Ongoing History of New Music

Once upon a time, all music was sold to us on pieces of plastic…we had to travel through time and space to hand over hard-earned money to purchase those pieces of plastic…and there was a financial limit to the amount of plastic we could buy…bloody things were expensive… Part the reason they were expensive was because baked into the purchase price was our ability to listen to that music an infinite number of times without ever having to pay for it again—unless of course you wore it out, damaged it, or somehow lost it… It was hard to share this music, too…you could make a copy on tape, which took a long time…later, you could burn a cd, which was quicker but still took effort…and the ring of people with which you could share something was fairly limited…again, we’re dealing with issues of time and space… What else can we say about the old days?...cost aside, our access to music was limited…we could only buy what was available in the store…and the store only stocked what it could acquire from a limited number of record labels…and only a very tiny percentage of people who made music had deals with record labels… In other words, the supply of music was severely constrained…that’s another reason for the expense…there were many, many filters a song had to pass through before it even had a chance to landing in a record store…this created an artificial scarcity of music and the channels through which you could access the little that was available was limited and tightly controlled… Wow….from where we are today, that sounds positively medieval, doesn’t it?...now it’s all about streaming, the ability access virtually any song ever recorded from everywhere on earth with just a few poke at your phone…and the price?...free—or something very close to it… That’s all that most people know about how streaming works…but if you’re listening to this program, you probably need to know more about what we’ve all got ourselves into…here’s a deep dive into the whole business of streaming music, part 1.. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being a rock star comes with all sorts of privileges: money, fame, plenty of sex, drugs…but those things can also be very dangerous. Take the case of slash…in September 1992, Guns N’ Roses was on tour with Metallica…Slash and the band were staying in San Francisco ahead of a show across the bay in Oakland…and after the gig, Slash died… Some drug dealers showed up at his hotel room at 5 am with all kinds of stuff… Slash took everything, including a powerful speedball, which is a combination of heroin and cocaine… He wandered out into the hallway where he encountered a maid…he tried to ask her where the elevator was—and wham!...he was out…she freaked out and called for help…meanwhile, Slash lay there on the floor… Paramedics arrived and gave him the old adrenalin-needle-to-the-heart trick and he was saved…when he came to, he was told that he’d been technically dead for eight minutes due to cardiac arrest…that seems like a long time, but that’s his story… He was transported to the hospital but quickly signed himself out and was onstage for the next gig in L.A. two days later…about a decade later, though, he was diagnosed with heart disease and ended up with a pacemaker in 2004… Slash is far from the only person who came back from the dead—or, at the very least, came awfully close to going into the light…here are some examples of rock stars who very nearly checked out long before their time… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was a time when movie soundtracks were the lifeblood of the recorded music industry…the lp record, which was introduced in June 1948, was developed at least partially at the behest of movie studios and Broadway show producers looking a better listening experience. The first movie soundtrack to be released as a record seems to have been “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1938…but the problem was that everything was divided up over multiple 10-inch 78 rpm records…every four minutes, you had to get up and either flip the record over or change it entirely…the same thing happened with “The Jungle Book” in 1942. That all changed in the summer of 1948 when the 33 1/3 rpm lp allowed up to 22 minutes of audio per side…movie studios bought in and the marketplace was flooded with not only movie soundtracks but original cast recordings of Broadway shows throughout the late 40s, all through the 50s and into the 1960s. Movie soundtracks were seen as “serious” music for adults…the kids and their rock’n’roll had their 7-inch singles…even as late as the middle 60s, movie soundtracks often did the biggest business. Take “The Sound of Music”…it was a top 10 record in the U.S. for 109 weeks between May 1, 1965 and July 16, 1967…it was the best-selling album in the UK in 1965, 1966, and 1968…for years, the Guinness Book of World Records listed it as the best-selling album of all time…the best guess we have is that it sold 20 million copies—a very big number, especially back in the day. As the years passed, it became standard practice to release a soundtrack album with your movie…in many cases, it was just the score, the incidental music written for the title credits, the closing credits and scenes in between. In others, the records featured songs from the movie, some original, some licensed for the purpose…and some of these soundtracks went on to sell very, very well. Prince’s “Purple Rain,” 25 million copies…“Titanic,” 30 million copies…“Dirty Dancing, “ 32 million…“Grease,” 38 million…“Saturday Night Fever,” 40 million…“The Bodyguard,” 45 million…even “Space Jam” from 1996 sold six million. By the 90s, every movie had a soundtrack as part of its business plan…they were cheap to compile and the margins were fantastic…they even launched a career or two. Let’s take a look at some of the key alt-rock-based movie soundtracks of all time… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the winter of 1417, a young man named Poggio Braciolini was searching through a library when it found an odd manuscript sitting on a shelf…it was a thousand years old—the last surviving copy of a poem by a roman philosopher named Lucretius… What Lucretius said in this poem was radical—heretical, in fact…what it contained was against all the teachings of God and men…it was called “On The Nature of Things”… First, he posited that the universe operated without Gods and that matter was made of tiny, tiny, particles that were in constant motion… Despite the danger—this was explosive stuff in 1417—Bracciolini translated the poem…copies were carefully distributed over the next couple of hundred years…and the intellectual impact on Europe was incalculable… Lucretius’ notions inspired new ways of thinking, leading to the renaissance, the enlightenment and all that followed…Bracciolini’s translation of “On The Nature of Things” quite literally changed the course of humanity… Scholars have argued that because of him, the world became modern…that everything we take for granted today in terms of culture and thought happened because Bracciolini happened to find that one-and-only manuscript… Yet have you ever heard of Poggio Bracciolini?...probably not…he is one of the great unsung heroes of history… Now let’s apply the same sort of thinking to the history of rock…are there similar such people—people who did something that altered the course of this music yet we don’t know about them?...absolutely…and it’s time to give them some credit…this is part two of great unsung heroes of rock… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not everyone who managed to change the world is famous…it is possible to do something absolutely, monumentally world-shaking and not receive any recognition for it… I’ll give you a name: Vasyli Arkipov…it’s possible that this guy is the only reason any of us are still alive…seriously… October 27, 1962…it’s the height of the Cuban missile crisis…the soviets had nukes in Cuba aimed at the u.s. and more were on the way…John Kennedy responded by setting up a blockade around the island… The USS Randolph was one of the ships in charge of enforcing the blockade…they spotted a Soviet sub that was sent to protect the flotilla of Russian ships approaching the island with more missiles on board…this one particular sub—a Foxtrot class b-59—was armed with nuclear missiles…Arkhipov was the second in command… The Randolph began dropping depth charges in an effort to get the sub to surface…b-59 suffered damage…the crew couldn’t breathe…they wanted to fight back…the sub commander tried to raise soviet command for permission to fire—but he couldn’t reach them… Because they’d been cruising submerged for days, they hadn’t heard anything from Soviet high command…but they had been monitoring American civil broadcasts which offered non-stop coverage of the crisis…and now they were under attack…maybe the war had finally begun…if that was the case, shouldn’t they launch their missiles?... Captain Valentín Savitsky was in favour of an attack…so was political officer Ivan Maslennikov…but in order to launch the nukes, Stavisky and Maslennikov also needed agreement from Arkhipov…“what do you say, Vasyli?...do we engage the Americans with our special weapon?”… Vasyli took a breath and replied “nyet…we do not fire…we have no proof that we are at war…what if we’re wrong?...if we launch, we risk starting an all-our nuclear war and  wipe out all life on the planet”… The commander wasn’t happy with that, but rules were rules and he ordered that the crew stand down…no nuke would be fired that day…and when the sub did surface, it was confirmed that hostilities had not broken out…this is why Vasyli Arkipov is widely regarded as the man who single-handedly prevented a global nuclear war on October 27, 1962…yet how many people know his name?... Now let’s take a big pivot into music…what kind of unsung heroes might we find there?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a movie is successful, someone somewhere wants more…that’s when we get a sequel…if that follow-up does well, then the sequel gets a sequel…and if that film has traction, well, then you reach the level of franchise… We’ve seen many movie franchises over the decades, Star Wars and Star Trek being among the most famous…but then we have all the Fast and the Furious films, Harry Potter, Rocky, Mission Impossible, Planet of the Apes, Toy Story, Lord of the Rings, and so on… And I haven’t even mentioned the marvel cinematic universe, which has something like three dozen movies and the dc extended universe, which has almost 30… Studios and producers love movie franchises because they’re reliable sources of revenue forever…fans will flock to any new release while they’re still bingeing on all the older movies…and don’t even get me started on things like merchandising… What’s the oldest movie franchise?...that would probably be King Kong…the first Kong movie came out in 1933…the first Alice in Wonderland movie came out the same year… The Wizard of Oz fits our definition…there have been four films since 1939…that counts…Godzilla…first one was 1954…and then we finally get to James Bond… There have been 27 Bond films, starting with Dr. No in 1962…box office grosses are now around $14 billion U.S. dollars…that is just the movies… Then we have the music…there are few crossover points between music and film that are more prestigious than being tapped to do the theme for a James Bond movie… Every time a new chapter in the franchise is announced, tenders go out for someone to do the theme…and the competition is furious… Sounds like there’s some interesting music history here—and there is… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are three moments when I remember looking at something in my hands and realizing that this was going to change my life… The first time was on my sixth birthday when my grandmother gave me a portable transistor radio…I was still awfully young, but I somehow knew that I could now control not only what I listened to but where and when… The second time was in 1999 when I was given a prototype of a device called an RCA Lyra…it was an early digital music player, capable of holding up to an hour’s worth of music…no matter how hard I shook it, the music would not skip…for someone who liked to go running to music, that was a big deal… And the third time was when I searched for—and found! —an obscure song on my iPhone…I had just installed the long-gone Rdio app and was still very skeptical about this whole new streaming thing…the idea that you just paid for access and not to own the music?...rubbish—until that day when I figured it out… We’ve come such a long way when it comes to making music portable, especially in the 21st century…what was once science fiction is now reality…taking our music with us is so easy right now, we forget how long it took to get us to this point—and how much technology we had to go through to get here… This is the history of portable music, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the many great things about music is that we can enjoy it anywhere…I’m talking about the recorded kind…everyone has a smartphone, and every smartphone has the capability of playing music, whether you’re listening to tracks stored in its memory or streaming something from a service like Spotify or apple music…as long as your device has juice, you can enjoy listening to music anywhere you are… Take this program, for example…in its radio show form, it’s being heard in homes, cars, offices, and workplaces either over the air or through a stream…if you’re listening to the podcast, you might have downloaded it to a phone, a tablet or a laptop which you can fire up anywhere at your convenience… But imagine for moment that you couldn’t take your music with you…if you wanted to listen to your favourite songs, you had to be present in a specific place and you couldn’t move from it…and that usually meant music inside the home—or perhaps someplace with something like a jukebox… This might sound absolutely awful to you…I mean, we’re so used to conjuring up music whenever we want and wherever we are…we take it with us everywhere…it’s hard to imagine life without that ability… That’s the way it was for most of human history, though…for centuries and centuries, the only way to make music portable was to bring a musical instrument with you and play it yourself… The idea of making recorded music portable—at least in a way that is convenient, cheap, and reliable—is more recent than you might think…and it went through way more incarnations than you may realize… What do you say we take a look at the history of portable music?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Long before I started doing this for a living, I had the notion that I was going to be a record producer…after all, I loved music and the idea of being able to help record it would be a great job… So as high school wound down, I started to look around for schools that taught music production…and that’s when reality set it…all of them asked for a portfolio of past work…I was 18 years old and from a small prairie town…how was I supposed to have a portfolio of past work?... They also made it clear that I had to be musically adept…I was a pretty good drummer, but that wasn’t enough…and I had seven years of accordion lessons, but that didn’t really cut it…I couldn’t play guitar or any other type of keyboard… Long story short, I gave up on that dream after a few rejection letters and here we are…but I’m still fascinated by the talent and equipment that goes into making records—which is why anytime I get a chance to talk to anyone who does that, I’m in… David Botrill is one of those guys…he’s a Canadian record producer who has worked with took, muse, peter Gabriel, the smashing pumpkins, rush, and a ton of others…he’s got three Grammy’s and has worked in some of the most famous recording studios from here to the UK. And I’ve got a chance to talk to him about being a record producer?...let’s go… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to music, not all years are created equal…listen, every year features some great new songs from great new bands…but over the long term, this music isn’t equally distributed…sometimes—maybe once a decade, but usually less—we run into what can only be described as an embarrassment of riches… What i mean by that is that we go through a period where every week—even every day—seems to bring something amazing… Like when?...1955, maybe…Elvis…Chuck Berry…Little Richard….Bo Diddley…Bill Haley and the Comets…they all exploded into public consciousness…it was the birth of rock’n’roll… 1965…The Beatles and everything they were doing…the rise of The Rolling Stones with “Satisfaction”…Bob Dylan releases “Like A Rolling Stone” for “Highway 61 Revisited” after going electric… Actually, rock’s most prolific years—at least when it came to being an agent for social change and a driver of western culture—were 65, 66, 67, 68 and 69… After that, we might consider 1977…punk, the beginning of new wave, the era of post-punk and all that came with it… But then there was a long fallow period…lots of disco, lots of pop, lots of hair metal—which was great if you were into that, but not exactly music that changed the world… But then came one particular year…if you look back on it, it’s astounding at what happened, what was released and the music we’re still talking about…by the time the calendar turned, everything—and i mean everything—was different… This is the amazing year that was 1991… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices