpler way? Well, there is…drugs…it’s not the smartest way to solve your problems, but for centuries and centuries, drugs have worked for artists… We can go all the way back to cave paintings made in France, Spain, Italy, southern Africa and the Americas 50,000 years ago that some anthropologists claim were made after these ancient artists took drugs, probably some kind of hallucinogenic mushrooms or plant extract…  Why do scientists think that? because many of these paintings feature specific geometric shapes and images that scientists say are common visions resulting from the ingestion of certain types of chemicals…in other words, some of humankinds first artists were junkies… Art and genius drugs have gone together ever since—not always, but more than you might realize… Vincent van Gogh?...he took digitalis for his epilepsy, which caused him to see everything with a slightly yellowish hue…think about that the next time you look at one of his paintings …Picasso liked hash…some say his cubist period was all about smoking hash… Would Friedrich Nietzsche have become a famous philosopher without his opium?...Thomas Edison enjoyed cocaine elixirs…how would World War II have turned out if Winston Churchill wasn’t wired on amphetamines? Andy Warhol liked obetrol (an early form of Adderall) so he could stay awake all night…both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were fans of LSD… See what I mean?...and we haven’t even touched music… rock stars often use drugs for both inspiration and escape, just like those cavemen 50,000 years ago... Which drugs, which rock stars and why?...that’s what we’re going to investigate in a show that’s part chemistry, part psychiatry and part warning…welcome to a primer on rock’n’roll drugs… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is almost impossible for anyone from a lightweight boy band to transition to serious, respected artist…it can be done—we can look at Justin Timberlake and, um…well, we can look at Justin Timberlake…. And as tough as that is, it’s even more difficult to move from being pigeonholed as a novelty act to one that carries gravitas and serious artistic merit…yet that’s what the beastie boys managed to do… No one took them seriously for the first eight years of their career…they were spoiled, snotty frat boys writing goofy songs and making funny videos… “Licensed to Ill” was a parody of hip hop…a good one, but a still a parody…let’s not forget that “Rolling Stone” described the album as “three idiots make a masterpiece”… But then something changed…The Beastie Boys grew up…they grew as artists…they grew as businessmen…they grew as humans… They took risks…they experimented…they branched out…they sought to make a difference—not just in music but in the world…and by the time it all came to an end with the death of Adam Yauch in the spring of 2012, The Beastie Boys had cemented a reputation as one the most important bands of not one but at least two generations… This is remembering The Beastie Boys, part 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For an entire generation of music fans—two generations, really—The Beastie Boys were always there…and now that they’re no longer with us, there are a lot of people who feel like there’s a void in music… But we’ll always remember their contributions…and there were a lot…this is part one of “Remembering The Beastie Boys”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a misconception that it takes a lot of people to come together to create a viable music scene…not true… The original punk scene in New York consisted of a few dozen weirdos who hung out at places like CBGB, the mudd club and Max’s Kansas city in the uglier end of town… The UK punk scene started with a similar number in the fall of 1976, pretty much every London punk fit into a single club on oxford street for a two-night music festival…capacity at the 100 club was official 350, but there was plenty of room to move around… The start of the english technopop scene focused around the few people who hung around the blitz club in Covent Garden… The same can be said for a dozen other scenes that resulted in sounds that eventually spread around the world…that includes grunge… Grunge started with maybe a dozen people in and around Seattle…that’s it…but within a few years, it expanded to became the dominant sound of western rock for much of the 90s… To become this in such a short period of time, this required a swift and steady change reaction…among those dozen or so people were artists who were not only to form successful bands but multiple successful bands…and every one of these groups exploded with a force great enough to prompt other neighbouring music to do the same… To prove my point, i would like to trace one of those chain reactions…and for the purposes of this show, we will call the singularity of this chain reaction “Chris Cornell”…a lesson in grunge physics coming up… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every once in a while, something extraordinary happens in rock’n’roll…I hate the use the cliché of “a perfect storm,” but that’s exactly what I’m talking about…a bunch of things involving culture, politics, demographics, economics and technology all collide and mix in just the right way for something totally new and unexpected to be created… Lemme give you some examples…Elvis came along in the 1950s just as million post-war kids—these new constructs that were now called “teenagers”—began gravitating to new radio stations that played music derived from a mix of the blues, country and r&b…this music greatly annoyed their parents, something that made it dangerous and forbidden… In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show with a fresh, new sound that helped drag America out of the funk that followed the assassination of JFK…as far as rock is concerned, the 60s really began that February night in 1964… Let’s try something more current…you might remember the appearance of the music video in the early 80s transformed the industry…. or the time you heard “smells like teen spirit” for the first time and immediately you somehow knew that whatever came next in the 90s would be very, very different… And hip hop? don’t get me started…there are people—academics! —who will argue that the appearance of hip hop in popular culture was an even bigger deal that the Beatles… There’s one other event that we need to include on this list: the rise of punk rock in the middle 70s…as it was happening, it was no big deal…it was an aberration, a niche thing that indulged weirdos and misfits… “it’s just noise,” said the rock purists, “ignore it and it’ll go away” … But it didn’t…in fact, we’re still talking about punk…and punk became more than just a form of music… it became a way of thinking and acting and creating and presenting…it’s music, film, visual art, literature, dance, politics… it altered much of western thought…the punk aesthetic—that “screw you, I’m gonna do it anyway” ethos—can be found virtually everywhere in society today… But what led to this? what were the factors that led to the rise of this music? and how it appears worldwide at virtually the same time in an era long, long before the internet? great questions…. let’s see if we can find the answer to the question: “why did punk happen at all?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Myths and legends come in all sizes…Atlantis…that’s a big one that we can’t seem to wrap our heads around…but maybe homer was just yanking our chain… “feed a cold, starve a fever”…turns out that’s wrong…depriving yourself of calories may make it harder for your body to fight off that infection or virus… “we only ever use 10% of our brain”…wrong…neuroscience has proven that to be false…the right number may be 20%--but there’s a lot of dispute over that… Here are some other myths I’ve run across…don’t feed pigeons uncooked rice or they’ll blow up…the great wall of china isn’t the only man-made object that can be seen from space…and you can’t certainly see it from the moon… Oh—and the “fact” that men think about sex every seconds…untrue…it happens a lot every day, but there’s no basis in any scientific literature that it happens every seven seconds…we’d never get anything done… There are also myths and legends in music, too…Robert Johnson’ pact with the devil at the crossroads…Gene Simmons of Kiss did not have a cow tongue grafted onto his…Jim Morrison, Biggie, Tupac and Elvis are most certainly very dead…but Paul McCartney is still very much alive… But what about the alt-rock word?...what kind of myths and legends lurk there…stick around…you may be very, very surprised… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some years ago, I had a conversation with Don Letts, the DJ, filmmaker and confidant of The Clash…and he said something that stuck with me: “the average lifespan of a band is seven years…that’s enough for them to form, get big, become stars, develop creative differences and break up” … He’s not wrong…the clash did their best work from ’76 to ’83…The Beatles from ’63 to ’70…Nirvana was around from ’87 to ’94…  But then there are the exceptions, groups that have survived multiple seven-year cycle…U2, the Stones, Oasis, Green Day, Foo Fighters…and if we’re going to make a list, we must include Blink-182…this is a band who had a big rise and then a big fall before clawing back again…  This kind of roller coaster career can be really hard on a band—and there are often casualties…you’ll see what I mean as we get into part three of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices