Andrew Hickey’s History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast (& books) — discuss!

For those who’ve wondered about his slow delivery on the early episodes, he explains in the Rubin interview.

Hearing him speak without a script explains it pretty well, even without having got to the explanation part yet.

i wish i could find the time to listen to these! they're all super good and interesting. i guess i could just read the transcripts but i do really like listening to the episodes.

anyway i was talking last night to someone about music (because of course i do when i can) and she's like, i was going out with this 56 year old dude and he was telling me about this podcast about all these old songs, and i was like oh yeah that podcast rules, and then she complained that hickey didn't do an episode on "rumble", because that's so often the way with these things, but it was fine because we just wound up listening to a bunch of '70s link wray, which is never a bad thing.

In the first few minutes of that Rick Rubin interview, he mentions that what was originally a 10-year project is now a 20-year project, which means he plans to wrap it up in 2038 (which would mean a pace of 2 episodes per month).

and then she complained that hickey didn't do an episode on "rumble"

It's one of the Patreon bonus episodes.

I've stopped approaching the podcast in terms of "but what about...?" because either a) he'll get to it, or b) there's likely a good reason for it not being covered. That said, the only omission I found genuinely odd -- and I absolutely do not have a horse in this race, because I mostly don't give a shit about Jefferson Starship (though I dig Airplane) -- was no mention of "Miracles." He'd mentioned many lower-charting songs by other artists in other episodes, and that's something of a career highlight for that band. Not a criticism, just an observation, but apparently JeffStar fans were pretty pissed about that.

maybe something to do with the song not being a hit in the UK? I've certainly never heard it before.

It hit # 3 in the US in 1975, and was by far their biggest hit here in the years between "Somebody To Love" and "We Built This City":

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

(Apologies for the awful "lyric" video -- it was the only one I could find with the single edit.)

I dig it myself, but yeah, neither the single nor the album (Red Octopus) charted at all in the UK. But then, none of the Airplane singles charted there either.

i'm sure that's true chartwise but i dunno "jane" feels much more enduring

It seems like their airplay, at least on the station I listened to at the time (WLS-AM in Chicago), was out of proportion to their chart positions. I heard "Jane" several times a day, though Chicago's mayor at the time was Jane Byrne, so it was often played after news segments with stories about Chicago politics. Hit # 14 (and #21 in the UK, their only '70s chart placing there). But I also heard "Find Your Way Back" so much that I assumed it was at least top 10. Nope, peaked at #29.

i heard jane on our classic rock station all the time, it was a staple on kqrs in minneapolis

i just listened to miracles and vaguely remembered it but i'm not sure i've ever heard it on the radio

i also didn't know that "find your way back" was them! they used to play that as well

I think "Miracles" suffers from maybe being a little too "Easy Listening" for Classic Rock programmers, the same way you won't necessarily hear certain other popular at the time songs from, say, Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac.

Remember too that Classic Rock stations would be playing the album version of "Miracles", which is like 7 minutes--alot of real estate to be taken up when Joe Six Pack is tuning in to get the Led out of groove to some prime CCR/BTO/BÖC.

"do it again" and "my old school" are the dan songs that got a lot of play on our station, but they are some of the most conventionally rock of the SD jawns

The "Jefferson" rock family evolved so much that it's hard to think of all of those groups as incarnations of the same thing. Paul Kantner is the only person who's on both "White Rabbit" and "Find Your Way Back" and of course Grace Slick is the only Airplane member on "We Built This City."

"Miracles" sounds like the most Airplane-ish of all the post-JA material because of the intertwining vocals of Marty Balin & Grace Slick.

Jesus fucking Christ, they're apparently still going, without one single original member, except, I guess, David Freiberg. What's the point? Who goes to listen to them? This makes me irrationally angry.

Need gas for the Starship.

7 minute version of "Miracles" also had the cunilingus reference, lest we forget

Ahem, a "taste of the real world."

Jesus fucking Christ, they're apparently still going, without one single original member

Wait’ll you hear the episodes on the Drifters…

Andrew Hickey seems to talk faster and faster as the Rick Rubin interview progresses

was no mention of "Miracles."

but apparently JeffStar fans were pretty pissed about that.

I can't even imagine having to put up this these kinds of people.

Plus, I don't understand why he would need to have talked about this song which wasn't released 'til 75 when he's still in the late 60s. Also, I have never heard this song in my life and I've listened to a ton of music from this era, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As someone that kind of likes this but doesn't think it's the greatest thing ever, it's perfectly ok to skip episodes and only listen to the ones that might interest you.

brilliant advice, I'll take it

Plus, I don't understand why he would need to have talked about this song which wasn't released 'til 75 when he's still in the late 60s.

This threw me for a loop as well, but I guess it's that he covers the entire Jefferson Airplane/Starship career? He sometimes does that if the artist doesn't have any more songs to come on the list...

Exactly. Many episodes will cover the artist’s entire career. The earlier ones, due to relatively minimal documentation on the artist, can usually manage this in 30-40 minutes. But the more recent ones can be upwards of two or three (or nearly five) hours.

The Airplane episode covered their whole lifespan, from pre-formation through “We Built This City” and beyond (the no-original-members lineup even gets a mention). I thought it worked perfectly, but yeah, I can’t imagine the annoyance of dealing with angry JeffStar fans. And you’d think Dead Heads would be all over him, complaining he left out a minor detail, but weirdly, there seems to be consensus among Dead Heads and non-fans alike that the Dead episode was something of a tour de force.

I’m a pretty obsessive deadhead and that episode was very cool. I loved hearing the take of an impartial observer with a vast knowledge of the larger music world. There are so many GD bios that cover the same tired territory over and over. This one was different in a great way. Only wish he’d spent more time on the 80s when things kinda went off the rails but that’s probably not so interesting a story to non- obsessives.

Take a load off Andy.

Hes back down to 2 hours with the new episode. So maybe he is lightening his load. Not listened to it yet and probably should get the patreon and not miss any of his output.

I don’t think it’s necessarily that he’s purposely lightening his load. He did say that the Dead, Velvets, and “All You Need Is Love” episodes are outliers, and listening to the Band episode you can see why: there’s a bunch of mentions of people who figured prominently earlier in the series (George Goldner and Morris Levy, among others), and the Velvets and especially the Dead episodes simply couldn’t be tied into the story in the same way. One of the things I admire most about his approach is his keen understanding of how and why details and accounts are important to the story — the Dead episode had to be nearly five hours, but those hours weren’t taken up by minutiae at the periphery. And did we really need all that time on La Monte Young in the Velvets episode, or Dexter Gordon in the “Eight Miles High” episode (which, at 90 minutes, is quaintly introduced with, “This is going to be an absurdly long episode”)? Yes. Yes we did.

(Also, we’re up to five Sun Ra mentions in the series, starting all the way back at episode 7.)

He said in the Rick Rubin interview – which is a great listen – that he very much viewed the Dead one as experimenting with the form in contrast to what he called the "meat and potatoes" approach of the typical episode.

He mentioned in the recent Q&A that there would be other big long shaggy ones coming up, and I am here for it. Even the new Band episode begins with John Ruskin. I love that.

The Band episode was the first major one where I felt like I didn’t learn anything significant or get a perspective that I hadn’t heard before. Maybe I’m too steeped in Dylan & The Hawks lore .. altho I’m probably a bigger Beatles nut TBH and have been illuminated by every Beatles episode. I wonder if Hickey just isn’t as much of a Dylan / Band fan and as such didn’t put as much effort into building a bigger story around the scene; I would have thought that this story, as the real locus of the Cult of Authenticity in Rock, would have been ripe for a new perspective or a takedown even, but it was about the most straightforward retelling of the Rolling Stone version of events as you could get. Ah well.

Fantastic new episode on Aretha's "I Say a Little Prayer," which includes much material on Burt Bacharach. After the featured song is covered there's still one hour of interesting stuff to come.

HIckey breaking down the time counting on "I Say a Little Prayer" is a wonder

The end of the Janis episode makes Jerry look like such a dick

Man I just love this podcast so much. I'm still in the early episodes - just finished the first Elvis one - but there's something about Hickey's almost-effaced narrative voice that radiates human decency; he somehow conveys a deep sense of humility and care for what he says and how he says it without ever revealing anything personal about himself (other than one brief digression about liking the Marx Brothers).

xp that last few minutes was fucking enraging

He reveals that he’s fat in this new episode, but it’s relevant to the story

I met him ten years ago this month, AMA (AIWNR)

Janis ep was ace. The last line was devastating.

it was posted on the active beatles thread and probably those who read that also read this but anyway his write-up on the "new" "song" is tremendous
https://www.patreon.com/posts/92258652

that hickey write-up was so good it actually got me to listen to the song! in general i agree with his thoughts, and in particular... so much of the beatles' work _is_ making silk purses out of, if not sow's ears, than something less than a silk purse. particularly when it comes to lennon's work! i once heard this mix of "instant karma", i can't find it now, that's just the raw backing track and lead vocals. i love it! it sounds fucking terrible! and that's on top of the, ahem, heavy debt the song owes to "magical mystery tour". so much of john's work in particular just doesn't _work_ in its raw form. hickey mentions "watching rainbows" and i think that's another good example - it's not a finished song, it's kind of an improvised jam. (depending on what one's standards are you _could_ in fact have harrison on the song, since it uses a pretty basic two-chord structure as on "i got a feeling".) hell, imagine turning something like "los paranoias" into a proper song. i bet you could. a lot of john's best songs have been studio patch jobs since, well... i was gonna say "since it was technically possible" but "strawberry fields forever" was actually a pioneering use of technology.

but it's not like it was only john's songs that were messed around with that way. the "anthology 3" version of "i me mine" demonstrates clearly that the final version was extended in much the same way that "now and then" was.

i know there's a blog full of "'70s versions of Beatles album", part of the whole "albums that never were" thing... i haven't listened, i don't know if they're any good, but god, even if they're not, you probably _could_ make a fair forgery of the beatles out of the solo albums the four of them did, right? (is that blog still up? anybody know what i'm talking about and/or have a link to the site for that? i can't remember and i feel like trying to find it again would be a chore.)

i also think "homeopathic amounts of george harrison" is a great turn of phrase. it made me laugh.

https://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/

Still around, slower pace but always intriguing, and he recently upgraded most of the What If the Beatles Never Broke Up comps

thanks hideous lump! <3

I always thought that a really really good Beatles tribute act could get deep into 1968-69 mode and start working up the post-breakup solo songs, arranging them in a reasonable facsimile of how the band would have really played them, even rewriting some of the more pointed/bitter tunes or combining half-baked ideas the way the Beatles would have done, to make 3-4 killer fake Beatles albums in this vein.

The failings of the ATNW approach — unavoidable! Not a criticism of his stellar work — are a) the vast sonic differences between the solo Beatles’ records, and b) the lack of a collaborative writing/editing/arranging process. You can never make a solo Beatles track sound like a Beatles cut without George’s bg vox or Paul’s bass playing & arranging skills (etc), or — this is the key element — the intensely competitive collaboration between partic J&P that fuelled their records.

Obv you could never really duplicate what might have been, but I think it’d be fun to try to get super close.

there is often a "who missed who more" discussion about lennon and mccartney solo and i'd argue john needed paul (and george martin, and ringo) to elevate his work more than paul needed john to edit his. songs like tomorrow never knows, walrus, come together are basically drab one-chord things if you're just playing them on a guitar without tape loops, strings, wild bass and drums, etc. lennon solo replaces a lot of that with sax solos.

What

I always thought that a _really really good_ Beatles tribute act could get deep into 1968-69 mode and start working up the post-breakup solo songs, arranging them in a reasonable facsimile of how the band would have really played them,

Ha, they've done a mid 60s-Beatles version of Now and Then already. Not one of their most successful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABa_RH1ygC8

There was an anecdote near the end of the Janis Joplin episode where there was a concert featuring the Grateful Dead and other contemporaries and when the news of her death got out, they just played on like nothing happened and even chastised a journalist who was crying backstage for ruining the vibe. Hippies were weird...or was death that common in the scene by 1970 that it was just taken for granted.

the dead always seemed vaguely sociopathic to me