This week, we’re featuring two authors who take us straight back to the golden age of pop-rock—Mark Arnold and Charles F. Rosenay!!!

If you’ve ever found yourself smiling the second you hear “Happy Together”… you already know why this one matters.

Why This Book Stands Out

Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles from A–Z (AM Radio to Zappa) is more than a music book, it’s a deep dive into a band that helped shape the soundtrack of a generation.

This isn’t just a highlight reel of hits. It’s a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes look at The Turtles—from their early days to their evolution into Flo & Eddie and beyond.

With hundreds of pages of research, interviews, and commentary, it’s the kind of book that both longtime fans and curious newcomers can get lost in.

A Personal Thread That Runs Through It

One of the things that makes this book special is the heart behind it.

Charles Rosenay shares how his love for The Turtles started as a kid, singing along with his family on long car rides, discovering their music in the most ordinary, joyful moments.

That feeling—music as memory, music as connection—runs through the entire book.

About the Authors

Mark Arnold
A respected pop culture historian and author of multiple books on music and entertainment, known for his deep research and thoughtful analysis.

Charles F. Rosenay
A pop culture personality, author, and longtime music enthusiast whose passion for classic bands shines through in both his writing and storytelling.

Together, they bring both knowledge and personality, which honestly fits The Turtles perfectly.

Featured Book

Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles from A–Z (AM Radio to Zappa)

This 400+ page deep dive explores:

• You love 60s pop-rock and the stories behind the music

• You enjoy discovering bands beyond their biggest hit

• You like music history that feels fun, not academic

• You’re curious about the personalities behind the songs

It’s part history, part tribute, and part celebration of a band that was always more than just one hit.

Why You Might Love This Book

• You grew up with ‘60s or ‘70s music

• You love discovering the stories behind the songs

• You enjoy music history with personality (not dry, academic writing)

Final Thought

The Turtles were never just “Happy Together.”
They were funny, creative, a little unconventional and full of heart.

And honestly… this book feels the same way.

Explore the Book

👉 https://geniusbookpublishing.com/products/not-just-happy-together-color-paperback

Your Turn

Have you listened to The Turtles?
Or is there a band from your past that still instantly takes you back?

From blues harmonica to Broadway orchestras to late-night bar bands, this piece looks at what happens when musicians serve the song—and when they don’t. Along the way, it raises deeper questions about creativity, interpretation, and the strange space where art lives once it leaves its creator.

For the Sake of the Song

The multi-instrumentalist artist known as Guinga has a given name which is impressive. Carlos Althier de Souza Lemos Escobar. Guinga is a Brazilian singer-songwriter, who suggested on NPR, on Jan 4, 2020, that he considered the song he was singing to be one of the instruments that he played, a unique instrument making a sound that expresses ideas and feelings for him—but that before you can play it, you have to first make the instrument. You have to create the song. And then, you have to learn to play it. Seems just what any serious player does, similar to what someone like Bob Dylan has done all along over the years.

“It’s all about the song,” Dylan said one time, adding “My only job is serving the song.” Dylan’s performances and recordings are not about a personality or a rock star up on a stage. They are not about winning his audience’s approval with flashing instrumental ornamentation. Dylan has more often than not totally ignored his audience. He definitely does not invite them to pick up his fragile and precious instruments and manhandle them—in fact he flees from the sound when they try to sing along. It’s all about the song, which is there, and has always been there, whether he played it alone with a six-string guitar when he was starting out, or on some long-ago records let Emmy Lou Harris add her soaring harmonies or let Scarlet Rivera’s gorgeous violin lines feel their way around his voice or let Mike Bloomfield’s electric blues band charge things up. Nothing changed when Dylan went electric. The song remained the same. He was playing songs as instruments—and honoring the song. Usually, the performances sounded great. Sometimes in later years the performances sounded lousy. But the songs were just as good.

The instrument you play, if it’s a song, may have lead guitar riffs, a wailing tenor sax and great bass lines set around it, and it may not. Those other instruments that people play are frames for a work of art and there are lots of them available. In many shapes and sizes. There are lots of players, and many musical instruments available. You don’t need to use them all. The song is just one of the instruments artists can use.

Sometimes the song is not the most important instrument. Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic” was a great piece of art when it came out in the sixties. But the actual song is just a barely sketched out framework, a skeleton—and he used it to hang an electric guitar performance on. In that case the performance itself was the key to the highway. Musical instrumentation on “Crosstown Traffic” included Jimi’s rhythm guitar, played in a pyrotechnic manner that makes it sound like a lead guitar. That’s the genius and beauty of that particular song. It’s the performance that we revel in there. Hendrix could have sung something else, picked another song, because for that particular work of art, the song wasn’t the instrument, the performance with his guitar was the instrument.
On the other hand, with some works of musical artistry, the song is in fact the essential figure, the “crux of the biscuit” as Frank Zappa put it. The reason we are there. And that song can be figurative or abstract. A story related with words and a tune or an image of musical colors and lines. A song can tell you something. Or it can be something. Dylan almost always uses the song as his main instrument. His guitar playing is sometimes rudimentary, and sometimes extraordinary, whether he’s playing rock and roll, or traditional folk or blues, but his guitar playing is not why we are there. His guitar playing doesn’t really matter. If guitar virtuoso Bruce Langhorne had been playing the rhythm guitar for Dylan on his first record, as vague accusations suggest, it wouldn’t be cheating and it wouldn’t make any difference. When the Monkees or the Beach Boys used session musicians in the studio, it didn’t matter either. It was the songs that mattered. And it was the performance, which is also an instrument.

Sonny Terry, the great blues harmonica player, originated a part in a 1947 Broadway play called “Finian’s Rainbow”. The character he played was a black blind harmonica player—and Sonny Terry was perfect for the part, because that’s what he was, a black blind harmonica player. Musical orchestrations were credited to Broadway music-arrangers Robert Bennet and Don Walker, but Sonny Terry marched to his own drummer, and he created his own portion of the score—which he played perfectly as a character on the stage while a ballet dancer danced alone in a dream sequence, halfway through the second act. It was a great little tune that Sonny Terry had come up with and he played it just right every time—just the way he’d created it—which was with room to move.

Sonny Terry was fired soon after the play opened. The problem was that he had created a work of art, a song for the harmonica, not a note-by-note score written on paper with indelible ink. What he actually played in the theater was sometimes in 3/4 time and sometimes in 4/4 time. Sometimes it was a twelve-bar blues and sometimes it was a thirteen-bar folk song. He played with his eye on the same glimmer of light, the light he had seen way off in the distance, when he worked out the piece originally. He did that six nights a week and Wednesday and Saturday afternoons too, standing up there on that Broadway stage—and he played perfectly what he first heard every single time. Having spent his entire life in darkness seemed to present few problems for Sonny Terry when it came to finding a song and playing it right.

Sonny Terry was a great blues harp player. He worked with guitarist Brownie McGee for years and they never had any problem keeping time with each other. They didn’t talk much; in fact, they didn’t speak to each other at all. They’d had a falling out early on and didn’t speak for the last twenty years they toured together. Separate buses, separate hotels, separate dressing rooms. They would meet out on the stage, night after night, and up there, under the white-hot stage lights, Brownie McGee could always play his guitar in close step with Sonny Terry’s harp. Brownie McGee could do it, but the union musicians in that Broadway orchestra pit trying to play along with Sonny Terry’s harp found themselves all over the place. Sonny Terry called what he did “whooping and hollering the blues”. Those Broadway musicians called what they did “playing the notes as written.” It didn’t work out, because they were following the black and white markings on sheets of paper propped open on their music stands rather than following the genius standing there up on the stage playing the tune as he had heard it.

I worked as an actor when I was younger, and I auditioned for and got that same part that Sonny Terry originated—in a revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” produced in a regional theater. I was a young white man playing the part of an old blind black man blowing a blues harp. I was close enough for regional theater—because I could blow a decent blues harp and how many regional actors can do that? I could play the music—and in that production, they needed someone who could play the blues harp more than they needed someone who could play blind or black or old. I tried to play the harmonica part just the way they showed me, note for note, as transcribed by the musical director. They wanted it the way the player on the cast recording had played it and I could make it sound exactly like that—but not every time.

The small regional orchestra they’d engaged, well-trained musicians who were insurance men and shopkeepers by day, went chopping through the night, looking for the dawn, following directions to the letter. We were doing all right. But the poor little ballet dancer trying to hit her marks, moving to the music I was playing, stomping my foot and honking all over the place, was flummoxed. Why, I figured, didn’t she just listen to what I was playing and dance to it?

“Twirl around a little bit more, up on your toes there, if you need to,” is what I wanted to tell her. She was crying one time when she came off the stage. I had really outdone myself, really nailed it that night and I thought she was weeping because we had done so well together. We were really hitting it—there was some life in what we were doing, and everyone there knew it. I felt the pure joy of performing well surging through me. We had gotten down deep to the core of the composition, to the spirit of the song Terry had originally played. I was Sonny Terry, and I was the new south and I had been to the crossroads for a flickering moment. I had been to the mountain! I had heard something on high and I had played it—and maybe I had gotten a little full of myself and tooted my own horn a little more than was written. But how would I know? A twelve-bar blues doesn’t have to have forty-eight beats, does it? The dancer was just swirling away, a dervish in silk veils, she was hearing it too, the song Sonny Terry had heard, coming from some far-off place, and she was moving with her whole mind and body to the whooping joy we both felt as we pushed our way through the darkness. I took the lead, going first, to light our way. And she followed. I thought. It turned out that one of us had messed up badly. Afterwards the dancer and the musical director suggested it was me. I felt bad because she was trying so hard, and there I’d gone and made her cry.

I played more recently, with a great session keyboard player one night in a bar in the Bronx, at some sort of a benefit where he and his band invited solo acts up to join them, to pick a song—any song—and see if they couldn’t play back up. I didn’t want to test them or challenge them. I wanted to play some music. It’s fun to do that with a great house band. They were doing songs from the radio. Lots of hits from the sixties and seventies. I think they covered something by The Ohio Express or maybe it was “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies. They were good musicians, and they made every song sound just like it had sounded on the radio. I figured I’d do “Quinn the Eskimo”. A little Manfred Mann song I’d heard long ago that Dylan wrote and never released on a studio record. That was in line with what other players were doing that night and would be easy to follow even if you didn’t know it. I got up on the stage and told the keyboard player I was going to be playing “Quinn the Eskimo” in the key of G.

“It’s in C,” he said.

“It is?” I was impressed and I wondered how he knew that. Still, I had sung it in G when I was starting out a long time ago and I had the cross harp already stuck in the rack around my neck.

“Not tonight, it’s not,” I told him. “Tonight, it’s in G.” I thought I was being amusing. It’s a simple song. What do they care what key it’s in? So, I played it in G—and the drummer and the bass player and then the keyboard player kicked in as I played through the progression once and then I really got started, singing the song. Howling along. Not too bad, I thought to myself. Playing cross harp to beat the band in between verses. Then at the end of the second verse, the backup singer with the red hair, shaking her tambourine, leaned over close and hissed in my ear, “It goes up a third at the end of the chorus.” Just trying to be helpful I guess.

“The Might Quinn” is a great little song. I’m banging it out on the guitar, but it’s the song making the sound, not my guitar. My guitar and harp outline the song, decorate it, give it something to sit on, but I am playing a song. As my main instrument. Maybe I’m not doing the Manfred Mann version. But I know that song, and I know what it’s about. It’s about three minutes. Just three chords—and you sort of pound ‘em out. It’s a passion play and a warning. So you sing it with a passion and as a warning. And sometimes you sing it in the key of G. It doesn’t make any difference.

“When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody’s gonna run to him . . .” That’s the score. “G” chords are big and bright. You stroke on one of those for a few bars, then you pull your breath in on the C harp for a bit, get a good head of steam up, huffing and puffing in and out, and then you start singing the song. A little way into it, you change to the “D” chord. And when it feels about right, you go back to the “G” for a degree of resolution. You know when to do it. It’s a great song to hear, and a blast to sing, it brings you right back to the beach blanket you were lying on in 1967 when Cousin Brucie first played it on the WABC top-forty radio, and you didn’t even know it was a Dylan song.

How hard it could it have been to follow me? I wasn’t playing Larry Coryell or Chick Corea up there in 7/11 time. I don’t care what kind of musician you are, if you have any music in you at all, you should be able to listen to me—and bang along. Because I’m not that complicated a player and three-chord rock and roll songs are not that hard to play. And if you don’t know how, I’ll be happy to show you the way.

Some players are sidemen by nature I guess. Players of notes. Their job is to support, to follow. To play it right—and there’s a magazine they make for them to read. I’ll tell you about it. It’s called Guitar Player and they used to have a regular feature, every month, called, “You’re Playing It Wrong.” I used to enjoy Guitar Player magazine, but I think sometimes that it takes a lot of nerve to tell musicians that they are playing it wrong. Maybe actually they’re playing “Purple Haze” right and Jimi was playing it wrong. It’s possible.

The pinnacle for these perfect players is to work behind what’s left of The Five Satins or Tony Orlando for forty or fifty shows a year. That’s what that keyboard player did for a living. I think he had toured with The Letterman or The Dave Clark Five or some group like that. But with me—an amateur if ever there was one, he didn’t have the chops. When I got down from the stage, they played a song by the Monkees—perfectly. Maybe it was “Last Train to Clarksville” that night. But who could remember? I do know that if you closed your eyes, you were on the beach, and it was 1967 again. Sounded cool. Just like it had sounded on the 45-rpm disc I had bought after first hearing it on the radio. Except without the warp and woof that comes from leaving your records in the back seat of the car on a hot day.

The version they played that night probably came in at two minutes and forty-nine seconds, just like The Monkees’ recording did, on that number one single they had released fifty years before. Every inflection just right, picture perfect. I would bet that even the Monkees themselves, as good as they were, with hired session musicians playing Neil Diamond songs written for them to record in the studio, couldn’t have done it any better. The keyboard player explained to me later in the evening what the problem was with what I had done up there. “That’s not how Quinn goes,” he told me.

“Pretty close, though,” I thought to myself. You could play that song slow with a tuba player off to the side and with The Newark Boys’ Choir behind you and it’d still be “Quinn the Eskimo”—the song that Dylan wrote. The exact same song that Manfred Mann did so well and that The Grateful Dead and Phish and Counting Crows and probably Jimi Hendrix all did so well at one point and maybe even The Mantovani Orchestra, who covered it once, except with them it was probably done without the vocal so it wouldn’t scare people stuck in the elevator.

I don’t think Sonny Terry ever played “Quinn the Eskimo”, but if he had, I suspect he would have played it “to the beat of his own drummer,” and it would have been just perfect, “however measured or far away,” from the original version. Because whether he was sitting alone or standing in front of a big Broadway crowd, wherever Sonny Terry sat was the head of table. And however he sang a song, even a Dylan song, it was the song he was serving, every single time. If we had to move ourselves a little, to the right or to the left, to hear it, well that was on us. And if you don’t believe me, ask Guinga.

Kevin Kane explores these ideas more deeply in his book Seeking Mirth and Beauty: Musings on How Things Come to Be, a reflective collection of essays on music, creativity, and the enduring pull of artists like Bob Dylan.

Rather than decoding songs or retelling familiar stories, Kane invites readers to consider why certain music stays with us—and how art connects to memory, feeling, and imagination.

Learn more about the book here:
Seeking Mirth and Beauty

Some books arrive with a quiet confidence. Others arrive at exactly the moment when the world seems ready to listen.

Stalebread and the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band is one of those moments.

This book represents years of deep, careful research by Michael Shurtz into a story that sits just outside the usual spotlight of jazz history. Not because it isn’t important—but because it has been hiding in plain sight. Street corners. Homemade instruments. Newsboys. Music made from whatever was at hand, long before anyone agreed on what to call it.

We’re proud of this book not because it stands apart from the rest of our list, but because it embodies what we value most as publishers: curiosity, rigor, heart, and a willingness to follow the story where it actually leads.

Which makes this week especially meaningful.

On Thursday, January 15, 2026, Michael Shurtz will be the keynote speaker on opening night of the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival, held at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. His talk will be livestreamed by the museum at
5pm PT / 8pm ET on the New Orleans Jazz Museum YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/NOLAJazzMuseum

There’s something quietly perfect about that setting. A book about music born from ingenuity and necessity being celebrated in a space dedicated to the living roots of that tradition. No grand revisionism. No inflated claims. Just a story finally being told in full.

If you care about where music comes from, how culture actually forms, or how creativity survives when resources are scarce, this is a story worth spending time with.

We’re honored to have helped bring it into the world.

It wasn’t staged. He just snapped it in his studio, surrounded by decades of music history, and it stopped me in my tracks.

Stolen Moments Book Photo by John Lenac

There’s something poetic about seeing the book in this space — guitars, gold records, framed legends. These are the environments I’ve spent my life documenting. To have Stolen Moments land among them feels... full circle.

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What Stolen Moments Is

“If you see something about to happen, get it. Put the camera up and click. Two seconds later you won’t have the chance again. You have to look for those stolen moments.”

That’s been my philosophy for almost 40 years as a concert photographer. From Neil Young to Robert Smith, Joe Walsh to Dave Grohl, I’ve chased the fleeting, electric, human moments that happen onstage — and often just before or after.

In Stolen Moments, I’ve pulled together some of my most iconic shots — many of them rare or never before published — into one definitive collection.

Available now from Genius Book Publishing:

👉 Buy the Book: Stolen Moments

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What’s Inside

The book spans decades, genres, stages, and styles. But the heart of it is the same: catching lightning in a frame. It’s a visual love letter to the raw, real, soulful energy of live music.

If you’ve ever stood in a crowd and felt your heart sync to a drumbeat... this book is for you.

The conversation dives into their lifelong love of pop culture, the making of their comprehensive Turtles encyclopedia, now also available in softcover—choose black-and-white on Amazon or the full-color edition directly from Genius Book Publishing.

Get the full color edition here - Not Just Happy Together

If you’ve ever had “Happy Together” stuck in your head — or followed the wild web of music legends from Frank Zappa to Alice Cooper — we published a book you’ll want to know about.

Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles From A → Z (AM Radio to Zappa) has been out for a bit, but it’s still making waves. The Boston Harold just featured it with a fun, deep-cut interview with the authors about the band’s wild ride — from AM radio stardom to psychedelic side quests and beyond.

Check out the piece here:

🔗 [New book chronicles history of The Turtles (Boston Harold)](https://bostonharoldpodcast.blogspot.com/2024/03/new-book-chronicles-history-of-turtles.html?m=1)

We’re always thrilled to see readers and music lovers rediscovering this story. If you’re into band lore, rock memoirs, or just curious how The Turtles ended up in the Zappa orbit — this one delivers.

And if you are ready to dive into the book, find it here… Not Just Happy Together

To celebrate his life and legacy, we’re sharing a special audio tribute:

Featuring a roundtable of musicians, historians, and friends — Godfrey Townsend, Charles Rosenay, Mark Arnold, and Andy Cahan — this heartfelt episode reflects on Mark’s life, his music, and the joy he brought to audiences around the world.

Why Mark Mattered

Mark Volman’s music — and his spirit — helped define a generation. This tribute episode reminds us why his voice (literally and creatively) mattered so much. It’s a joyful, moving, and at times hilarious conversation that captures the groovy magic of the '60s and beyond.

About the Book

Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles from A‑Z (AM Radio to Zappa) is our definitive, all‑color paperback look at one of rock’s most enduring and beloved bands. Written by Mark Arnold and Charles F. Rosenay!!!, this book spans everything from The Turtles’ earliest days as The Crossfires to their chart‑topping hits, their theatrical turn with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and their later work as Flo & Eddie.

If you’ve loved “Happy Together,” you’ll find even more to discover here: every song, every album, this book deep dives into the stories behind the music, plus includes interviews with band members and associates offering new revelations—even for longtime fans. It’s a celebration of Mark Volman’s legacy, his craft, and the joy that The Turtles’ music continues to bring.

Order the book here: Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles from A-Z

When Mark Volman of Flo & Eddie and The Turtles passed away at the age of 78 on September 5, 2025, it was a true gut punch. Not only was Volman the last Turtle standing by being the final original Turtle still touring (lead singer Howard Kaylan retired in 2018), he also personified what The Turtles were about.

Losing Mark Volman was like saying goodbye to your rock & roll uncle, always there to bring a smile and a song, always there to entertain his family, which was his audience. This meant great singing with a sense of humor & fun, with Volman regularly performing such antics as tossing a tambourine high into the air (and usually catching it), or spoofing his music contemporaries. He also entertained us with some fine guitar work.

When we were putting together our "TURTLES A-Z: AM RADIO to ZAPPA" book (www.NotJustHappyTogether.com), we wanted it to be the most comprehensive (and enjoyable) work on the band. Since we were including interviews by as many principals connected to The Turles as possible. Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan were musts, but Howard was retired and reclusive, while Mark wasn't his healthiest. We miraculously got Kaylan to agree to a great interview (and we don't believe he's granted one since), but we didn't want to pressure or disturb Volman. Instead, by permission, we included an interview conducted by a colleague.

We hope that Ron Dante (The Archies) decides to continue the legacy of The Turtles' songs, but it will never be the same without Mark. It's a shame he wasn't able to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Let's hope that happens while Howard is still with us. The era of “Happy Together” will never truly be over, but without Mark, the world of The Turtles will be a lot less happy.

by MARK ARNOLD and CHARLES F. ROSENAY!!!

(photo below Charles F. Rosenay!!! with Mark Volman)

Those Old School Records takes you through the history of rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and more from 1946 to 1987 through the lens of top-charting 45 RPM singles. With over 1,000 songs, labels, release dates, suggested pairings, remakes, answers, and other detailed information, Those Old School Records leaves no musical stone unturned.

At over 400 pages, Those Old School Records will answer many of your questions about the origins and history of these chart-topping songs.

Arthur Big Boy Crudup “That’s All Right” Victor/RCA 1946

Style: Blues

Where from: Omaha, NE

Where recorded: Chicago, IL

Suggested pairings: Blind Lemon Jefferson “Right Of Way Blues” 1927; Tampa Kid “Keep On Trying” 1936; Son House “My Black Mamma” 1930; Jimmy Rushing “Boogie Woogie” 1938; Arthur Big Boy Crudup “Keep Your Arms Around Me” 1944; Arthur Big Boy Crudup “If I Get Lucky” 1941

This blues combo—with Arthur Big Boy Crudup, guitar and vocal; Ransom Knowling, bass; and Judge Davis, drums—was recorded in September 1946. “I wasn’t making money off those records to amount to nothing,” Crudup told an interviewer as he was paid a flat sum for each song during recording sessions. Between sessions, he sharecropped or moonshined to support his family.

In March 1949, record technology radically changed with the marketing of the 45 RPM record by RCA/Victor when a reissue of Arthur Big Boy Crudup’s original of “That’s All Right” was the first blues 45 issued by RCA/Victor.

Remakes: Elvis Presley 1954; Marty Robbins 1955

It’s said that Presley financed a Crudup session he made for Bobby Robinson’s Fire Records in about 1959 which resulted in a later remake of “That’s All Right,” though Robinson claimed Presley had nothing to do with the record.

Get the full book here: Those Old School Records

Looking for the book? Get it here Head Bangin Radio

• 336 full color pages

• softcover edition

• a complete discography of the entire TMQ catalog of over 100 LPs and EPs

• well over 350 images of the albums, colored vinyl, and inserts

• the underground tale of how Trade Mark of Quality came into being

This book is essential for record collectors and dealers.

In that hot summer of ’69 two longhaired music freaks created an underground LP record album of unreleased tracks by one of their music gods and put it out on the streets of Los Angeles. No one had ever been crazy enough to do such an audacious thing before. The god’s official record label was not amused but the music fans were thrilled. Were these guys pirates or heroes? It was so much fun the first time, they soon pressed up even more records of forbidden musical fruit. They were on a roll. The following year, in 1970, one of the culprits put The Pig image in a circular logo with the name “Trade Mark of Quality.” TMQ and Pigman were born!

With a cast of outrageous characters, here is the story of Trade Mark of Quality aka TMQ aka The Pig, the first bootleg record label of its kind, spawning many later imitators. From the end of the '60s to the mid '70s, TMQ and Pigman led the way, trotting down a muddy trail, feeding the habits and needs of music addicts around the world. Who were these fellow travelers? Carl? The Greek? Merlin? Hans? Rob Snout? Casper? Sheldon? The Blue Hasslebeast? Ol’ Fred? (Not to mention, The Brooklyn Boys, The Record Suits and The Feds!) What was the connection between TMQ and the Viet Nam war, revolutionaries, guns, pot and the moon landing? It’s all here!

Included in A Pig’s Tale is not only the Trade Mark of Quality and Pigman saga, but reproductions of all the rubber stamped and illustrated album jackets from every genuine TMQ record release, including the earliest releases from ’69 right up to the last titles in 1976. Everything you ever wanted to know about the real TMQ label is here: A complete discography of artists and track listings, sources of recordings, catalog numbers, master tape and record matrix info, colored vinyl pressings, record labels, graphics, photos, vintage news clippings, articles and more, all collected together, at last, in one volume.

A Pig’s Tale by Ralph Sutherland and Harold Sherrick, with their unique point of view, guides the reader through the never before told history of Trade Mark of Quality. It’s all here for the music lover and fan, the hardcore record collector, and the just plain curious.

WARNING! THESE EVENTS COULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IN ANOTHER TIME AND PLACE!

(Pigman says, “Be cool, put some sounds on the turntable and groove on with ‘A Pig’s Tale’!”)

Part 1: Prologue

A TIME AND PLACE

The 1960s was a unique time in history. It was an era of change and great upheaval in politics, events, and culture resulting in clashes between generations. There was a new generation coming of age with their own views of how the world should be. They were the “baby boom” kids of their WWII parents, who didn’t have a clue what was going on with their offspring, and it scared the shit out of them. It was a new world and their compass could no longer find north. Presidents and the government were lying to America and young men shouting, “Hell no, we won’t go!” were being sent, against their will, to the slaughter in Viet Nam. For what and why? It was a decade of protest, Black civil rights, revolution, riots, assassinations, anti-war demonstrations and, at the same time, a search for justice and peace expressed through free love and drugs, unprecedented creativity in new colorful art, design and fashion, innovative theatre and cinema, and most important to this story: music.

Music was a big part of this revolution. It was the glue that held it all together. It was the DNA essence in the minds of those kids screaming in the streets, making love or just stoned out of their minds at some love-in. Unlike now, music then wasn’t just some standalone tune you downloaded from “the cloud,” listened to with your earbuds, then just deleted when you tired of it. At that time, a long-playing record album was an artistic “concept” made up of songs. When one of the music icons of the day released a new LP, people couldn’t wait to storm the local record shop on that first day of release to grab a copy to take home, and to play it over and over on their stereo sound system, until every nuance on every track was etched into their brains. They held the album jacket looking at the cover, reading the back liner notes, listening to the lyrics and tunes, wearing out those LPs, until it became a permanent part of their psyche. It was part of their life. Even to this day, 50-plus years later, those music memories are deeply imprinted. Whatever was going on around or inside those young heads at that time, for better or worse, that moment is forever alive in that music.

The end of the decade was fast approaching. That groovy ‘60s “Summer of Love” airplane would crash land on December 6th of 1969 at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco. At a free outdoor Rolling Stones concert, as they performed “Under My Thumb,” an 18-year-old Black man was killed by a Hell’s Angel in front of the stage. It was an ugly finale to a decade of hopeful optimism, tainting the memory of Woodstock the previous summer.

Our story here begins earlier that year as two bizarre events occurred in that July of 1969. A brave astronaut in a white space suit stepped down a ladder and actually walked on the moon. Meanwhile, back on terra firma, two long-haired music freaks in Los Angeles had put together a strange double LP record album. What the hell was it? The whole world knew about the guy on the moon. But very soon, many who were into the music of that time would hear about this mysterious record album which would first hit those smoggy L.A. streets like a small explosion. The very existence of this album would have been impossible without what had gone before in the 1960s. It was the product of a particular time and place unlike anything before. Was it a statement against The Establishment and those who wanted to control and manipulate the minds and lives of a new generation? Was it a big “Fuck You!” to those who would dare to tell them what music they should or could not listen to? Or was it just some crazy scheme cooked up by a couple of wacko record collectors? Whatever it was, when these two guys created this “underground” record album, they really didn’t have a clue what they had unleashed, or that the world of music and the record business would soon be dropped on its ear….

This is just the beginning. A Pig’s Tale is available now.

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It’s time to get “Happy Together” again!

Discover the songs and the history of one of the most successful pop rock bands ever, The Turtles, who had many, many Top 40 hits including “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Let Me Be,” “You Baby,” “She’d Rather Be with Me,” “You Know What I Mean,” “She’s My Girl,” “Elenore,” “You Showed Me” and of course, the iconic “Happy Together!” All of their Golden Hits!

Authors Mark Arnold (Looking for the Good Times: Examining The Monkees Songs and Headquartered: A Timeline of The Monkees Solo Years) and Charles F. Rosenay!!! (The Book of Top 10 Beatles Lists and The Book of Top 10 Horror Lists) have joined forces to cover the entire careers of The Turtles from their early days as The Crossfires, through their hit-filled years, into their break-up that led to most of The Turtles’ members joining forces with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, to Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan’s years as a duo under the guise of Flo & Eddie, and even their forays into children’s records.

Arnold and Rosenay!!! have reviewed every song and album, and interviewed many of The Turtles’ friends and associates along with most of The Turtles themselves, who have given startling new revelations that will surprise even the most hardcore fan.

Open the doors to your library to add this book. This definitive Turtles compendium is as unique as The Turtles themselves.

FORGET THE MONKEES, WHY THE HELL AREN’T

THE TURTLES IN THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME?!?

A Rant and Historical Discussion by Mark Arnold

This may shock anyone that’s reading this, but I’ve been a Turtles fan longer than I have been a Monkees fan. I just didn’t know it. Anyone who has read my two Monkees books or has listened to my Fun Ideas Podcast probably knows my history with The Monkees. In short, I didn’t like them when I first encountered them as a child on Saturday morning TV reruns in the early 1970s. That all changed with Michael Nesmith’s Elephant Parts in 1980, when I suddenly discovered that there actually was some talent and creativity there in the bunch and I began collecting the group’s records, and realized there was more to them than just the typical teeny-bopper flash-in-the-pan group.

In the meantime, I had already encountered on TV the two crazy hippies colloquially known as Flo & Eddie. I was already a fan of comedian Martin Mull, thanks to the comedic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off talk show parody called Fernwood 2-Night (later called America 2-Night). I discovered that Mull also sang humorous songs and eventually hosted an episode of The Midnight Special in 1978 that featured Flo & Eddie as his special guests. I think somewhere along the line I saw this and Mull’s 1976 appearance on Soundstage that also featured Flo & Eddie. Mull was really the attraction for me. In fact, I saw him live on stage in 1977, my first actual concert. Flo & Eddie also had a certain charm for me, and I liked that they actually could sing despite their hairy facades.

Around this same time, I became aware of a fledgling record label called Rhino Records, who loved to reissue rarities and obscurities of rock and roll and comedy. One of their earliest releases was a picture disc featuring (what seemed to me at the time) a bunch of fat guys going by the name The Turtles. This turned out to be a 12” EP that featured two previously unreleased songs, a demo and a long out-of-print song bearing the title 1968. As all of the songs and the group seemed unfamiliar to me, I didn’t purchase this disc until about a decade later when I was a certified Turtles fan.

I soon discovered that a tune I did know by just hearing it on the radio called “Happy Together” was done by this mysterious group known as The Turtles. Well, I liked that song… a lot… but I still wasn’t willing to plop down good money on four songs I didn’t know at all.

Rhino Records had a lot of faith in these Turtles and by the early-to-mid 1980s, they had reissued the group in a number of configurations including a compilation, some of their original 1960s LPs and even a turtle-shaped EP on green vinyl. The most fascinating of these was a three-record box set called The History of Flo & Eddie and The Turtles. I was gobsmacked. I mean, why the hell were these crazy singers named Flo & Eddie even remotely combined with the group that sang the angelic “Happy Together?” This was truly worthy of further investigation.

Strangely, I did not go out and purchase Rhino’s 14 track Turtles Greatest Hits collection from 1982 which would have been the obvious choice, or even this three-record set, which I deemed too pricey for my teenage income.

Eventually, I was rummaging through those cheapie cut-out bins that had various LPs and audio cassettes with drill holes in them. I came across a different Turtles Greatest Hits on cassette that had more tracks than the Rhino one and was a release from France! I think it was 99c if memory serves, which was the perfect price if Happy Together turned out to be the only good track on the tape.

I went home and played it. The first song was “She’d Rather Be with Me” and it immediately captivated me as much as “Happy Together” did. I discovered that it too, was almost a #1 record. So now, The Turtles were no longer one-hit wonders to me. The track that followed, “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain,” was very strange sounding to my ears and it took me years to actually like it and appreciate it.

The next song was “You Know What I Mean,” followed by “Elenore,” both winners to me, although “Elenore” did have some pretty silly lyrics.

Next up was “Grim Reaper of Love.” Like “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain,” this one also took me a while to warm up to it. So the tally so far: four hits (counting “Happy Together”) and two misses.

“Lady-O" was sung very sweetly and “It Ain’t Me Babe” was my first encounter with the Bob Dylan song, as I wasn’t much of a Dylan fan, apart from the covers done by The Byrds and Jimi Hendrix. So now we’re at six hits and two misses. Not bad. I kept listening.

“Sound Asleep” was very strange upon first listen. In fact, I would have to say that I didn’t like it much, although it was kind of neat to hear a tree being sawed and felled in stereo. Overall, I thought it, more than “Elenore,” was more of a rip-off of “Happy Together.”

“You Baby” and “Let Me Be” were both decent rockers, so I gave them high grades, and then next was “Happy Together” followed by “Guide for the Married Man,” another winner.

“The Story of Rock and Roll” followed and was kind of meh, but the rest of the tracks I really liked: “She’s My Girl,” “You Showed Me,” “Me About You,” “Outside Chance,” and “Can I Get to Know You Better?”

My final tally for the 18 tracks: 14 hits and 4 misses. Not bad for a greatest hits collection of songs that I hadn’t heard before apart from one. I liked The Turtles and I played that tape over and over and over again, so eventually I came around and also liked the four songs that I initially wasn’t too crazy about.

In the meantime, Rhino started reissuing the rest of The Turtles catalog, including The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, Turtle Soup and Wooden Head. The first of these three really intrigued me as I had heard about this concept album wherein The Turtles pretended to be a bunch of other bands in various styles and “competing” in a Battle of the Bands, something The Turtles (and their precursor The Crossfires) actually did in the formative years of their career.

I already knew “You Showed Me” and “Elenore,” but when I played the rest of the album, EVERY track was glorious and was filled with many treasures. I loved the stylistic differences with the country-sounding “Chicken Little Was Right” and “Too Much Heartsick Feeling,” but it was the humor that put me over the edge with tracks like “Oh, Daddy!,” “I'm Chief Kamanawanalaya”, and especially “Food.”

I honestly felt that The Turtles had out-Beatled The Beatles, coming up with a better concept album than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and their upcoming The Beatles a.k.a. The White Album.

Equally surprising and also baffling was that despite The Battle of the Bands having two Top 10 hits for The Turtles, the album only charted at a paltry #128! Wow, that must have been a disappointment!

Indeed it was, as Howard Kaylan revealed much more recently. He actually left The Turtles for a time between Battle of the Bands and Turtle Soup. He didn’t claim that Battle’s lousy chart performance was the reason, but I speculate that it had something to do with it. It also explains why Turtle Soup features the other Turtles taking on lead vocals on some tracks.

Eventually, I got all of The Turtles’ other albums. Happy Together is their only LP that comes close to Battle of the Bands as far as overall consistency to me. Turtle Soup still kind of leaves me cold, but knowing that Howard left for a time and producer Ray Davies from The Kinks really didn’t know how to produce The Turtles, it’s amazing that it hangs together as well as it does.

The leftover tracks that would have become Shell Shock and eventually be re-recorded and issued as Flo & Eddie tracks leads me to believe that had The Turtles not broken up and were somehow able to wrangle themselves from the clutches of White Whale Records, they might have had greater chart success in the 1970s.

As it was, and as the story goes, The Turtles broke up in early 1970, and Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (and soon Jim Pons) joined Frank Zappa’s reformed Mothers of Invention by March. Now simply known as The Mothers, they basically went on tour together through the end of 1971, when two significant events ended their progress: the fire in Switzerland at Montreux that destroyed their instruments and was the inspiration for Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” on December 4, and six days later on December 11, when a jealous fan pushed Zappa into the orchestra pit in London, where the band was now playing with rented instruments.

Zappa was so prolific that a studio album, a soundtrack double album and three live albums (one released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono) came out covering this period, with many more years later.

Flo & Eddie bided their time while Zappa recovered, creating their own albums starting in 1972. Zappa did recover by 1973, but decided to transition into a more jazz fusion stage and also created some of his highest charting albums of his career: Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe. Zappa, Kaylan and Volman remained friends, and OCCASIONALLY worked with each other professionally again.

Flo & Eddie secured the rights to The Turtles music by 1974 and quickly issued a double-LP compilation called Happy Together Again! in November.

Throughout the rest of the 70s, they continued to tour and release albums under the Flo & Eddie moniker, as well as sing backup on some of rock and roll’s biggest songs, including “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen and “Get it On (Bang a Gong)” by T. Rex.

By the 1980s, Flo & Eddie released the last of their LPs and also a number of children’s albums featuring the characters of Strawberry Shortcake, The Care Bears, and G.I. Joe. They continued touring as The Turtles featuring Flo & Eddie and released a live album in the 1990s that was reissued and repackaged many times.

By this time, many, many, many Turtles compilations hit the shelves with varying success and with occasional rarities and outtakes. As a fan and collector, I cherry-picked the best ones, getting all of The Turtles, The Mothers, Flo & Eddie, but cautiously avoiding the children’s albums and totally missing bizarre pet projects like Checkpoint Charlie and most of The Rhythm Butchers releases, which are admittedly best forgotten.

I’ve seen The Turtles a number of times and have gotten both Howard and Mark’s autographs, and eagerly purchased Howard’s only solo album and wished there were more.

As I got more and more interested in The Monkees during this same time period, I realized that there was a growing public outcry demanding why The Monkees were not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

While I feel that The Monkees SHOULD be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I can somewhat see the reasoning of why they aren’t, namely due to how they were formed and packaged… at least for their TV series and first two albums. This would mean that other “fictional” groups like The Chipmunks, The Beagles, The Banana Splits, The Globetrotters, The Partridge Family, The Hardy Boys, The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats, The Cattanooga Cats, The Groovie Goolies, The Bugaloos, and more could all theoretically also be in consideration for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which arguably could tarnish the image and meaning of the Hall.

But none of this applies to The Turtles! The Turtles were created organically the way a rock band is arguably supposed to, originally as The Crossfires (and other names). The Turtles played their own instruments from the start mainly because they had to. White Whale was cheap. Even Howard and Mark honked their way into the group with their saxophones before becoming singers and clowns. The Turtles did use outside writers for their songs, but so did The Beatles, and also like John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles, Howard, Al Nichol, and Chuck Portz were all writing original songs from the beginning for the group to play.

Eventually, The Turtles were writing and performing all of their own music and had as many Top 40 hits as The Monkees.

Besides, Flo & Eddie have done a few rap parodies over the years in concert. While I feel that rap has no place in a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this alone should help qualify them.

So, why aren’t The Turtles in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Politics. Grrrr!

Note from co-author Charles: Let’s get this book - and Mark Arnold’s valid argument - into the hands of the powers-to-be at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so the oversight of The Turtles’ omission can be rectified.

Get your copy now! Not Just Happy Together

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In this exclusive new clip, original Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward opens up about the power and impact of the band that defined an era. It’s a must-see moment for any Sabbath fan — raw, reflective, and rooted in truth.

This video is just one of many moments captured in Black Sabbath: An Oral History, a behind-the-scenes book crafted from interviews and personal stories of Sabbath members past and present. Author Mike Stark brings their journey to life — in their own words.

📖 Grab the book:
Black Sabbath: An Oral History is available now.

Get your copy here: Head Bangin Radio

But what was the firstborn? What was the first rock ‘n’ roll record?

Using this question as their starting point, writer Jim Dawson and DJ Steve Propes nominate 50 recordings for that honor. Beginning with a 1944 Jazz at the Philharmonic recording of “Blues,” and ending with Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? Profiles some of the most important and influential recordings in rock’s history.

For each nominee, Dawson and Propes provide chart positions, labels, recording information, and an explanation as to why it might qualify as the first. Lesser known milestones like “Open the Door, Richard” and “Rocket 88” appear here alongside acknowledged classics like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and “Rock Around the Clock,” and many forgotten artists are restored to their rightful place in rock’s pantheon. The result is a provocative and entertaining guide to the earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll.

This 30^th anniversary updated and revised edition brings to light new and surprising details about the songs, albums, and artists that are vying for the honor of being the first rock ‘n’ roll record.

1 BLUES, PART 2
by Jazz at the Philharmonic, featuring Illinois Jacquet

Chart position: Did not chart

Category: Jazz/R&B

Writer: Entaoin

Label/number: Stinson 624

Flipside: “Blues, Part 1”

When & where recorded: July 2, 1944, in Los Angeles

When released: Late 1944

Why important: It was one of the first “live” commercial recordings; Illinois Jacquet’s solo performance launched a school of highly emotional “honking and squealing” saxophone playing that became a staple of R&B and early rock ‘n’ roll

Influenced by: “Seven Come Eleven” by the Benny Goodman Sextet (1939), and Jacquet’s own earlier solo on Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home” (#23 Pop, 1943)

Influenced: Every R&B saxophonist from Wild Bill Moore and Big Jay McNeely to King Curtis and the Comets’ Joey D’Ambrosio and Rudy Pompilli

Important remakes: “Jet Propulsion” by Illinois Jacquet (1947) and “Rockin’ at the Philharmonic” by Chuck Berry (1958)

The story behind the record: Los Angeles-native Norman Granz was a twenty-six-year-old film editor at MGM Studios who, in his spare time, ran all-star jazz jam sessions at clubs around town. Coming from a Ukrainian-Jewish family, he was sensitive enough to ethnic and racial discrimination that he insisted on whites and blacks being allowed to play together on stage at his shows and sit together in the audience. In 1944 he was holding a weekly get-together at the new 331 Club on Eighth Street, just east of Normandie. “I worked there every Monday for twenty-one Mondays,” said tenor saxophonist Jack McVea. “Nat ‘King’ Cole had the regular group there, but then he got a hit record going [‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’], so [clarinetist] Barney Bigard called me up and asked me to take over.” Whoever was in town would show up, and patrons could expect to see some of the top names in jazz.

The sessions got so popular that one day someone kidded Granz, “Hey, why don’t you put this in the Philharmonic? They’re not doin’ nothing.”

The impressive beaux-arts Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium, downtown at 427 West Fifth Street overlooking Pershing Square, was the staid home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and was generally filled with soaring arias and symphonies. Ragtag jazz seemed as out of place there as Pagliacci wearing a porkpie hat. But the thirty-eight-year-old edifice could hold 2,300 people, and nobody was using it most Sunday afternoons, so Granz arranged a major jazz concert there. As usual, one of his stipulations with the management was that blacks would not be barred from attending the show or shunted into the balcony. This provided an ironic touch, since the theater—once known as Clune’s Auditorium—was where D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a paean to the Ku Klux Klan, had its world premiere in 1915 and packed the house twice a day for months afterward. Granz also agreed to donate most of the concert’s profits to a defense fund to help several Mexican-American youths wrongly convicted for murder during the infamous “Zoot Suit” riots in June of the previous year, when a mob of drunken servicemen rampaged through the barrio near downtown, beating up pachucos and tearing off their baggy, draped suits.

When Granz set up his first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert on Sunday afternoon, July 2, 1944, he packed the joint. “That first session,” Jack McVea recalled, “people was trying to get in the place after it was closed.”

Granz himself hadn’t thought of recording the event, but a friend, Jimmy Lyons, who worked for the Armed Forces Radio Service, “asked my permission to record [the artists] on those old sixteen-inch disks,” Granz said.

The Armed Forces Radio Service generally recorded jazz and swing concerts in Los Angeles as part of its Jubilee series of broadcasts for black military men, who at that time served in segregated units. These concerts were edited down onto twelve- or sixteen-inch, 78-rpm transcription disks and sent to short-wave radio stations around the world. Jazz at the Philharmonic fit perfectly into the Jubilee program.

For his rhythm section, Granz recruited drummer Leonidas “Lee” Young (saxophonist Lester Young’s twenty-seven-year-old kid brother, who led the house band at the Club Alabam on Central Avenue) and the Nat Cole Trio: pianist Nat Cole, guitarist Oscar Moore, and bassist Johnny Miller. The trio’s presence demonstrated their high regard for Granz, because by now they were major recording stars with two Harlem Hit Parade hits behind them and a current record, “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” sitting at the top of the chart (for a total of ten weeks) and winging over into pop terrain.

Cole had settled in Los Angeles a couple of years earlier after being stranded by the collapse of the road troupe of the Broadway revue Shuffle Along. Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1917, he grew up in Chicago. Though his biography implies that he accidentally became a singer after he was already known as a first-rate jazz pianist, in fact he sang on his first recordings in 1938, issued under the name the King Cole Swingsters. Now recording for Capitol Records, only in the past year had he established his velvety voice as commercial gold. In order to play at the JATP he used a dummy name, Slim Nadine, and limited himself to the ivories. Nadine, incidentally, was his wife’s name.

Bassist Johnny Miller, a native of nearby Pasadena who had recently joined Cole’s trio, showed up for the gig, but Oscar Moore was reportedly shacked up with a hot babe and a bottle, so Cole asked his friend Les Paul to sub him on guitar. Since Paul was in the army at the time and not allowed to record as a civilian musician, he also, like Cole, assumed a phony name for the day: Paul Leslie.

Rounding out the crew was the horn section: Illinois Jacquet and Jack McVea on tenor saxes, and a twenty-year-old trombone player from Benny Carter’s band named J.J. Johnson.

The combo started the afternoon with Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In,” then moved into another instrumental, a head arrangement that McVea called “just a traditional blues, with standard blues changes we could all play,” although the beginning riff bears a close resemblance to bandleader Benny Moten’s 1933 “Moten Swing” and the Benny Goodman Sextet’s 1939 “Seven Come Eleven.” After Nat Cole kicks off the number, McVea takes over and establishes the melody with a chorus of rich tenor sax. J.J. Johnson follows with an extended trombone solo. Then, as the tune heats up, Illinois Jacquet steps forward and launches into two-and-a-half-minutes of rabble-rousing. He slips way down into his horn and brings up a throaty growl that rises from the bell like a tornado. He shrieks, squeals, pinches off the ends of his phrases somewhere in the stratosphere. Each new assault on the melody drives the crowd into a frenzy.

For a general audience, this was something new, a mixture of stage antics and musical pyrotechnics that, in only a few manic choruses, blew open the boundaries of jazz and rhythm and blues. On that July day at the Philharmonic, Jacquet introduced the phenomenon of the honking saxophonist [see #9, “We’re Gonna Rock”], and black music—hell, American music—would never be the same again!

Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet was born in Broussard, Louisiana, on October 31, 1922, and raised in Houston, Texas. He was a big, handsome, green-eyed kid who blew a big-voiced tenor. Moving to the West Coast in 1941, he joined Lionel Hampton’s band and wrote his indelible signature on the coming decade with his impassioned solo on Hampton’s “Flying Home,” one of the first identifiably rhythm and blues hits. Jacquet was playing with Cab Calloway’s orchestra when he got the nod to play at the Philharmonic.

The show was a ringing success. Granz scheduled another concert at the auditorium the following month and invited back some of the same musicians, including McVea and Jacquet. During that jam, Jacquet knocked out the audience with an overheated rendition of “How High the Moon” that would later change the fortunes of JATP. But because the fans at the two events were unruly (McVea recalled that several jivers “ripped up the seats”) and some people resented the integrated seating policy, the Philharmonic management told Granz he wouldn’t be welcomed back. He moved the show to the larger Shrine Auditorium not far away, on Jefferson Boulevard. Though Granz never returned to the Philharmonic Auditorium, he kept the name Jazz at the Philharmonic for its commercial ring.

After the Armed Forces Radio Service aired the July concert for servicemen around the world, Granz carried his JATP masters, along with a dozen or more other recordings, to New York City on a business trip. When Columbia Records turned him down, he contacted Moses Asch, a Polish immigrant who had been recording blues, gospel, and folk music since the late 1930s. Asch’s biggest artists were Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. At first Granz tried to sell him a dozen sides by a jazz singer named Ella Logan, but Asch wasn’t interested. However, he did want to hear some of those other disks Granz was toting. The minute the needle touched down on a live recording of Jacquet playing a bopped-up version of “How High the Moon,” Asch was hooked. He agreed to release an album with selections from the first two Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts.

An album in the mid-‘40s was indeed an album: several sleeved records within a cardboard-covered book. Normally these albums were made up of ten-inch 78-rpm records—the normal size—but Granz and Asch needed a different format. The musicians had played without any thought of limiting their solos to fit comfortably on the side of a ten-inch platter, which held less than three and a half minutes of music. This required that Granz carefully edit the numbers, fading out at the end of a chorus so that the performance could fit on one side of a record, and then fading back in with a few seconds of overlap on another side. To get as much time per side as possible, Asch pressed the recordings onto twelve-inch 78s, which could hold over five minutes of music. (The twelve-inch format would later accommodate the microgroove 33-1/3 LP, which was an album in name only.)

Along with “How High the Moon,” Asch and Granz decided to release the improvised blues number. They named it simply “Blues.” At ten and a half minutes long, it had to be split into two sides. The Jack McVea and J.J. Johnson solos dominated the first side, “Part 1.” Jacquet’s blistering solo and a humorous chase between Nat Cole and Les Paul were the centerpieces of “Part 2.” The so-called composer, “Entaoin,” was a dummy name. Nobody copyrighted “Blues” at the time and no record of Entaoin exists.

Because of a wartime rationing of shellac—the Indian gum required to make the “wax” for 78s—Asch was faced with an inventory problem. He solved it by linking up with Hubert Harris, president of Stinson Records, who had specialized in releasing Russian music in the U.S. until World War II cut off his sources. Asch had music but no shellac; Harris had shellac and no music.

Their release of live material was a commercial risk. Up until then, transcriptions of public performances were used for radio programs, mostly to allow shows airing on the East Coast to be replayed in the western time zones hours later. Because of the still primitive technology, no one had thought to commercially release anything that hadn’t been recorded in the controlled environs of a studio. But jazz, with its flights of improvisation, often sounded better live. The JATP concert recordings became the first “live” albums.

Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic turned into a perennial success, but Asch soon severed their partnership because he felt the producer spent too much money on recording his artists. Granz leased his JATP material to other labels, including Mercury, but eventually he formed his own record companies, Clef, Verve, and later Pablo. The concerts spawned one hit, “Mordido,” featuring Illinois Jacquet, in 1949. Ten years later Granz took the JATP overseas and continued to hold concerts in Europe and Japan until the 1980s. He died of cancer on November 22, 2001, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Jacquet joined Count Basie’s Orchestra shortly after the 1944 concerts, gradually abandoned his pyrotechnics, and became a respectable jazz musician—but not before he remade “Blues” under the name “Jet Propulsion” for RCA Victor in 1947. Illinois Jacquet died in New York of a heart attack on July 22, 2004.

With the international success of “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” in 1946, Nat “King” Cole evolved into a major pop star and influenced a generation of smooth balladeers, including Frankie Laine, Charles Brown, Ray Charles, Johnny Ace, and Jesse Belvin, to name a few. Cole died of lung cancer on February 15, 1965. Les Paul teamed successfully with wife Mary Ford, helped pioneer the technology of multi-track recording [see #23, “How High the Moon”], and defined the rock ‘n’ roll guitar solo. J.J. Johnson became an internationally celebrated bebop trombonist and recorded with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis; Johnson died in Indianapolis in 2001. Drummer Lee Young challenged the Hollywood power structure and became one of the first black musicians to sit in with film studio, radio, and later television orchestras. He died in 2008. And Jack McVea co-wrote and recorded one of the biggest hit records of 1947 [see #6, “Open the Door, Richard”]. The Philharmonic Auditorium was torn down in 1985 to clear the way for a parking lot.

When Chuck Berry recorded an instrumental in 1958 called “Rockin’ at the Philharmonic,” he credited it to tunesmith Chuck Berry. In fact, the number was “Blues.”

Purchase the book here: What Was the First Rock N Roll Record?

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"A voice. A banshee, crying for mercy. Crying to be put out of his misery."
— from the introduction of Black Sabbath – An Oral History

"A voice. A banshee, crying for mercy. Crying to be put out of his misery". - from the introduction of "Black Sabbath - An Oral History"

I can't tell you how many times I've been told over the years that Black Sabbath, with Ozzy, "saved my life". Knowing the antics of Ozzy over the years following his time with Sabbath, his escapades on reality TV and the humor he brought to everyone - many times at the expense of himself, it's hard to conceive that he was able to even save himself.

But those early recordings in the hands of a kid (or an adult) in angst, were the release valve that likely did save the lives of many. Maybe your life was perfect, but for that kid with little future to look forward to, whose been mistreated, abused and marginalized by others, that music was as important as it gets to ease the pain and release some of the anger. Let's also remember that he and the other members of Sabbath invented a musical genre. From that foundation, the MANY metal artists out there today are continuing to help heal the angst - and save lives.

Mike

Photo: Ozzy Osbourne at Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, AZ, Feb 20, 2010. Photo by darkbladeus / Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Head Bangin’ Radio is an exciting memoir of the era of FM rock radio at Los Angeles’s flagship heavy metal station, KNAC-FM, through the days of Pirate Radio and beyond. For fans of heavy metal, those nostalgic for the great days of rock radio, or anyone who wants a good laugh at the absurdity of show business (and Thrasher himself!), Head Bangin’ Radio delivers. If you ever wondered what it was like to be on the radio, or just what the heck those people were really doing “in there” as you listened, Ted lets it all hang out, blemishes and all, with humor and love for a medium that is all but gone today.

HIGHWAY TO HELL—L.A.

Let me take you back to early January of 1986. At the time, I was the morning jock at an FM rock station in Tampa Bay, Florida and I had taken vacation time to fly out to L.A. One of my old radio buddies, Lou Simon, was on the West Coast as on-air talent and music director at a CBS-owned FM radio station, KKHR, in Los Angeles.

Lou showed me around town a bit and as a result I quickly learned that L.A. traffic was nuts beyond anything I had ever experienced. The horrific traffic essentially trapped people in their cars for hours on end. As a result of the time spent in vehicles, radio listenership was huge. Remember, I’m talking 1986 so there’s no satellite radio, no internet, and no cell phones to speak of. Unless you were rocking a cassette player or were an early owner of a car CD player, you became a radio junkie in L.A. There was no better place to be in radio than on the West Coast.

Legendary KMET was still on the air with Ace Young and Jeff Gonzer in the morning, Robert W. Morgan was doing mornings at KRLA-AM, Rick Dees on KIIS, Jay Thomas on Power 106, and the most creative and innovative station in the world at that point, KROQ, was changing radio formatting and presentation—forever.

I wanted to live in Southern California and work in L.A. radio more than anything. It was intimidating just to listen to all the talent on every AM and FM signal in L.A., and I had no idea how to make my dream a reality at that point. Then again, I had no real idea of how I had gotten as far as I had in my seven years of my “professional” radio career. All I can say is that very interesting, almost mystical, things go to work when you put total commitment in motion. Some years earlier I had decided to just get started somehow, take one step at a time and keep going no matter what happened or how things turned out. It had been an interesting journey in which I found myself in places and situations I could never have imagined. Like driving down the Sunset Strip with my pal Lou, and me mouth-breathing like a tourist trying to take in all of the sights and sounds.

As a kid, the world came to me through my transistor AM radio. It was a little green Emerson that I would hide under my pillow and listen to the Top-40 records played on KQV-AM in Pittsburgh where I grew up. To show you how young I was when I got hooked on radio, you have to understand that I had an older brother who turned me on to Fats Domino and groups like the Contours and Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon long before I heard the Beatles or the Stones. Those short little two and a half minute songs transported me to places away from freezing-ass Pennsylvania winters, arguing parents, and neighborhood kids who just did not get where I was coming from when it came to the rock and roll music I heard on the radio. I could stand in front of the mirror, lip sync with a Four Season’s song, and become a Philadelphia “Bad Boy” just like Frankie Valli. Whatever song came to me over the radio had some effect. I could be a great dancer, the best singer, or the most popular kid in school if only for those few minutes.

When the “British Invasion” and puberty hit me at the same time, my fate was sealed. I was going to be in or around rock and roll music and that was that. For me, it was supposed to be lights out and beddy-bye at about 8:30 PM so I had to hide that radio or feel the “hairbrush on the ass” wrath of my mom. In fact, my mom would fly down from heaven and kick my ass right now if she found out I had been listening to that radio after bedtime for all those years.

My first experience with actually being on the radio came in the early ‘70s at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia where I was a student. I won’t go into any detail about the horror that was my academic career but suffice to say that after an academic suspension (that is I flunked out), I returned to find that some of the science geeks had built a 10-watt FM radio station, WWHS-FM, in a small room above the cafeteria.

One of my fraternity brothers, Jimmy Logan from Luray, Virginia, and I were pretty tight due to our mutual worship of a Detroit disc jockey named Don Cornelius and in particular the TV show he hosted in the ‘70s called Soul Train. Watching Soul Train for us was like going to church. We’d smoke some of our home-grown weed, kick back in our fraternity house’s “tube room,” and soak up every second of the hour-long show. It didn’t matter that we were out in the sticks, we were making our connection with the big world every weekend by watching Cornelius on TV. All the great R&B acts performed, the dancing of the kids on the show was off the charts crazy, and Cornelius himself was the paragon of cool.

When Jimmy and I found out that WWHS-FM would let students perform on the air, it was all over. We signed up to do a “Soul Show” right away. Naturally, we had to create some kind of buzz so we came up with on-air characters. Jimmy called himself “Dr. Starr” and I was the “Dream Merchant.” I’m pretty sure I stole that nickname from R & B singer Jerry Butler whom I had seen in Richmond at some point. So “Dr. Starr and the Dream Merchant” became a team and nailed down a time slot on WWHS-FM. For show prep we would rip and read articles out of Right On! magazine and other similar fanzines that covered R&B music and black celebrities.

Luckily for us there was a 7-Eleven store in the “black section” of Farmville. VA, the closest town to school. Remember, we were in the south in the ‘70s so we stuck out like hookers at a debutante ball in that neighborhood, but we could buy all the current magazines there. Let me be VERY clear: We were NOT unwelcome there. In fact, after a few weeks, folks got pretty used to seeing us around.

I remember Jimmy got a clothing store in Farmville to sponsor us which was very cool as we were one of the first shows to bring in any kind of such underwriting. We were a couple of promoting fools, to be honest about it. We printed flyers and stuck them up all over campus, and also talked the school newspaper into doing an article about the show. Jimmy and I had a blast. My grades went to hell again but I was focused on that radio station so I didn’t care. I did some other freeform type rock stuff in other time slots and filled in on the air a good bit as I remember. I stayed connected to WWHS-FM until I left school. Thing was, I couldn’t really connect with how to turn that serious interest in radio into a real job. When I graduated I pretty much resigned myself to finding some kind of a “grown up” career.

As you can well imagine, a “grown up” career didn’t suit me too well. I was in training at the Virginia Paper Company in Charlotte, NC, with the idea of becoming a salesman. Part of the training was to work in the warehouse for a while in order to learn the basics. Well, I had more fun working in the warehouse with all the black guys than I ever did in the office with all the white folks. As I have always been somewhat of a mimic, I put my talents to work imitating the voice of the manager who had a preppy, country club kind of Southern accent. The guys in the warehouse got a kick out of it so I had a built in audience.

I was moved into the office after a time and set to work taking orders on the phone. I hated it. I actually asked the manager if I could move back out to the warehouse. That cracker looked at me as if to say, “What in the hey-ell is wrong with you boy?” Soon after, I gave notice and registered at UNC-Charlotte in the Theater Arts department that same week. At the time, there was no audition or other requirements for that department, so I found myself in school again, this time as an art student. It was the fall of 1978.

In Charlotte there was a radio station with a great morning show: WAYS-AM/WROQ-FM. The morning man’s name was Robert Murphy, “Murphy in the Morning.” Murph performed comedy sketches and used a really talented character voice guy named Larry Sprinkle. The two of them came up with a bit that became known nationally called PTL—“Pass the Loot.” It was a satire on the PTL Club (People That Love or Praise the Lord—take your pick), which was the brainchild of Jim and Tammy Bakker, who from their religious sect’s compound just over the border in South Carolina, fleeced the hell out of people dumb enough to mail in their hard earned money. Their thievery went on until Brother Jim got caught schtupping Jessica Hahn some years later. You might remember Jessica Hahn in Sam Kinison’s “Wild Thing” video.

Tammy became the butt of many a stand up comedian’s joke repertoire because of her makeup “skills,” and Jim was simply seen as just another redneck evangelist douchebag. Anyway, my point is that Murph and Larry were very bright, hip people and I saw them as the only really talented radio people around town, and I wanted to be part of it. As usual, I had no idea how to make that happen. However, fate stepped in at the right time. On the first day of class at UNCC, I met a guy named Mike Donovan who was a part-time disc jockey on the station BIG WAYS. It was to be a fortuitous meeting. As it turned out, Mike and I were the only two heterosexual men in the whole theater department, including the instructors. But everybody was cool and it was quite a humorous Christmas party when Mike and I opened our “Surprise Santa” gifts: matching sets of Soap on a Rope. We’re great friends to this day.

UNCC was a major step in life for me. I had suffered from horrible shyness from an early age. In fact, it got so bad at one point, I couldn’t go into a fast-food joint and order a hamburger. But theater people are wonderful and everyone I met there accepted me and all of my weirdness without judgment. I accepted them as well. As a result of their kindness, I started to come out of my shell. As you can guess, my attitude about people of different lifestyles broadened as well. All of my classes required some kind of performing on a daily basis. I was fortunate to perform in the department’s major productions as well as numerous smaller shows and student productions during that year. Slowly, surely, I became quite comfortable with the whole business.

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This piece is an early glimpse into Kane’s upcoming book, Seeking Mirth and Beauty, arriving later this year. The book doesn’t try to solve Dylan’s puzzle — it simply sits with it, letting the music speak.

Enjoy the essay below, shared in full.

Seeking Mirth and Beauty

Musings on a Song and Dance Man

“While we seek mirth and beauty…” is a line from an American parlor song by Stephen Foster that Bob Dylan covered on his 1992 record, Good As I Been To You. Dylan’s work has been good to us, and the world is a better place for that work having been brought to fruition. There have been many books written about Bob Dylan that are based on his life, on gossip about his life, or on guess work. Those books have little to do with the work that Dylan has brought to the world. There are writers and critics who have tried to explicate Dylan’s songs and lyrics, trying to figure out for themselves, and to explain to interested listeners, just what it was that Bob Dylan really meant. That is a way to approach Dylan’s work—but it’s not the way that he seems to approach his work and it’s never particularly insightful.

There are no convoluted or secret meanings to the songs that Bob Dylan writes and sings. The songs are just what they are—although admittedly, there is no simple category for just what that might be. That is certainly true. It is also true that Dylan’s life story reveals little or nothing about the work he has produced. And so, the focus here will not be on Bob Dylan the man or on what any particular song might mean, but rather how and why some songs work. Dylan’s work is of particular interest because there is something in it that resonates with our own experience of the world—or that resonates with something deep inside of us. And that’s enough.

Dylan is an anomaly—and his work is outsider art. He is as much an abstract-impressionist artist as he is a traditional songwriter—though what he produces are songs. His work is as demanding, complex and enigmatic as he seems to be—though we are fooling ourselves to think that we know much about him. Knowing how very private Dylan has been over the years, for a public figure—and so unwilling to offer easy explanations of his life’s work, it was surprising to read a posting he made one time on his official Bob Dylan website.

“Everybody knows by now,” Dylan wrote, “that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”

It’s impossible to know whether that posting was facetious or not, but he did make the suggestion. I started this project for my own edification some time before that was written—but I’ll still take that encouragement as Bob Dylan’s personal okay. What I want to know, to figure out, is what exactly it is that makes Dylan’s work so moving for so many people—and so very unlike any other singer/songwriter you’ve ever come across. What did you hear? What exactly are the qualities that make Dylan songs what they are? And why do those qualities—whatever they are—work so well? Why are there so few songwriters working the way Dylan does? And why has this songwriter, performer and cultural icon, winner of every award possible, and on every critic’s short list of honorees to be included if there was ever a rock stars’ Mount Rushmore—never had a number one hit song on the radio? Not a single one. It’s a good question.

In my forthcoming book, Seeking Mirth and Beauty, and with more postings to follow here, I will muse a bit on that question—not to provide for you any easy answers, but more to give you something to think about when you consider Bob Dylan and the work he’s brought to us.

(For those readers who know Dylan’s work well, you’ll find a number of places in these posts and in my book where I am using lifted lines from Dylan’s lyrics. There are two lines on just this page!)

And so more to follow,

Kevin Kane

Photo Attribution

Ready to dive into the book? Get it here… Black Sabbath: An Oral History

Until now.

In this deeply personal reflection, Stark recounts the emotional significance of Black Sabbath’s final performance on July 5th:

• The return of Bill Ward after years of exclusion

• The healing of old wounds

• And the powerful feeling that, this time, they finally got it right

More than just a concert, this was a moment of closure for the band—and for fans who’d followed their tumultuous journey since the '60s.

Although, in rock 'n roll, you never really know if it's end, the "Back to the Beginning" celebration that took place on July 5th certainly felt like this would be Black Sabbath's final hurrah. All the acts leading up to and paying tribute to the band helped make this a fitting ending, but the actual performance by the original four members was the close[est] everyone had hoped for.

Redemption: That's what this final Black Sabbath performance represents.

For almost as long as I have known the band’s drummer Bill Ward, through his huge contribution to my book and producing his long running radio show, his relationship with Black Sabbath was a love that went one direction. He has an outward unconditional love for his bandmates and the music they make, and it broke his heart (and mine) whenever he was treated horribly by the "business" of his band.

Whenever they said Bill wasn't up to the job or wanted to pay him less, I sat across the glass producing his radio show, knowing that he lived to play the drums and was ready for whenever the call came in. Then when the calls did come, they always wanted him to make some concessions—which usually meant paying him less. He never talked about this stuff, but it seemed to always play out in the press.

He had passed on the last "final tour" because of an "unsignable contract." That tour ended on February 14, 2017, with Tommy Clufetos on drums, immediately after the other members of the original line-up started vocalizing "regrets" that Bill had not been included. They made the money for that final tour, but even they knew it was the wrong way to go out. I think at the time Bill had resolved it was over and dove into his own solo projects.

Then the "business" of the band realized that with Ozzy's declining health, that time was short to right the wrong of that final tour.

For this final performance, redemption for that bulls**t came in the form of a powerful and passionate performance by Mr. Ward. For the others, redemption came by bringing back Bill into the fold of their tribe and righting the misguided legacy of their last "final show"—and they ALL brought their best for this final musical experience.

If you've read my book, then you know that Black Sabbath has been in some kind of a turmoil from the start of their journey in the late ‘60s, so—if you're a fan—you can't help but be very satisfied with this somewhat "storybook" ending.

Bill has at least two albums ready for release and has returned to doing his radio show with me on a monthly basis on KLBP radio in Long Beach, California.

If we ever do another edition of my book, we can add this "postscript" to the timeline section, but I expect that Bill still has some good work ahead of him and I'm glad I'll get to see that.

Now that it is over, I've included in this post some "audio" from the book that has Ozzy talking about those "beginnings."

Want the full backstory on Sabbath’s rise and chaos-filled legacy?
Check out Black Sabbath: An Oral History by Mike Stark, featuring rare interviews and behind-the-scenes insight into one of music’s most legendary bands.