Isolation causes people to do funny things. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes mad, often both. We're both under the recommended self-quarantine and as we're waiting for this pandemic to hopefully quickly subside. We started thinking about albums that were made while in confinement. Many came to mind quickly. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street while holed in France avoiding tax penalties. Of course, that is less like quarantine and more like a weekend at Caligula’s. Bon Iver’s post-bre...
Mar 20, 2020•48 min
Today, we examine the messages that were delivered by seven of the most famous, and some equally infamous, single track records. The emotional tension that went into making them. The strife that went into releasing them. And the waves that were made by listening to them. Each with a message beyond their declaration of musical independence. A jazz composer completely undoing the constraining rules of his genre. An Afrobeat icon illuminating the political and social unrest around him. A New York l...
Mar 13, 2020•2 hr 6 min
Kevin Coyne released over 40 albums in the course of his 35-year career. He would be hailed and championed by the likes of John Peel, Richard Branson, Johnny Rotten, the Mekons, Sting, and Will Oldham. He unceremoniously rejected an offer from Elektra Records to be the dead Jim Morrison’s replacement in the Doors, quipping that he didn’t like leather pants. He wrote scores of songs about the fringes of humanity dealing with mental illness and addiction with empathy and poise that few could match...
Feb 18, 2020•1 hr 43 min
On today’s episode, we are going to seek to understand the bands who spent hours stenciling runes on their guitars and drum heads, writing lyrics in the Black Tongue of Mordor, and filling their pipes with Longbottom Leaf. The bands that wandered into fame beyond belief and those who were lost to the darkest depths of Khazad Dum. Today’s episode: Tolk-Rock: the musical obsession with Middle Earth. Sources used for this episode: The Tolkien Music List An Essay posted on We Are The Mutants by K.E....
Jan 20, 2020•1 hr 50 min
The holidays are a time of peace, joy, and love. They are also the best time to look around, take a breath, and stop a minute to enjoy all the madness that constantly swirls amongst us. Here at Highway Hi-Fi, our Christmas episode is the show we allow ourselves to talk about some of our favorite stories that are too small for a Turntable Talk, but too good to not share. All of which have nothing to do with Yuletide Festivities. And the theme this year is our favorite music conspiracies and myths...
Dec 20, 2019•1 hr 30 min
In the middle of the century, a collective thirst for knowledge grew around the world. In these new space age times, people had neither the time nor patience for books, tutors, or apprenticeships. Instead they turned to the newest form of mass media for their learning needs...the vinyl record. The turntable allowed unlimited listens in the private and cozy confines of home making it the ideal vehicle for audio instruction. As a result, there was a gigantic wave of how-to records, or educational ...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 43 min
While music is often dominated by songs of love...romantic love, fleeting love, spiritual love, love of place, love of country, love of Waffle House delicacies, there is a dark side to that jukebox coin. An obsession we all have with the darkness. A bleak reality that is as unknown as it is universal. It is riveting, enthralling, and oddly comforting to delve into other people’s tragedies. And honestly, we can’t get enough of it. Everyone loves a train wreck. Quite literally and especially if it...
Nov 18, 2019•1 hr 34 min
Today, we are exploring the depths of a genre that can be both ghoulishly fun, menacing, and shocking all within the same side of a record. The twists and turns that composers use to enthrall the audience and make their collective flesh crawl. The orchestral equivalents of Vincent Price whispering sweet nothings into your ear. A left out style of music that has made itself into a viable and influential genre despite being secondary to its own medium. Today, we examine the history of the horror m...
Oct 26, 2019•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 61
No one man can make a scene. But perhaps one can be an embodiment of it. A representation of what makes a place and its music intertwined. Like his beloved Cleveland itself, the emblematic and occasionally problematic Peter Laughner was on the fringes of the American music canon. A shadowy presence in a shadowy place at the time when rock n roll was dark, smart, and powerful. But that is the thing about underground music...it can happen in the most unlikely places. And underground music needs pe...
Oct 11, 2019•2 hr 5 min•Ep. 60
In the late 50s, the streets of Jamaica were alit with music. Bands would bang out jazz and rhythm & blues songs every night, catering to large crowds of people desiring only to dance all night. It was a disco, but outside in the streets, every night of the week, from dusk till dawn, like Mardis Gras and a discotheque crammed into one big outdoor dance-off. However, there was a singular prevalent problem. The bands...they wanted breaks, and the breaks lasted too long and people wanted to kee...
Sep 30, 2019•1 hr 46 min•Ep. 59
We don’t really stop and think about it that much, but records are pretty damn amazing. A hunk of plastic that can be so powerful that it can bring us to tears, take us back to childhood haunts, or even make friends out of total strangers almost instantaneously. But beyond records being this incredible social and cultural artifact, records are amazing pieces of innovation. In essence, the basic concept of a record hasn’t changed much since Edison’s needle etched vibrations onto tinfoil wrapped o...
Sep 15, 2019•2 hr 8 min•Ep. 64
What is the cost of silence? What part of the human condition is lost or found in the stillness of sound? At some point, our culture seems to have turned its back on reflective quiet, opting instead for an environment that is constantly using stimuli to condition the population to various ends. Even in an era of personal choice, piped-in music is ubiquitous these days as advertisements are embedded in our daily routines. No doubt the struggle of the avid music listener is to cut out the commerci...
Aug 29, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 63
For the past few episodes, we have been examining the thin line that separates authentic from fraud in rock n roll. The fantastical world-building of Mingering Mike showed how one can create true inspiration and beautiful art even without ever actually making music or having an audience. The deception and tomfoolery of the music industry to create whole phantom biographies and personas as a means to some sort of end: financial, creative, critical or otherwise. Today, the last piece falls into pl...
Aug 18, 2019•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 62
There truly is a fine line between what’s real in rock n roll and what’s just an act. Judging the authenticity of an art form that at its heart is about transformative performance can be difficult, or worse, can take away from the power of it all. Where does one put the line in the sand beyond which is a total fabrication of aesthetic rather than an honest expression of self as art and music? Further complicating the matter is pinning down a measuring stick to determine the value of the music......
Aug 05, 2019•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 61
On January 21, 1977, Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam War draft dodgers. This happened the day after Carter was sworn into office and it was this single act ended the career of Mingering Mike Stevens, who was a singer, producer, label owner, and movie director. For nearly a decade, Mike created a career of epic proportions with tenacity, dedication, and precision. According to a website dedicated to him, here is a list of his credentials: “Between 1968 and 1977 Mingering Mike recorded over fift...
Jul 04, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 60
Everywhere you look you are surrounded by dead technology. The car you’re driving, the television you’re watching, the phone or computer that’s playing this podcast. Next month it will be outpaced. Next year it will be outdated. And next decade it will likely be obsolete. Proponents of technology always hail the latest and greatest as the critical next step toward inventive actualization. However, you probably wouldn’t be collecting records or listening to this show if you didn’t have some notio...
Jun 20, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 59
A middle-aged lady with a beehive hairdo, cat-eyed glasses, and an orange church dress sits at a piano in the middle of cathedral-like Solarium in the Denver Botanical Gardens. She plays soft, chipper classical music surrounded by families of ferns: Maidenhair, Holly, Horsetail, Cloverleaf, etc. She is being filmed for Leonard Nimoy´s In Search Of, a television documentary show dedicated to the world’s mysterious phenomena. Her undergraduate experiments with music and plants would inadvertently ...
Jun 06, 2019•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 58
In 1959, a new radio show hit the Parisian airwaves called Salut les Copains, which translates to "Oh, Hi!" The show couldn’t have been more popular with teenagers. And on that program, there was a feature called “Sweetheart of the week” which featured one female pop singer. Because of the popularity of the show, those singers were all nearly instant hits, however fleetingly it was for most. In 1963, Salut held a concert to celebrate the launch of its magazine. That concert drew nearly 200,000 p...
May 27, 2019•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 57
For our mid-century episode, We are going to take a bit of departure from the usual. This podcast started as a way to teach ourselves more about music history and to keep on introducing each other to great songs and stories about those songs. Today is an exploration of why we are obsessed with vinyl and what it means to be a record collector. And for this show, we’ve asked some of you to help us narrate the show by telling us about your run-ins with record collecting. We’re going to spend the ne...
May 08, 2019•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 56
To celebrate our impending 50th episode, we've created a trivia contest for you, our beloved listeners. For this quiz, we're playing 8 clips. From these 8 clips, we're looking for a phrase, specifically based on the artists, so you don't need to get the song names. The name of the quiz is "Mixed-Up Confusion" Clues: The answer is based on artists only Use the initials It's an anagram When you think you have the answer, you can submit it to us in 3 ways: Email your answer to highwayhifipodcast@gm...
Apr 25, 2019•7 min•Ep. 55
Under British control for decades, in 1911, Zambia was merged in with other South African countries to form Northern Rhodesia. For most of the colonial period, Zambia was governed by an administration appointed from London with the advice of the British South Africa Company. Zambia was rich with copper mines and there was an economic boom that carried into the 50s and 60s. This boom, combined with westerners moving into the country as missionaries and expatriates, allowed for Zambians to hear a ...
Apr 22, 2019•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 54
To celebrate our impending 50th episode, we've created a trivia contest for you, our beloved listeners. For this quiz, we're playing 8 clips. From these 8 clips, we're looking for a word or phrase, specifically based on the artists, so you don't need to get the song names. The name of the quiz is "Mixed-Up Confusion" When you think you have the answer, you can submit it to us in 1 of 3 ways: Email your answer to highwayhifipodcast@gmail.com Send us a direct message on Twitter with your answer. O...
Apr 11, 2019•9 min•Ep. 53
Perhaps it’s a fool’s errand to try to define what Cosmic Country is. Like numbering all the stars in the heavens or counting bubbles in your beer. We are those fools though. In the starry fringes of country and western music resides a sound that is powerful, dreamy, and utterly nebulous. And so in trying to wade through this style, it is important to recognize these waters were muddy to begin with and intentionally so. Today, the second part of our history of Cosmic Country. Most of us know Cos...
Apr 06, 2019•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 52
Perhaps it’s a fool’s errand to try to define what Cosmic Country is. Like numbering all the stars in the heavens or counting bubbles in your beer. We are those fools though. In the starry fringes of country and western music resides a sound that is powerful, dreamy, and utterly nebulous. And so in trying to wade through this style, it is important to recognize these waters were muddy to begin with and intentionally so. Today, the first of a two-part episode as we try to elucidate and illuminate...
Mar 25, 2019•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 51
When 78s were first sold, they were sold individually, with each side lasting between 3 and 5 minutes. The records were relegated to backs of furniture stores as if they were some sort of obscenity. Mostly, the reason for this was the packaging. At that time, records were wrapped in bland, blank paper like hooch or in cardboard sleeves, and sometimes had the name of the producer of the record or the store selling it. By the 20s, record albums started appearing on the market. A record album then ...
Mar 10, 2019•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 50
In this special episode, Ryan and Joe duke it out over who is the most essential least essential member of the greatest band of all time, The Velvet Underground: Angus MacLise or Doug Yule. One of them never recorded a single note with the band while the other plays on more tracks than John Cale and Nico combined. One is unfairly maligned for his pop sensibilities and desire for fame and the other is unfairly praised for his staunch experimentalism and anti-consumerist proclivities. One was ther...
Feb 23, 2019•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 49
As the relevance of rock and roll began to explode, labels and managers wanted to exploit and milk those hits for all they were worth, for fear of it being a fad and dying out quickly. To maximize popularity and exposure, labels in the UK would often prep bands for European tours by having their stars record their own hits in other languages. Most famously, the Beatles were strong-armed into recording German versions of both “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and She Loves You”. These were recorded in P...
Feb 11, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 48
Are you as sick of Fyre documentaries as we are? We thought so. This week's episode is all about a festival that took place over two September days in 1971. The festival was controversial and featured historic performances from Mexican psychedelic bands at the height of La Onda. It was also condemned by conservative government leaders, with the president of Mexico declaring, "While we regret and condemn the phenomenon of Avándaro, it also encourages us in our belief that only a small part of our...
Jan 24, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 47
In this episode, we explore the world of the Butthole Surfers during the 1980s when they were the best live band in the country and one of the most interesting bands ever. Much of the show is spent on stories of debauchery, including feeding excrement to fish, exploring the flammability of New Jersey, ex-presidents touching defiled suitcases, and more! Join us, won't you? Most of the research for this episode came from these three books: Let's Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfe...
Jan 12, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 46
For this episode, we look back on stories we spent time researching but couldn't fit into an episode. That, and just plain goofy stories about goofy musicians. Find out what Prince did to make Michael Jackson run screaming from a room. Find out how to pronounce Hasil Adkins first name correctly. Find out how Ryan's cold sounds after an hour of talking (not good). All that and more!! Subscribe to Highway Hi-Fi: iTunes | Stitcher | TuneIn | PocketCasts | Overcast | Google Play Twitter | Facebook |...
Dec 28, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 45
