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

Your favourite band may suck, but not anywhere near as much as that podcast sucks.

Enjoyed the AMM segment of the "See Emily Play" episode. Imo a nice thing about the sheer scale of the project is that it allows those sorts of connections room to breathe in a relatively unforced way.

I loved this episode, and I'm not a Barrett fanatic. The way he framed it was, for me, unexpectedly very moving.

yeah this was one of my favourites, I love Barrett-era Floyd which if anything put more pressure on this one to be good, and it lived up to it entirely. bonus on The Incredible String Band is also a good un.

xp 100%. I'm also not especially attached to Barrett's work but I thought that Hickey's treatment of the meta-discourse around it was a great example of what this series does best.

catching up on bonus eps and wow fuck John Fahey, don't think I had any idea

One of the worst things about this series is learning just how many of my favourite musicians were garbage humans.

Which bonus episode discusses John Fahey? I think I've listened to them all but I don't remember that one.

Fuck, I really need to proofread my posts! John Martyn, not Fahey.

Artists with similar names that you get mixed up

According to his biography, John Fahey caused a lot of trouble, but mostly to himself.

Fuck, I really need to proofread my posts! John Martyn, not Fahey.

From the Patreon email:

Early Access! Episode 164: "White Light/White Heat" by the Velvet Underground is finally here!

As some of you have seen me complain about, Spotify does a thing where if you upload a file and then fix it, it never corrects the fix, so I get people complaining for literally years about some tiny glitch that I didn't notice when uploading but fixed within an hour.

This episode is *three and a half hours long* (it's one of those stories where I don't even mention the first of the band members until an hour in) and was recorded and edited under more than usually stressful circumstances, so I'm sure that somewhere in there there is a glitch that Tilt or I missed.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to this three-and-a-half-hour long episode a day before it goes live, and if you see any horrible glaring thing in there, let me know. If you don't want to do that, just wait til first thing tomorrow morning and it'll be live in the main podcast feed and linked here as normal. I'm doing this because normally if there *is* an error, someone here is the one to point it out.

(NB I'm not talking about mispronunciations and so on -- I'm not going to rerecord the entire thing -- but if there's a bad edit or something, do let me know, or an *easily* fixed factual error that can be fixed by snipping a sentence. Other stuff has to just be errata. Indeed, I have already noted one erratum which will go in the notes -- I say at one point they didn't play in New York "for the rest of the sixties", when in fact they did at least one performance in 1967)

Also, I'm rather brittle at the moment, so preemptively please don't do any "joking" pointing out of fake errors, or "criticism" that amounts to "I wouldn't have made the episode this way, it's boring". This really, really, took a lot out of me, and if you don't like it, that's your right of course, but I don't need to hear it.

And then, of course, a link.

listening to it right now

Just in time. I finally caught up after listening from the beginning. Was wondering if/when he would tackle VU since he skipped their first lp.

50 minutes in and we've embarked on what promises to be a detailed biography of La Monte Young, no mention of any member of the Velvet Underground yet, brilliant stuff.

Finished this about an hour ago. Ridiculously informative, meticulously researched (which accounts for both its length and, to a degree, the delays in getting it finished), a few surprising mentions/relationships…just endlessly engaging.

oh my god just got to the part where nico talks about gender stuff shortly before the 2 hour mark. _very_ cisgender of her, haha.

45 minutes in and he’s still reading off content warnings.

J/k this was good. I sensed he was tiptoeing around the Todd Haynes documentary trying not to duplicate info from it. But I feel as if he gave a good framework for understanding what the group chose to do at each turning point in their lifetime.

This episode gave more time — and respect — to Yule than Haynes’s film did.

Man, I need to find 2.5 hours to listen to this pronto.

Haynes bio shoehorned Yule in near the end like the after-rehab coda of a Behind the Music episode.

Damn, if I listen to this along with the Jokerman podcast that's been going through every VU and Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico album, I'll have listened to far more hours of podcasts about this band than albums (tbh I never really listened to any of it until the last year).

Interesting episode but yeah time consuming. Does give some interesting background on the avant garde that Cale came out of. Still need to get more Lamonte Young.
Does a beginner listener have the stamina to listen through 3+ hours of the history behind the band history or do they need to tune in a couple of hours in.
Pretty in depth, like.

Haven't listened to this one yet, but for the longer episodes he tends to spend a majority of the time building context and setting the scene, and then gives a reasonable condensed summary of the band. I often find the tangential stuff more engaging than the main act. For instance, in the Byrds episode it felt like he spent more time discussing Coltrane and the history of modal jazz than he did discussing the Byrds, which worked just fine for me.

Just wanted to drop by and say that after listening to the first ~25 episodes and losing a bit of interest (more so found I didn't have time to give it the attention it needed) I bought the books and am loving them. Super readable and rich; I've picked up a ton of detail I missed in podcast form.

I had a similar reaction -- I was too impatient to listen, but I've read all the episode transcripts on his website. The VU episode is great.

This is a good tip, thanks.

What is this weird cover of Bowie’s “Andy Warhol”?

^ Sounded like a demo of Dana Gillespie's version

Yep, it’s on the Bowie Divine Symmetry box. If I hadn’t heard it before, I woulda been pretty baffled.

The podcasts are extraordinary documents but I've only listened to maybe 10 as I find them hard work. Listened to the VU one on a long walk and, yeah, what I said in the first sentence: extraordinary, but was flagging madly by the end. I have no idea how he navigates so much research. Like, where one episode ends and another begins, or how to decide what to include, what to leave out. I can see why he's feeling pretty 'brittle' tbh.

Right. To me podcasts are like audiobooks. On the one hand I like to hear someone else speaking as a way to get something into my head. On the other hand it’s way too much information for me to retain coming through without the ability to constant vary the speed, to double back and reread or look ahead or any of the things that make physical books and to some extent ebooks such an amazing technology.

I really liked his Monkees book. I assume I will eventually buy these books but may get the one about The Kinks first.

I’ve been trying to listen to some of a Twin Peaks podcast by a guy whose writing I really like, and they’re interesting, but so insanely detailed… like he’ll spend almost 2 hrs. 15 mins. dissecting even one of the weaker eps. in the depths of S2. The folks who do these podcasts are so obsessive that unless you’re a fellow super-obsessive, I don’t know how you can have the stamina for them.

I, too, find this podcast to be overwhelming in the amount of detail. I usually listening while running or dog walking or driving but I can never devote 100% of my attention and miss out on long stretches of info.

That said, he provides more detail than I really need in my life so it’s no big deal. I wish he didn’t spend quite so much time on the context/background stuff and spent more time on the song in question.

A fair criticism of this latest episode, which is also a fair criticism of the Haynes doc, is that it doesn’t give enough credit to the influence of free jazz/NYC loft jazz on the VU, even though it includes a Lou Reed quote saying he was inspired by Ornette Coleman and some other progressive jazz guys

Yeah, he had a college radio show, named for its theme song by Cecil Taylor---ilxor tylerw, of bootleg blog Doomandgloomfromthetomb and Aquarium Drunkard, mentions it while intro'ing a later Lou radio guest host marathon, still linked in here:

Had he not been a genius songwriter and musician, it’s easy to imagine Lou finding his calling as a disc jockey. And indeed, as an English major at Syracuse University in the early 60s, he hosted a radio show, Excursions On A Wobbly Rail, playing what was surely an adventurous blend of jazz, rock and doo wop for his fellow Oranges.

Alas, there are no known tapes of Lou’s college radio days. The closest we’ll probably get to it is this guest DJ stint on New York City’s WPIX in early 1979. Lou is in fine, fighting form here, peppering his commentary with scathing diatribes against Robert Christgau, Rolling Stone magazine, Jimmy Carter and NYC taxi drivers. He even takes some calls – witness the hilarious, surreal moment when Lou “Take No Prisoners” Reed admonishes a caller for using foul language. The music he plays is fantastic, too, with some classic doo wop, tracks from his then-unreleased The Bells LP, and a truly bizarro segue from Al Green to Nico. Lou even comes out in favor of disco.

And if that’s not enough, none other than John Cale pops up towards the end of the tape. Even though these dudes spent plenty of time at odds with one another over the years, they just sound like old buddies here. The whole thing closes out with a trio of killer live recordings (otherwise unreleased?) from Cale, featuring the Blue Oyster Cult’s Allen Lanier! What an embarrassment of riches.

And herrre's, Cecil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNL2CyHQMh4

Also, Ornette was on The Raven, and Reed later posted some other things they did, still around here and there---hope the regular Lou-Laurie-Zorn get-togethers find a good home on the Web, or maybe they already have?

A fair criticism of this latest episode, which is also a fair criticism of the Haynes doc, is that it doesn’t give enough credit to the influence of free jazz/NYC loft jazz on the VU, even though it includes a Lou Reed quote saying he was inspired by Ornette Coleman and some other progressive jazz guys

iirc, the Haynes film didn’t mention the new music (Cecil, Ornette, Dixon, Ayler) at all, not even in passing. I was surprised that Hickey didn’t talk more about it. I’ve been wondering if there’ll be an episode that talks about the new music as much as the one on “Eight Miles High” talked about bebop; I assumed/hoped it would be this episode.

Was thinking last night that it might just have added another hour which might have just been too much for a lot of people. Having a straight 3hrs 20 whatever was hard enough I would think.
But do want to hear what he would have to say about the New Thing. Still need to read about the Loft Scene too.

Need to hear what he says about the Downliner Sect. have loved that track and the lp it's on since I was like 14 and found the Charly lp version for like 60p on Walthamstow High St.

Since he's now in 1968 and rock is meeting jazz and things do wonder what else he will cover that will have the option to look into the freer elements of jazz. Is he going to look at crossovers with non Western music much deeper too.
Pretty great research and collation of information so do wonder what else he will look into. 70s and 80s ought to be good if he gets that far.

Ok I'm an hour and a half into this episode and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Lol @ the description of Cale's festival he organized after graduating (banging on the piano with his forearms until audience members tried to wheel it away, crawling after them and continuing the performance).

I've been listening sequentially, and I'm up to 1960 now. The level of detail is just right for me- really wonderful getting me to re-listen to all these 50 r'n'b compilations from the 80s that I bought in the 90s as vinyl was getting unloaded. The only context I had for a lot of that were the liner notes, which assumed a "you were there" knowledge. Hickey really makes the connections and fills in the gaps. So while I knew exactly how Sam Phillips connected things together, I only half understood Lieber and Stoller, and Johnny Otis was just a name I'd heard. Also, understanding how r'n'r took hold in Britain haltingly but steadily coalesced. Fascinating that Gene Vincents British TV appearances were what codified the black leather rocker look after he was out of the spotlight in the US.

I, too, find this podcast to be overwhelming in the amount of detail. I usually listening while running or dog walking or driving but I can never devote 100% of my attention and miss out on long stretches of info.

That said, he provides more detail than I really need in my life so it’s no big deal. I wish he didn’t spend quite so much time on the context/background stuff and spent more time on the song in question.

― tobo73, Wednesday, April 5, 2023 9:08 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

There are a lot of times where he'll say something like "To understand this song, we have to start with Person X. Person X was discovered by Person Y. Person Y worked for Label Z. Label Z was a competitor to Label A. Label A had big Song B." and that chain of connections would be totally lost on me because I was listening in the car and distracted for 10 seconds by a bad driver. I'm not advising anyone to stop listening to the podcast but definitely recommend getting the books and/or re-reading the transcripts. There's a ton of rich detail that I've internalized on review.

I do appreciate hearing the musical excerpts though.

xp The abundance of detail is one reason I can't get into listening -- I'm afraid I'll lose the thread and get frustrated because I missed some vital esoteric connection.

For even more obscure and detailed information, I recommend one of Hickey's favorite sources, Larry Birnbaum's Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll. I've been reading it on and off for a few months and am still less than halfway through.

That book is intriguing but expensive. How long is it exactly?

461 pages including the notes and index, in font sizes that require bifocals