This is an episode all about bust-ups and break-ups, those times when tensions within a band get so high that things get weird and violent and—well, let’s just say “regrettable”. Some of these incidents resulted in nothing more than an airing of the grievances…steam was let off, people calmed down, and it was back to business as usual…other times, though, the damage of was irreparable and it marked the end of the group forever—or at least something close to it… You want stories?... You want drama?... You want weird…stand by…i got the stories ---and they are not pretty.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”. Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states. A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that’s supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener…there have been many times when I’ve asked a singer “what does this song mean?”… and their answer is “well, what does it mean to you?...whatever you say is the right answer”. Okay, i get it…it’s art…art is supposed to be open to personal interpretation…when you hear something beautiful or provocative or inspiring, who cares what the initial intent was—if there even was one…all that matters is that the song somehow hits you on some kind of emotional level that’s difficult or impossible to quantify or describe. Then again, some songs have a very specific point…they tell a story…or they’re inspired by something that happened in real life and the composer is trying to capture what he or she felt and saw. And then there are the stories of the creation of the songs themselves…something happened for that song to be born…what was it?...and what were the circumstances, the serendipity, the accidents, the crazy coincidences that needed to manifest for a great song to come to life?. Let’s explore that…this is another episode of stories behind songs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is an episode about murder…call this a crossover episode with my true crime podcast, “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”. For as long as rock music has existed, people have been blaming it for turning impressionable people to the dark side, inspiring them (if not outright encouraging them) to do evil things. My opinion is that an unstable mentally ill person is liable to be triggered by anything…and yes, sometimes that trigger might be a song…there are, however, not that many documented cases of this happening. I call this episode “murder ballads (and other deadly songs)”…and what you’re about to hear is not pretty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Nadine Bailey was 7 years old she woke up terrified of dark figures looming at the end of her bed and an eerie presence all around her. From then on every night was the same, she was visited by phantom-like shadows and no matter where she went, the ghostly encounters followed her. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits and the unexplained have consumed her entire life and for the past 20 years she's been an award-winning guide with Edmonton Ghost Tours  Along the way she has taken people into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. On Haunted Canada, Nadine journeys through terrifying and bone chilling stories of the unexplained. Join her if you dare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anyone with a passing knowledge of rock is aware of its origins back in the late 40s and early 50s when blues, rhythm and blues, western, country, folk, and hillbilly traditions began to mix and match, eventually coalescing into what became known as “rock’n’roll”. If you’re an alt-rock fan, you’ve heard the story of how all this began with the garage bands of the late 60s and the punk rock explosion of the mid-70s. The birth of modern electronic music?... It has a rich and complicated origin story that stretches back to the 40s before the technology was cheap enough for young musicians to give it a go in the 70s. Ska and reggae?... Understanding those sounds and their enduring appeal requires a deep dive into Jamaican culture and politics. Once we get to the 80s, things really begin to separate, segment, and stratify…goth, industrial, punk-funk, hardcore, dream pop, all the various flavours of metal…the last time I checked into Spotify’s classification system, the platform had sorted music into more than 2500 different genres—and that number keeps growing. This program has looked at many of these origin stories…and it’s time that we did another one. If you have ever enjoyed a pint in a traditional pub, you’re going to love this…it’s the history of Celtic rock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re a musical artist and you start to do well, the point will come when you need a manager. The manager is the person who looks after all the business stuff so the musician can get on with the business of making music…managers deal with booking gigs, marketing, promotions, promoters, publicity, support staff and road crews. They collect the money and pay the bills…and the oversee all the infrastructure of your career: lawyers, accountants, and all the other people involved in running the business that is you and your music. But it doesn’t stop there…managers can also function as advisors, sounding boards, fixers, father and mother figures, referees, bail bondsmen, bouncers, psychologists, and even amateur physicians and pharmacists—for good or for not-so-good reasons. They need to be on top of trends, have all the right connections, understand audiences, be able to navigate record companies, and translate contracts…it can be a 24/7 job. Bottom line is that a manager can make or break a career…they are incentivized by their commission, which is usually somewhere around 15%...the more you make as an artist, the more they make…if they’re good at their job, your career grows and the money roles in. These are the stories of nine managers who have had an impact—mostly good, but also, you know, not-so-great. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For some people, history is dry and boring…it’s all dates and wars and dusty facts about things that don’t have anything to do with life today…and yes, that can be true…but history also helps us understand why things are the way they are…study the past, understand the present, and maybe predict the future—at least to some extent. But history can also be stupid…and when it is, it can be fun to learn about these things…and in addition to all the dates and wars and famous people, i think we need to stupid history’s stupid bits…i’m calling this instalment “stupid history: the music version”. These are some of the dumbest stories from music history that i believe should be taught alongside the serious stuff…i think it adds colour and understanding—and it shows that history’s heroes are as dumb and weird as everyone else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By the time this episode is over, you will learn things about your fellow music fans (and music in general) that you can use to astound your friends…and when they say “go on, that’s not true,” you can simply point them to the research. Some are the result of serious, empyreal scientific work at universities and labs…other were conducted by professional pollsters and survey-takers…and then there’s the category of survey where a piece of research is really just a masquerade for an advertisement. Everything you’re about to hear that is the result of a legitimate study—or at least something pretending to be. I call this episode..."Survey Says: Useful and Odd Music Surveys and Polls". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion.  The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Mexico, and beyond. A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995. We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's here...it's happening. So we thought why not go back into the podcast vault and re-release a two part series we call “Oasis at War”.   It’s a look at one of the most intense sibling rivalries in music…and boy…there is a lot to go through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don’t like to think about our favourite musicians as being mortal…because let’s face it, we believe that they do extraordinary things and make us feel in ways we otherwise wouldn’t. Rock stars are special, superhuman, because they can do what we can’t and live a lifestyle that we can only dream about. Yet they are just as human as you and, fallible to temptations, in danger of accidents, and vulnerable to all the failings that may plague the body and brain. When one of our favourites die, it’s like a little bit of us goes with them…in most cases, we’ve never met these people…we might have never seen them in the flesh…but because what they do speaks to us in only the way music can, it hurts when they’re gone. And in a weird way, it’s instructive to look at how they died…these deaths can be cautionary tales that we as fans can learn from—you know, “hey, i’m not gonna let that happen to me!”. Their deaths may provide retroactive insight into the music they made—where in their hearts it came from—so we understand them better as both artists and humans…when they’re gone, we may appreciate their music even more…you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, right. This is another installment of “the last moments of”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion.  The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland and beyond. A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995. We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's here...it's happening. So we thought why not go back into the podcast vault and re-release a two part series we call “Oasis at War”.   It’s a look at one of the most intense sibling rivalries in music…and boy…there is a lot to go through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways. Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it…i find this aspect of history fascinating. There’s the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low-pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic causing a hurricane in the Caribbean. That doesn’t really happen…it was a metaphor created by a meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 when he discovered that a miniscule change in atmospheric conditions ---he ascribed a value as tiny as 0.000127—could make an enormous difference down the road …this shows why it’s so hard to forecast the weather…a little difference can add complexity and instability to a system. Remember that “treehouse of horror” episode from “The Simpsons” where homer accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine? ...he travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making the tiniest mistake. This is based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled “A Sound of Thunder” …a man named Eckels goes back in time and kills a dinosaur…when it returns to the present, everything is different. We hear about “black swan” events, a random thing that no one expects or could have predicted, yet it happens…and suddenly, everything changes. Covid-19 was an example of that…whatever spawned the virus—bats, infected animals in a wet market, a lab leak—started as something very, very small but ended up changing the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. We can also apply this sort of investigation to the world of music…if you pick a topic or thing, you can often trace it back to something that illustrates the wonderful and awful randomness of the universe. This is another episode that I call “connections”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tell me if this sounds familiar…you’re sitting around with a bunch of friends talking about music when someone says “what’s that song with the thing at the beginning and the boom-boom sound effects?....it’s got that guitar—or maybe it it’s not… you know the one!”…and then the friend gets frustrated when he gets a bunch of blank stares. If you’ve ever worked in a record store, you know the stare because you’ve done it with the customer who wants you to identify the artist, song, and album from her little acapella performance…and then she gets mad when you come up blank. Same thing happens with me and with all people who work in radio….a couple of times a week, I’ll get an email like this: “i’m hoping you can help me find a song”…uh-oh…“I think it’s from the 80s but maybe not…there are some beats on a bassline with a melody that goes “oooooooeeeooo” or something…the video has a bunch of dancers in it…do you the song?”…uh, no…i don’t. Some attach audio files of them plunking out notes on an instrument—and there have been at least a couple of people whistling. But here’s the weird thing…sometimes—just enough times—you actually get it right…it’s like a tiny explosion in your head as your personal database throws up the correct answer…when that happens, it feels so good!...you solved a mystery and made someone happy in the process…i love that feeling. Things have changed in this century, of course…tracking down a mysterious song is easier than ever thanks to listening apps like Shazam and Soundhound…or you can enter some lyrics into a site like lyricfind.com. Even throwing a bunch of random words into the google search bar can get you started…I’ve found crowdsourcing a song identification problem through certain websites (reddit, for example) can sometimes be helpful. But even with all this technology and the ability to tap into the minds of music fans around the planet, some songs just don’t want to the identified…and this has become a serious game for music fans… “challenge accepted,” as they say. These mysterious songs that are missing from the musical record are part of a category that’s been dubbed “Lostwave”…and this is their story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a scene in the 2000 movie “High Fidelity” that introduced a lot of people to the name Belle and Sebastian. Rob, the owner of a record store, and his employee, Dick, are enjoying a new arrival. Then Barry, another employee played by Jack Black, bursts through the door. This goes on for a while before Rob has enough and rips the cassette out of the machine. I have a couple of issues with that scene…first, I have a hard time believing that an obnoxious snobby indie record store clerk would love “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves that much…way too commercial, way too overplayed. Second, there is nothing wrong with Belle and Sebastian—although I will admit they’re not for everyone. They are part of a genre called “Twee Pop”…you may never have heard the term before, but its influence is everywhere these days…and it has a long history when it comes to alt-rock and indie rock…it’s certainly something we should take a look at…so let’s do that, shall we? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I do not dance…I’m too awkward and too self-aware of my awkwardness…I know we’re all supposed to dance like no one is looking, but when it comes to me, people will look, point, and judge… My wife realizes this…since we were married decades okay, she’s had to be content with the fact that she got that dance at the wedding and that’s pretty much it…and that’s because she’s not into dancing, either… I can feel the judgment stop it… This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t move me…I’ve got that involuntary need to move when the music is great…and I don’t mean tapping a toe or nodding my head, although that’s where it starts… Put it this way: I’ve done my time in the pit…I’ve been elbowed, kneed, kicked, head-butted, burn with cigarettes and joints, and doused with water (at least I hope it was water)…no problem because that’s all part of the pit experience…the only thing I haven’t done is stage dove or crowd-surfed…I’m not sure why… But here’s a question: why is there a pit in the first place?...who came up with this idea?...how did it spread?...and is it the same everywhere?... These are important anthropological questions…we’re deal with a type of human behavior that’s seen all over the world…I think we need to study this…here a whole hour on the history of moshing… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program…but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the movie “Hidden Figures”… This was a 2016 film based on a book of the same name…it told the true story about black female mathematicians who worked at nasa during the hottest period of the space race… They were “computers” in the original sense of the word: people who computer things complex things like flight trajectories, re-entry methods, and landing coordinates…they were even assigned to check and correct the calculations spit out by NASA’s big ibm mainframes…their work was essential to the American space effort… But this being the 60s, these women were segregated away from the other scientists, meaning that their work was largely forgotten until the movie and book came out… This got me thinking…are there any forgotten figures in music?...I’m talking about women who did awesome and important things but have largely been ignored by the traditional history of rock?...I’m talking about people beyond Deborah Harry, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde, and Courtney Love… Well, yes…yes, there was…and we need to know about them…let’s do that now… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the English language: “psychedelic” … The word first came into use in 1956 when a psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond was studying a new class of pharmaceuticals that had potential when it came to treating certain mental disorders… A chemical known as lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD, for short—had been extracted by a Swiss scientist named Albert Hoffman from a fungus called “ergot”…from 1943 on, medical professionals tried to figure out what it could be used for…it was even marketed commercially for a while under the brand name “delysid”… Then the CIA got involved, thinking that LSD could be used for things like interrogation, chemical warfare and mind control…but that’s a whole other story... Because the chemical resulted in people entering an altered state of perception, some started using it recreationally… artists discovered its properties and started taking acid trip, looking for inspiration and new creative roads… Then other psychedelics went mainstream, including mescaline (which comes from the peyote plant) and psylocybin (which you get from certain mushrooms) before just about all of these drugs were made illegal… Meanwhile, “psychedelic”—which means “soul-revealing” in Greek—became an adjective…it describes anything that could be described as mind expanding, anything that alters the way we perceive reality… Naturally, this quickly extended to music…psych became a thing in the 60s—that sound, feel, vibe, attitude continues today with alt-rock… This is a quick history of psych in the world of alternative music…   Songs used in this episode: Kula Skaker - Tattva The Soft Boys - Give It To The Soft Boys Teardrop Explodes - Sleeping Gas Echo and the Bunnymen - Bring on the Dancing Horses Siousxie and the Banshees - Dear Prudence Spaceman 3 - Revolution The Bangles - Hero Takes A Fall My Bloody Valentine - Soon The Verve - Slide Away Tame Impala - Elephant Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we begin, I am very aware that there are people listening to this program who have never, ever set foot in a record store…they came of age musical after the Internet changed everything about how we hear about, acquire, and consume music… But remember this: for over a hundred years, the only way you could hear music on-demand was to own it…you had to purchase a piece of plastic for x dollars and for that price, you could listen to that music an infinite number of times for no additional charge… You made not just an emotional investment in that music, but a financial one as well…and dammit, you were going to make sure you listened to that piece of plastic until you wrung out a possible bit of enjoyment you could from it…otherwise, you’d have to come to terms with the fact that you wasted your money… There was another aspect to this emotional investment, too…in order to acquire this music, you had to leave your home, find your way to a record store, and search through all the shelves hoping to find something…if you were looking for something specific and it wasn’t in stock, you had to special-order it, which was a whole new level of emotional investment… And while you were at the record store, you interacted with records that you didn’t know about…just flipping through the racks looking at albums was an education in itself…maybe you’d go with a couple of friends, fan out across the store and then compare finds… Maybe you’d meet a stranger and strike up a conversation…and if you were a regular, it’s possible that the person behind the counter became a trusted source for recommendations…or maybe you’d go see an artist play live or for some kind of autograph session… Record stores are still with us, but there are fewer and fewer of them—certainly way less than the glory days of music shopping from the 60s through to the late 90s…and a lot of legendary stores and chains have disappeared forever… But while it lasted, it was pretty amazing…this is the story of the record store… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 10, and the final episode in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 9 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 8 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 7 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 6 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 5 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 4 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1931, a larger than life prospector, in search of Slumach’s legendary lost gold mine goes missing in the wilderness of British Columbia. In this episode, we retrace the epic search and rescue efforts that went into looking for the missing prospector as well potential clues left behind at his campsite, that point to an even bigger mystery of what happened to Volcanic Brown? Host:  Kru Williams Guest: Adam Palmer Facebook - @HISTORYCanada  Instagram - @deadmanscurse Instagram - @Historyca Instagram - @kru_williams Twitter - @HistoryTVCanada  Curiouscast website: https://curiouscast.ca/ Great Pacific Media Website: https://greatpacifictv.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 3 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those. But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  This is Part 2 in the series. We hope you enjoy this look back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross. For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”. This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since.  We hope you enjoy this look-back… When a lot of people look at history, they only look at the big stuff...you know, the wars, the plagues, the disasters–you know what I mean? All those things are important, but they don’t even begin to tell half the story. To understand history, any kind of history is to also look at the little moments You know what I’m talking about...tiny, boring events and decisions that seemed completely innocuous and unimportant–or even meaningless–when they happened, yet eventually the consequences proved to be unbelievably huge. That’s what this ten-part series will be like...we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those... But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You would think that being a musician would be a very safe existence…I mean, your job is to write and perform music…yeah, you might get into the odd altercation and fight, but it’s not like you’re going to war, right?...yet every once in a while, we hear about a musician being murdered… The earliest example I can find is Alessandro Stradella, an Italian composer of classical music…back in his day—which was the mid-1600s—he was quite the star and was very influential with his six operas, 170 cantatas, and a long list of instrumental compositions… But then on February 25, 1682, he was found stabbed to death in a public square in Genoa…no one was ever convicted although the story is that he was murdered by one of three brothers who accused Stradella of seducing their sister… The first musician I know of who got shot was Pinetop Smith, a boogie-woogie piano player from Chicago…in 1929, just as he was about to go into a recording session, he was shot during a fight at a dance hall…he might not have been the intended victim, but he died all the same… And the first musician of the rock’n’roll era to be murdered was probably Sam Cooke on December 11, 1964…fantastic soul singer…he took a gunshot wound to the chest when Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel in South Central L.A.…she said it was in self-defence but even today, there are a lot of questions about the case…How many other rock musicians have been murdered since then?...fortunately, not a lot…but there is a tragic list…let’s go through it… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Next to music and my dogs, my biggest obsession is cars…I’ve always been a car nut…i’m one of those people with a list of cars I’ll buy when I win the lottery… I’ll start with production sports cars…a Porsche 911 Turbo 4 will be my daily driver, although there will be a Lamborghini Uris SUV for those times I need to haul people and stuff…for those summer days, I think a McLaren 750s Spider would be cool… I’ll need a car for track days, of course…no one else in the neighbourhood would have a Koenigsegg…I’d probably order the Jekso Absolute…1600 horsepower sounds about right… And just to show everyone that I’m not out to completely destroy the planet, there will be at least one EV…right now, that would be a Rimac Nevera… That’s what? Four million dollars worth of vehicles?...not including insurance and maintenance, of course…I’m never going to win that kind of lottery, but it’s nice to dream… For other people, though, this is the kind of machinery sitting in their air-conditioned, highly secure underground garages…that includes a lot of rock stars… Eric Clapton is so well-known at Ferrari that the company built him a custom one-of-a-kind model that probably cost him upwards of five million…Neil Peart had a selection of very collectible sports cars from the 1960s, all in silver… Brian Johnson of AC/DC has a bunch of Bentleys, Ferraris, and some classic race cars…same with Nick Mason of Pink Floyd…he’s even written a book about this collection… Then there’s everything we use in the car to listen to music…radio, car audio, satellite radio, infotainment systems and all that… All this got me thinking about the relationship between cars and rock…the two things go hand-in-hand…I think we should look at this history, don’t you? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every once in a long while, a new genre of popular music emerges, evolves a little bit and then stays almost exactly the same with only the slightest of variations…not that there’s anything wrong with that…a formula is discovered…it seems to work…so why change it?... Old-school 12-bar blues is an example…it features one of the most common chord progressions in Western music…the style of lyrics, phrasing, structure, and duration have been pretty much standard since the days of gospel and spirituals and African-based oral traditions…an Alabama musician named W.C. Handy was the first to codify 12-bar blues playing around 1905… Ska might be an example…it has many different flavours, but there are common components under the hood, rooted in playing on the off-beat—the “one” and “three” instead of the “two” and “four”… You might say the same about Reggae and its foundations in the debow beat, although you’ll probably get a little pushback from fans… Lemme throw this into the mix: garage rock…two or three chords played on guitar, bass, and drums with a loose, rebellious vibe…nothing too complicated…it’s just gotta feel good… And here’s one more that might not spring to mind right away: surf music…it, too, can come in different forms…as a type of garage rock…it can be punky…it can be hardcore…it’s great for skateboarding or snowboarding…and yes, it’s also about the beach, the boards, and the swells… But it’s also more than that…it’s about guitars, amps, pedals, amps, cars, girls, beer, and parties…it can feature vocals but it might be best experienced as instrumentals…. There’s a lot more to surf music than you might think…and its importance and influence and legacy goes far beyond the beach...…here…let me show you. Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want you to take a deep breath… It’s only when we focus on our breathing that we realize how important it is that 21% of our atmosphere is made up of oxygen…that is the ideal amount… Drop too, say 15%, and it would cause all sorts of mental and physical impairment…if the oxygen levels were to increase suddenly, we’d suffer “oxygen toxicity,” meaning that our cells would oxidize, leading to exhaustion and death… Meanwhile, spiders, roaches, and other crawly things would grow bigger and bigger because of their biology… if you think we have a wildfire problem now, imagine if those fires had more oxygen as fuel… So, unless you’re hoping for a burning planet covered in spiders the size of a compact car, 21% it is… Music is such an integral of our lives that we have no idea how important it is…I can even tell you…a study by Deezer, the French streaming service, says that to maintain a healthy lifestyle, we should listen to 78 minutes of music per day… The study broke things down even further…that 78 minutes should be portioned this way for maximum benefit… ·      14 minutes of uplifting music to exercise your happiness. ·      16 minutes of calming music ·      16 minutes of music that counteracts sadness. ·      15 minutes of motivational music to help with concentration. ·      And 17 minutes of music that will help you deal with anger. A few suggestions come with the study, too. Abba’s “Dancing Queen” is an example of the sort of happy music we should appreciate…when it comes to anger management, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” is about perfect, although certain tracks from Rammstein and Metallica are good, too—and Mozart for some reason… This stuff fascinates me…and whenever I run across a study or some research that connects music and the brain and our overall mental and physical help, I bookmark it…and I’ve bookmarked so much that we can now do a full program on it… This is another instalment of “The Medical Mysteries of Music” Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most attractive things about rock is that it’s often dangerous…from the very beginning, rock has been about rebellion, a disregard for the rules, and thumbing its nose at the status quo…rage against the machine summed it up nicely with their song “killing in the name… f-you, I won’t do what you tell me… There’s an edginess to rock that’s addictive…most of us live pretty normal lives, so there’s something cathartic seeing rock stars live out our wildest, most reckless impulses and fantasies…rock stars get to do what we wish we could… When we go to a show, there’s always that hope we’re going to see and experience something a little unhinged, unpredictable, and primal…between gigs, we like to soak up the gossip and stories of bad behaviour from books, biopics, and social media… The music is fine…but we also want spectacle on and off stage… It’s all in good fun—until it’s not…there are limits to what we think is okay…legal lines can be crossed…and there are aesthetic, ethical, and moral areas that are just off limits… But here’s the thing about some artists…they don’t care…they live in their own reality where the normal rules of society just don’t hold…we might see behaviours that are thoughtless, selfish, overly audacious, negligent, self-destructive, incredibly violent, and downright criminal… For some, this is a lifestyle…for others, their dangerousness relates to illness, out-of-control passions, and, in some cases negligence and misadventure… In short, there’s a subset of rock stars who are genuinely dangerous, not to themselves but others…and once we start seeking out these people and examining their actions, what we find can be terrifying on a series of different levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1990s was a golden era for Gen X music fans…classic and heritage artists were still a thing, but it was clear that a new generation of rock artists was in control and was releasing music that captured the hopes, dreams, wishes, anger, and aggression of young people…we hadn’t seen that kind of thing since the 70s during the punk, post-punk, and new wave times…and for a little while, pop was not dominant…it was a time for rock-with-a-capital-R…  Things really got into gear in 1991…momentum carried over to 1992 and 1993…and by the time we got to 1994, we were living in an alt-rock world…was it the greatest year for alternative ever?...maybe…let’s explore that… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Usually, the whole idea of being famous is to be, well, famous…you’re known by everyone…your face is everywhere…you’re a celebrity…and you get invited to the best parties, you get endorsements, you get free stuff… Sure, there’s a trade-off…your right to privacy is greatly diminished…your every move is scrutinized…it might become harder to maintain meaningful relationships…and then there’s the constant pressure to live up to this thing you’ve become…this is emotionally draining… After a while, you may start to resent this fame thing…the challenges and pitfalls can overshadow all the perks… But you can also be famous and not famous at the same time…you just have to be very, very careful about revealing who you are… There’s the story of Comte de Saint-German…he was some kind of adventurer in the 1700s who popped up throughout Europe…he spoke almost every language on the continent, knew a lot about chemistry, and was quite the musician….he was so mysterious and amazing that he acquired the nickname “the wonderman”… Remember tank man?... He’s the guy who held up that row of tanks during the crackdown on Tiananmen square in China…no clue who this dude is… Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?...is he the creator of bitcoin?...he disappeared from the internet around 2014 and stayed hidden…there are theories but nothing concrete… Let’s riff on that a little bit more…can you be a famous musician and still be able to walk through the mall without anyone knowing you are?...yes…it’s difficult and comes with its own tradeoffs, but it can be done…plus you have to work very hard to maintain the art of hiding in plain site… This is the history of anonymous artists from the world of rock… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know… It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends… Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy… For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman… To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters… There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”… But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport… The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994… Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians love to investigate causes and effects…it’s possible for a teeny-tiny seemingly inconsequential thing to set off a cascading series of events…and before you know it, the universe has changed forever… Let me give you an example…a bunch of inept anarchists in Sarajevo were out to make a statement about the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina under occupation of the Austro-Hungarian empire… When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914…two guys were set to toss a bomb at his six-vehicle motorcade, but they chickened out…then a guy named Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a second bomb, but it bounced off the back of one of the cars… The archduke, his wife, and the governor of Bosnia sped off—although the governor suggested that they take a slightly different route…the driver—Leopold Lojka—got confused and turned right instead of left into a very narrow street…  When he tried to back up, the car stalled—and it stalled right in front of another member of the anarchist group named Gavril Princip…up until that second, he’d been discouraged that the assassination plot had failed and had allegedly slinked off to schiller’s delicatessen to get a sandwich and sulk about the afternoon’s failures… (that’s not true, by the way…it just makes for a better story)… Anyway, Princip’s target sitting directly in front of him, trapped…he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots…one hit the Archduke’s wife, killing her instantly…the other hit Ferdinand in the jugular…he died within half an hour… This created a series of crises involving a web of alliances across Europe and within a few months, the great war had begun, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people and injured 21 million more…it led to the Treaty of Versailles , the humiliation of Germany, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the carnage of World War Two, the spread of Communism, the arms race, the cold war, and the world order as we know it… If Leopold hadn’t hung a right instead of a left—or if you like the myth of Princip going for a sandwich—how would the 20th century have been different?... Why am I recounting this?...because there are ways we can make connections like this in the world of rock….here…let me show you… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the first 60 years of the recorded music industry, things sounded awful…the quality of the recordings people had to put up with were terrible…the old 78 rpm records played on gramophones were no match when it came to hearing music live…we just didn’t have the technology to capture audio so that when we listened back, it sounded real… That began to change in the late 1940s with the introduction of vinyl records: the 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album and the 7-inch 45 rpm single…it changed further with the switch to magnetic recording tape in the early 1950s… New microphones, better tape machines, and further understanding of acoustics when it came to building recording studios…then came better turntables, amplifiers, and speakers…recorded audio started to sound more and more like the real thing… In the middle 50s, people started to hear about something called “high-fidelity”…it was a marketing term invented by the audio industry to describe equipment capable of producing music properly… Once stereo recordings came along in the late 50s, music fans went wild and started buying hi-fi gear for their homes…then their cars…and then for going mobile… It was an endless pursuit for perfect sound, music that was loud, clean, clear, and accurate…meanwhile, recording studios were constantly in a state of retrofitting and refurbishment because artists demanded the best for their music… That was the 1970s…in the 1980s, there was a reaction, a backlash, an artistic regression, after the introduction of the compact disc…for some, this music was too perfect, too shiny, too unreal… They felt it contained none of the imperfections that made it human…beauty, they thought, was in the mistakes…that’s what made music authentic…audio quality mattered less than being able to listen to music that obviously came from the heart… These music fans even had a name for this approach…if the best-sounding audio was high-fidelity, then what they wanted was the opposite: low-fidelity…and that aesthetic continues today…this is the history of Lo-Fi music… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear. www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - reference case # 06274598 https://newsroom.calgary.ca/sexual-assault-case-from-2006-has-new-lead/ Contact: Instagram: @nancy.hixt Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyHixtCrimeBeat/ Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Streaming is a very cool way to access tens of millions of songs with a few pokes on your phone…the idea of being able to listen to virtually any song from any era of human history with such ease is something akin to magic… The downside of streaming is that it doesn’t provide any context to what we’re hearing…a continuous stream of music tells us nothing about the artist or the song…it’s just music, standing alone with nothing to anchor it to anything… It was different in the old days…if you bought an album, dammit, that was an investment…you paid money for it, which created a fiscal relationship with the artist…that meant you were more likely to stick with an album and get deeper into the artist and the songs…otherwise, you had this nagging feeling you had wasted your money… Context means so much to the enjoyment of music—which is probably a reason you’re listening to me right now…you want more than the notes that make up a song… Yeah, sometimes a song is just a song…you know, it’s got a good beat, you can dance to it and maybe sing along…it doesn’t really mean anything more than that… But some songs are very deep…they actually form some part of a historical record…they tell the story of real people, real events and the things that came after… That’s where we’re going with this show: everything we’re about to hear is based on fact, on history, on actual events…and you may be shocked by the truth beyond songs that you’ve been digging all your life…this isn’t anything you’re gonna get from a stream…trust me… Songs in this episode: The Clash - White Riot Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Monday's U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday REM - What's the Frequency Kenneth? Pearl Jam - Jeremy Nirvana - Polly The Tragically Hip - Wheat Kings Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A band is like a plant…stay with me on this…like a plant, a band grows from seeds to maturity, bursts for with new seeds and then eventually withers and dies…it’s the cycle of life, you know?... But like plants (or animals or any other living thing), the lifespan of bands varies greatly…you could last as long as rehearsal—kinda like, what, a dandelion?…or you might find yourself on some kind of 50-year-anniversary tour—the equivalent of a bristlecone pine tree that can live as long as 5,000 years… Okay, I think we’ve tortured this metaphor long enough… Then we have bands that form, rise to a peak, hit something of a downhill slope, and break-up, only to reform again for—well, there could be any number of reasons…and this leads into completely new second act…and thus things begin again—and maybe even under better circumstances than anyone thought possible… Let’s do a case study…let’s have a specific band deconstruct their journey from formation to breakup to reunion…this is the history of Alexisonfire—in their own words… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A boy cannot become a man in the Satere-Mawe tribe of the Amazon Rain Forest until he can stand being stung by a swarm of Bullet ants…they’re called that because it’s said their sting is as painful as being hit by an actual bullet…if the kid can handle it without shedding a single tear, then he is officially a man…I can’t explain it…and I’ll bet that no one in this tribe can, either…it’s just always been their thing, something that has always been done… Let’s try something more modern…have you ever noticed that any depiction of an iPhone or iPad, the time on the device used to be 9:42 am?...now, it’s 9:41…why?... We need to go back to when Steve Jobs’ unveiled the iPhone in 2007… the first image of the iPhone appeared behind jobs at 9:42 am…and for a while, that was the time shown in all ads…but when the iPad came out, the reveal happed at 9:41 am…from then on, it became a rule that time displayed must be at 9:41… The Apple Watch is an exception…the standard advertisement display time is 10:09 am…not one is sure why, although that’s the old Timex watch commercials always had the time as 1:51…10:09 is the mirror image of that… Now think about your car on the driver’s side…if your car is a standard, the pedals from left to right go clutch, brake and accelerator…if it’s an automatic, it’s brake then the accelerator…and that’s the way it is in every car made in the world today…doesn’t matter which side the steering wheel is on…the pedals are always laid out the same from left to right…. But in the early days of the automobile, it wasn’t always this way…sometimes the accelerator was in the middle…sometimes it was on the left…sometimes it was on the steering wheel… The first car with the pedal layout we have today was probably a 1912 Cadillac…that spread throughout the company and then on through Chevrolet and other gm cars…from there, everyone eventually adopted that arrangement…. And since we’re in the car, let me explain your automatic transmission lever…it goes park, reverse, neutral, drive, and low…R,R,N,D,L…that order was laid out in “U.S. department of transportation standard no. 102” which stated the order of gears on automatic transmissions must always be park-reverse-neutral-drive-low…and since America called the shots with the auto industry back then, this law became our universal standard… There are so many things in this world that we just accept without bothering to look for an explanation…they’re there, it’s everywhere, it’s a simple truth of life…but why?... The world of music is filled with things, too… for example, why do we call a certain genre of music “heavy metal?”…who came up with the idea for paying to see a concert?...why would anyone use a toilet plunger together with a trumpet or a beer bottle on a guitar?...why is there music on the phone when we’re put on hold?... Let’s figure this all out…welcome to another edition of “the rock explainer”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The biggest tech story of recent years has been the rise of artificial intelligence…the subject of ai is everywhere… it’s been “AI this” and “AI that”… The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT, the company that really got things rolling in this area, was the most popular Wikipedia article in all of 2023…50 million visits… That made it more popular than even Christian Ronaldo, the world’s most famous athlete…that’s more than “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” put together… This tech is being adopted everywhere, mostly for good…just look at the medical field…. Ai is being used to sort through chains of molecules to come up with the next generation of breakthrough drugs, including those that will work on antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the misfolded proteins behind Alzheimer’s…ai is being trained to quickly find things in scans and x-rays that a human technician might miss… AI can be used to make better decisions in real time…for example, it can learn traffic and pedestrian patterns and synchronize lights for more efficient movement of everyone… AI should even have an impact on fighting climate change by creating better models…and when it comes to world hunger, ai can analyze zillions of data points to help determine what crops, seeds, fertilizers, soil, and so on for maximum efficiency in any area of the world… AI is growing at an exponential rate…it’s predicted that the industry will grow by 250% over the next five years… by 2031, the market for generative ai will be at least one trillion U.S. dollars… But yes, AI can also be used for evil…deep fakes and fake news, copyright infringement and forgery, cybersecurity breaches, manipulation of financial markets… AI is inevitably going to replace humans in a lot of different jobs…there’s a lot to be concerned about… If you’re listening to me, you’ve probably wondered about artificial intelligence and music…that’s good because there’s going to be an impact…best we know where this intersection of music and tech came from so that we can maybe figure out where it’s going…. This is the history and future of AI in music… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, I was deep into collecting bootleg recordings of my favourite bands…and this obsession came from a really good place…at least I thought so… I’d already bought all the albums and singles, collected a bunch of memorabilia, snapped up the t-shirts, and gone to all the shows…but I wanted more…the only place let to go was unofficial—read: illegal—releases… Almost everything I accurate was on cd…some were burned discs that I traded for with other hardcore fans…I might go to eBay once in a while…there were a few stores I knew that stocked these discs for special customers…and whenever I went overseas to certain countries were copyright laws were lax—Russia, Indonesia, a few places in the Caribbean—I’d be sure to visit the market stalls to see what they had…I honestly wasn’t trying to rip off or hurt anyone…I just loved these bands so much that I needed to own a copy of everything they did…once, when I talked about my bootlegs on the radio—probably not a smart idea—I got a letter from the head of a recorded industry organization calling me “morally reprehensible” … But over the years, these hardcopy bootlegs became harder and harder to find, thanks to crackdowns on illegal exploitation of intellectual property, the disappearance of these record stores, and, most importantly, the rise of online file-sharing…by 2008 or so, the physical bootleg market had all but collapsed…I haven’t acquired anything new for my collection for almost a couple of decades now… But I’ve never lost my fascination for this recordings…where did they come from?...how were they made?...who distributed them?...did they really hurt artists and the industry?...and what kind of legacy did old-school bootlegs leave behind?... I’ve found some answers to those questions and more…this is another look at bootlegging, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.  On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music. We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so search for and follow Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry wherever you get your podcasts.  I hope you enjoy this sneak peak of Episode 9 "The Disappearance of Richey Edwards" Episode Link: https://megaphone.link/CORU6081355392 Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On December 24, 1877, Thomas Edison filed a patent for a new invention he referred to as a “talking machine”…for the first time ever, audio could be captured, played back, stored, shared, and analyzed… When asked what the point of his machine was, Edison listed some future possibilities…. His phonograph (as he called it) would eventually be used as a method of preserving great speeches….it could also be used for making audio letters, giving dictation, a talking clock, a telephone answering machine, and remote learning…and way down the list was “reproduction of music”… That original talking machine technology has evolved greatly over the years and the “capture and reproduction of music” has moved way up on Edison’s original list of uses…the recorded music industry is now worth tens and tens of billions of dollars… But the phonograph also gave birth to a new type of music industry…when it first went on sale, copyright laws weren’t ready…they had been drafted and enforced with the printed word in mind, not with audio recordings…this meant that people began making recordings that weren’t exactly authorized in the proper ways… This gave birth to another industry, one that worked in the shadows of record labels, music publishers, performing rights organizations, and all the rest of the legitimate record music industry… What started with secretly recorded Edison phonograph cylinders progressed through reel-to-reel tape recordings, unauthorized vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, and digital files freely traded online…you may have some of these recordings in your collection—and you may not even know it… The original name of such recordings is “bootlegs”…here are a few things about them that you might wanna know… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We would not be sitting here talking about rock music if it weren’t for people of African descent…if you start in the present and begin to trace things backward to important innovations and accomplishments, nine times out of ten, you’ll end up exploring something from black culture… And we can go way, way back—right to 1619 when the first slave ship arrived in north America at the British colony of Virginia carrying about 20 captives… Over the centuries that followed, the people of Africa, consisting of many different communities, nations, tribes, and cultures, were brought to the west by force creating wounds that have yet to heal…  But more than just bodies made the trip across the Atlantic…these were human beings with identities, history, traditions—and music…and these songs and rhythms helped sustain them during those brutal times… There were work songs, protest songs, satirical songs, songs meant to be sung in the fields and streets, songs that were games in themselves…some had regular rhythms while other contained syncopated beats from traditional dance…  Over the centuries, the music evolved, mutated, and spread…spirituals and gospel…blues and boogie-woogie…ragtime and jazz…rhythm and blues and bebop…and in the early 1950s, this music with its rich history and traditions was incorporated with country, western, hillbilly, r&b, and a few other ingredients to become what we call “rock and roll”… Along the way, there were many musical firsts, and landmark contributions by black artists that changed everything…without them, what we call “rock” today and so much of its culture would simply not exist… These people and their accomplishments need to be recognized; commemorated, and celebrated…this is an episode on rock firsts by black artists… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices