Hey, Sound Opinions listeners, if you support us on Patreon, you get to listen to our podcast ad-free on Patreon. You're listening to Sound Opinions, and this week we're bringing you the 1,000th episode of Sound Opinions. I'm Jim DeRogatis. And I'm Greg Cott. Against all odds, we've hit a big milestone. We'll take a walk down memory lane to mark the occasion.
So, Greg, for those who don't know the prehistory of sound opinions, I had started doing guest slots on The Loop with Bill Wyman of the Chicago Reader, the weekly in Chicago, in the early 90s. And that turned into a show.
of our own called Sound Opinions. We then moved to the local new rock alternative, Q101, and you started doing your own version of two critics talking about music. Yes, it was magically called The Rock Tonight or something like that. But we had fun with Michael Harris of the Illinois Entertainer, the editor of the Illinois Entertainer. It was fun. And they kind of left us alone, but they didn't really like what we were doing because we were bringing...
And talking about artists that WLUP typically did not play or care about. I remember a conversation about why Bill and I were spending so much time on this album called Ten by a band called Pearl Jam when Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell 2 had just come out. We had our priorities all wrong. I left the Sun-Times for a while and went to be the deputy music editor of Rolling Stone. Hootie Gate.
Look it up, kids. It didn't last long. Then eventually, after freelancing for a while in Minneapolis, I came back to the Sun-Times, and literally from on the road with the U-Haul trailer behind my old Mitsubishi Montero, I stopped and called you and said, hey, we should do Sound Opinions again and do it right this time. Siskel and Ebert Symmetry, you were the music critic at the Tribune. I was going to be the music critic round two at the Sun-Times. I worked with Roger, and he was a hero.
You worked with Gene, and he was a mentor. And so we did seven years on WXRT, commercial adult alternative album, whatever, AAA, right? And then we had been pestering this guy, Tori Malatia, forever. We were fans of This American Life. We were fans of... public radio and the fact that it never talked down to its listeners. We were fans of the performance recording studio at WBEZ. And after twisting Tory's arm for quite some time...
We began national distribution from WBEZ a thousand episodes ago. Yeah, I think that was the key was that we'd built up an audience despite being on this late night Tuesday slot at XRT for a couple hours. And I give him total credit for giving us carte blanche. Oh, yeah. The show we wanted to do.
We got the same kind of leeway with public radio, but the advantages were the national distribution, and they were pioneering in the podcast area as well, got us going in that realm. And then also the idea of that studio, as you mentioned, bringing in bands to basically make state-of-the-art...
type of recordings for us in the facility there. Yeah. Well, you know, the pandemic hit. Yes, that happened. And the economy crashed, especially in media. And so we became an independent production, missing only the live performance studio, with our producers who had been working with us at BEZ. And here we are. I think any critic worth his or her salt uh has to be about moving forward all the time and and that's what we're always excited about new music and yet i i guess we should mark
our anniversary. And I think our intrepid producers also made this point, Andrew Gill and Alex Claiborne and Max Hatlam, that, hey, by the way, a thousand shows. You should do something. So we're entering our 26th year. This is our thousandth show, a nationally distributed show. If we're going to get nostalgic, there's some stuff to look back on and say, you know.
Kind of proud that this happened on our show. Yeah, we did some stuff that didn't suck. I'll never forget Radiohead coming in. Nip and Tuck, are they even going to show up? And lo and behold, there they were, Tom York and Johnny Greenwood. I think it might have been like Father's Day or something. I think it was. I think it was Father's Day. We were taking time away from our family. Very untraditional time and place to show up. And all of a sudden, there's Tom and Johnny showing up.
And we were saying, hey, maybe if they wanted to play something, we sort of threw that out there early on. And well, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. We didn't know what was going to happen. That grand piano that VEZ had was just a beautiful instrument. And we had this loose two-hour conversation in which a listener gave us credit for...
pointing out to these guys, hey, you could release your next record on your own. You could put that out on your own. We had this really interesting discussion about where distribution of records was going, how they were going to be released in the future, given the digital possibilities. Was the record company needed anymore, yeah. And they, in fact, started talking about that idea, and lo and behold, the next record came out on their own website. It was kind of an interesting discussion from that standpoint. But then...
The conversation, we've been there for two hours, and Tom goes, we're just getting started. Do we have to stop now? He was enjoying it. And then he just sits down at that piano, and he's playing a song that I was not familiar with at the time. And it turns out it's I Want None of This, which it turns out that's a historic recording that's only been performed live four times. So I think Sound Opinions makes five.
Okay. And you're probably going to hear it again here in a second. But Tom York going out with an extremely rare Radiohead track that appeared only on a compilation album, a charity record, and has never been officially released as a Radiohead record of their own, let alone performed live all that much, four times, as I said. Here's a little bit of Radiohead's I Want None of This with Sound Opinions. Looking on in awe.
That is I Want None of This, Tom York's solo on the piano at Sound Opinions in 2006. Well, you know, Greg, I was having a hard time. I don't like to live in the past. I'm always about moving forward. And I thought, look, one of the things I can do is illustrate the thinking of what we're doing in Sound Opinions. You and I came from the print world. We were both newspaper.
critics for decades and, you know, contributed to magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin and others. You know, in the same way that 60 Minutes was a news magazine on television, we wanted Sound Opinions to be a magazine on the air. So, you know, up front.
You had Music News, which given the vagaries of the timing of the stations that air us and podcasts, news now is instantaneous. We've kind of lost that or we get into it in a more featurey way. In the middle of the magazine, you had your feature segment, you know, and I'll talk about some of those. And at the back, you always had the album reviews, right? We love reviewing new.
Music. We try to choose albums we are excited about. We never compare notes ahead of time. We try to live with the record for a week or two, ideally. We don't want, you know, this instantaneous world we live in where Beyonce drops one of the densest double albums in decades and everybody has to have an opinion five hours later. You know, it's ridiculous. So we get to live with the records a bit.
We love to surprise each other. And I just thought, hey, the last record review that I remember having an absolute great time recording with you was only in November. You know, Tyler, the creator, dropped Chromacopia. And, you know, I was blown away listening to it. It's a dense album. His eighth solo record really took some time to live with it sonically and conceptually. I still don't understand it. Has something to do with.
Phantom Tollbooth, the children's book, and Chroma the Great, the orchestra conductor who brings color to the world. It's this psychedelic masterpiece. I just bought it on vinyl. And wow, does it come alive even beyond listening on streaming or on your computer or on any other format.
When we are both excited about a record, a good review kind of builds because we get each other more excited. When one of us loves something and the other dislikes it, those are always fun, too. We try not to shoot fish in a barrel. If we're both really not enthusiastic about tackling a record, you'll notice we haven't talked about the new Coldplay. Life is short. Why bother? But in that episode in November, we talked.
about Tyler the Creator, Emil and the Sniffers, the new record by The Cure, and we had an interview with Verboten, which was a great story about teenagers who finally made their first record 30-some-odd years later. Record reviews. It's the core of what we do. So respect here and also wrestling with his own childhood as a, you know, growing up with a single parent. You know, where did my father go? Can I be a good father?
You know, I'm wrestling with this whole idea of like growing up, you know, being a dad. Yeah, parenthood looms throughout this album. You know, at 33, by his own admission, he's beginning to turn gray and he's gaining weight. And he's thinking about mortality and he's thinking about relationships where partners may want a child. And he's wondering if he wants to bring a child into this.
Yeah, us chatting about Tyler, the creator. Damn, is that a great album. Made both of our year-end best lists. Well, and I enjoyed that review as well. Tyler has turned into one of the great artists of the last 10 years, and I don't think that could have been predicted when they started out. And you can see the evolution in the way we've addressed his art over the decade. It's grown from this, like, this guy.
is an opportunist, and he's transgressive for the sake of being transgressive. Yeah, he was worse than that. He's really just amazingly... transformed into this really substantial artist. When Odd Future emerged in the early 2010s, they were as offensive as they could possibly be. Misogynistic, homophobic, gutter humor. I mean, they were bad. I despised them and wrote several pieces about that. I think that review also illustrates that as...
Critics and journalists, you know, the opinion is not set in stone. Artists evolve, and we evolve in our understanding of the artists. And, you know, just because I took a very firm stand anti-odd future in the beginning doesn't mean that Tyler, the creator, didn't become an artist really worth listening to today. Right. You know, I wanted to talk a little bit about our classic album dissections, Jim, because I think that's...
The feedback we get about the show is that people really enjoy those. And they seem to be among our most popular regular features. And I could have picked any number of them because they've all been fun to do. Great to dive into those records, do research.
come up with people who were involved in making that record and getting their memories of how the record was made. The one that sprang to mind when I was thinking, like, which one should we do? At the risk of patting ourselves on the back, I thought we did a really good job with Carole King's Tapestry. A record that everybody knows inside out of a certain age. Everybody owned that record at one point. In the 70s, it was just like in everybody's collection.
But I think we made an effort to try to go a level or two deeper. And I think that's one of the things we try to bring to the show is like, let's not do the boilerplate presentation. If we've got something to say, let's do it. But if we don't have anything new to say, let's move on to something else. Carole King's Tapestry is a record I think is somewhat underrated now. Like how important it was, how it was made, why it was made. And Carole King herself is somewhat underrated. She's very shy. She didn't want to talk.
You know, to me it was kind of like, you know, Gore Vidal's piece on Sinatra. Frank Sinatra has a cold. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the greatest profiles of Frank Sinatra. I teach that in journalism as literature. That does not involve an interview with Frank Sinatra. Never gets to Frank, no. And we never got to Carol, even though we tried. And she's a very nice lady. But she enjoyed the show and tweeted at us. Yes, she did. But we did talk to Tony Stern.
who was her collaborator as a lyricist. She died in 2024. I'm glad we got to talk to Tony. Bert took the lyrics and he handed them to Carol. And she said, oh, these are good. Did you write them? And he said, no, my friend Tony Stern wrote them. So he set up a meeting and Carol and I met and hit it off. And then we worked together for the next five years. And also Danny Korchmar and Russ Conkle.
that A-list session musician group that backed up Carol on that record and others, as well as everybody who's who of California artists. But that was one of their early signpost records. And they both brought something to the table in terms of...
What was the atmosphere like in the studio? And they talked about this idea of Lou Adler, the producer, creating sort of a living room atmosphere. Yeah, casual. And Carol just in her living room making a record. The atmosphere, as far as the studio and the control, I would say was definitely controlled by Lou. But, you know, the music, Lou is smart enough to know that if you have Carol King as an artist, you let her do what she does.
We tend to romanticize the making of a classic album. And, you know, you ask, was it special in the moment? And they were like...
Oh, yeah, it was. Remember when we had Nova Selleck, Chris Nova Selleck of Nirvana on? And I said, hey, man, the first time you heard Smells Like Teen Spirit, did you know? And he just laughed at me. Of course I knew. What am I, an idiot? Yeah, you know, Kurt played it and it was a masterpiece. The folks who played on Tapestry knew they were making something very special. Well, I had to pick a classic album, Dissection 2, Greg. I mean, you know, as you said, we've done some true classics. I mean, almost rock critically.
We did Purple Rain and London Calling. We did The Wall and Russ Never Sleeps. We did Revolver and the first Velvet Underground album. I think a lot of people, when we do something like D'Angelo's Voodoo, which we tackled in October of 2020, you know, they're like... Some people are like, who? And what? You're saying this is on the level of those other records? Yeah, we are. We knew it at the time when D'Angelo released that. I mean, it's an R&B record that has a vibe.
No other album I've ever heard. It sucks you into this swampy, voodoo, mysterious, super sexual and sensual world. I mean, you can almost feel the temperature rising as you listen to this record. And we went deep with author Faith Penick, who had written a 33 and a third book about the album. And later we got to talk to bassist Pino Palladino, who played on the album. Again, getting a perspective from.
artists who worked on something and we were trying to bring a fresh perspective to this record saying, you know, I don't care. Name your favorite by Funkadelic or Sly and the Family Stone or the Beatles or anybody you choose. This album is as immortal as those. D'Angelo hired
musicians who are you know at the time were in some cases still are at the top of their game and were open to improvisation and like you said playing behind the beat i mean pino paladino who played bass on a lot of the album talked about and that was hard for him because he he you know that wasn't necessarily an easy thing for him to do he was like i don't know what this is but i will figure it out
All right, a little bit of chat about a classic album, Voodoo, by D'Angelo. We feel strongly about this sort of thing. It's like if we're at a record store and somebody's saying, I don't know what to buy, and you're in front of D, we will pick that album out of there. You need this now if you haven't heard it. That's why we do this show.
Hey, Jim and Greg, this is Carla from Sprints, and we just wanted to wish you a very, very merry 1,000th episode of Sound Opinions. Thank you so much for making the editor yourself your number one and number two record of 2024 last year. We are such massive fans of the podcast, and we're wishing you the best of luck in the future, and we can't wait to change your record too. Cheers.
Yo, Jim and Greg, it's your old pal Ira Robbins from the Grand Duchy of Trouser Press here. For crying out loud, a thousand episodes? What's left for you guys to talk about? No, no, no, seriously. You guys rule, and I'm really glad you do what you do. When we come back, we'll share more of the special moments that we think are highlights of a thousand episodes of Sound Opinions. That's coming up on Sound Opinions.
Welcome back to Sound Opinions. I'm Jim Dierogatis. That guy over there is Greg Cott. You should know that by now. It's been a thousand times we've said that. Hello, Greg. Hello, Jim. Grzegorz Ketkowski from Trupa Trupa, from Free City of Gdańsk, from Poland. And I want to congratulate you. One thousand episodes. This is amazing. See you soon in Chicago.
This is Erin Osmond, music journalist and author, and I just wanted to extend a big congratulations to Jim and Greg on your thousandth episode. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm over the years. You've been a big inspiration to me and my career, and I just wish you all the best. Hope you're feeling the love today. This week, we are sharing favorite moments from our first thousand episodes. Greg, you got another?
I do, Jim. One of the shows that I think we got some mixed feedback on, but a lot of feedback, which indicated we pressed some buttons with it, our show extolling disco. Yes. Disco doesn't suck. No. That's the name of the show.
We were riffing on the Disco Sucks t-shirts that were ubiquitous in Chicago in the late 70s, early 80s. The infamous radio stunt of a riot at Kaminsky Park. Disco Demolition Night. It will live in infamy in Chicago, Laura. There's still people who defend it. Homophobic, racist, idiotic. A lot of friends of mine, Vince Lawrence, one of the creators of house music, was an usher at the ballpark and said he remembered.
seeing piles of records. And he said they had one thing in common. Not all of them were disco records, per se. He said, but the one thing they had all in common was that there were black people on the cover of those records. And it was largely a white audience, and they just sort of went into this feeding frenzy of destroying so-called disco records.
But I think the whole idea that disco was some kind of trend, some kind of cheap exploitation of its audience, fomented by the fact that the Bee Gees did a movie about it, had nothing to do with the fact that this was an art form rooted in people of color making dance music in basements and house parties in the early 70s and creating an art form that produced some timeless, Music.
It is impossible to imagine Madonna or Lady Gaga or everybody else in between without Donna Summer having paved that ground. Early on, before she even went to Europe, she was in a psychedelic rock band called Crow. Later, she said she really loved country music. She recorded some Christian music. We always think of funk and R&B as being the roots of disco. But she said, I love all music. And she could apply that wonderful voice pretty much to every style. She made albums throughout the 80s.
This music had depth to it, had some amazing vocalists, Thelma Houston, Sylvester, Gloria Gaynor, Teddy Pendergresh, Shirley Goodman of Shirley & Company, doing Shame, Shame, Shame, 18 years after doing Let the Good Times Roll in the 50s, right? Updating the sound for that era. And those lush orchestrations, I mean, those Barry White records. Barry White, yes. I mean, it was just... Those records were immaculately done in terms of just the sound.
The lushness. Brilliant musicians, right? You know, there's good disco and there's bad disco, as in any genre. There is great polka and there is bad polka. There is wonderful death metal and there's the regular. You know, all right. So we got to dive deep and say this was the good stuff. And, of course, when disco becomes a bad word in the commercial realm, because the record industry is always ready to move to the next hype, it just goes.
goes underground in Chicago. And a little credit to Detroit with techno. But house music is born anew. In the ashes. Right, exactly. Frankie Knuckles said that to me. He said, we were just doing our own thing. We weren't going to let that disco demolition stop us. We just created something new out of it. And it really is about resilience of a population that is consistently...
uh attacked you know a community that's attacked black brown people lgbtq people yes these were the foundation of that art form and it continues to this day when you talk about a record like good times by chic or uh i feel loved by donna summer or you make me feel mighty real by sylvester you're still an anthem in every gay club you could go on about this forever we could do a disco part too but right i got another live moment i want to lay on you um
Wire is a band that's probably been more important to me than any other in my life because I've gotten to be close to the geniuses in that art punk band.
You know, art punk geniuses, Greg, three brilliant albums, hugely influential between 1977 and 1980. And then they went on hiatus for a while. Came back in 87. Another. You can Google kids, Hootie Gate, and Google my connection to Wire. I ain't going to tell that story again. But we have had, as a core underwriter supporter of Sound Opinions for some time, Goose Island.
Chicago's Beer. And we get to do several live events a year at Goose Island's venues around town. September 2015, Wire is touring behind the first self-titled album of its career. Unlike so many bands that take a long break and reform, they were anti-nostalgia to the core of their being. We were talking about the evils of nostalgia, to quote Wire.
Nostalgia is the kiss of death of old great art, right? Rock and roll in particular is our most immediate art form. You and I have always said it's about being here now and living at 11 now. And Wires always followed that. So they've always been reluctant to look back and play old material. They are about moving forward. We had them at the Goose Island Barrel House. They played one of the loudest.
sets we've ever recorded for live radio. Three of the original members. And, you know, the young upstart on guitar who replaced Bruce Gilbert, Matthew Sims. And you started with a great question to him about was there pressure to join this legendary band and make new music? And he was like, no, no. Wire's always been about now and the future, which I learned at age 22 when I toured with them.
been a credo of my life ever since, Be Here Now. It's an ideal that sometimes is harder than at other times to live up to, but in music, that is the vehicle that really brings it home. So they played two excellent songs, Split Your Ends and Joust and Jostle, from their then-current album, Wire, and they looked back to a classic, rare for them to play older stuff, used to, from 19...
1978's Chairs Missing, and I think they did it as a little nod to me. I think you had posted something on social media about a thousand shows. The great Graham Lewis weighed in. Did you see that? Yeah, yeah. Graham posted a two-word review of a thousand episodes of Sound Opinions, Cantankerous Charmers, with the exclamation point. I was like, okay, I'll live with that as an epitaph. Yeah, that's all right. I love that.
Yeah, those guys are great. They're always fun to talk to. We had, I think, the chat before we... Before we actually jumped into the show proper outside the venue where we were at, it was just as good. I only see them every couple of years, but it's like we pick up the conversation right where it left off. They never seem to be out of things to talk about. Their ideas are brilliant. They're smart men and very funny as well. Very funny.
Not funny. What we're going to talk about next was a couple of the lowlights. We've got to be honest about the show. We've had some disasters. There's been some swings and misses on the show. And when you're doing live events, there's always that extra added thing of you're doing it in front of an audience. And you want the audience to come away.
You know, enjoying the moments. Right. And because you and I have interviewed so many people that you get used to the idea that sometimes guys are going to be cranky and it's going to be, you know, not fun. Right. And they may call you names, but you're so what? We have been hung up.
on by some of the best in the history of popular music. You know, you get the call in the middle of the night from some guy you reviewed the day before and they hated your review. But, you know, Japandroids on show number 357 in 2012. Another Goose Island event. It was a doubleheader, I believe, with parquet courts performing, interviewing a performance, and an interview performance with Japandroids. And Japandroids...
Here's the lesson I took away from that. Never give the band a fifth of Maker's Mark before the interview. Wait until the end of the show. Maker's Mark was underwriting the show at that point, and each of them got a full bottle of whiskey. So it was a gift, right? Two-man band. A little thank you for coming on the show and interviewing and setting up your equipment to play a short set.
And, you know, wonderful. Everything's going to be great. Little did we know that the singer-guitarist in the band, Brian King, would consume the entire fifth of Maker's Mark before coming on stage to do the interview. So every question sort of turned into an argument. And, you know, it was kind of squirmy, I think, for some people in the audience. You could sort of see people kind of rustling around like, where's this going to go?
And for us, it was kind of like rolling water off a duck's back. Isn't that the saying? It's kind of like, yeah, you're being a jerk right now. We get it. And they ended up playing a great set. The set was good, but the interview was not one of our best. And it was a little uncomfortable. And the thing about it, later on, the drummer, David...
Looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and die in the middle of the interview, David Prowse. And I later found out, the publicist later passed on to me, David was really sorry about that. He was kind of chastened about it. Still love the band, still love that record, did not love that interview. How does such wonderfully ugly music come from such a beautiful, idyllic place? Do you say we make ugly music? Wonderfully ugly, in the best way. Yeah, but that's like...
Is that like a backhanded compliment? No, that's a full fronthanded compliment, brother. It seems like a strange place. It seems like a strange place for you guys. I'm too insulted to answer that question seriously. You've been enjoying the Maker's Mark backstage, haven't you? I have, but at the same time, I don't think there's anyone in this room who would... You know, speaking of interviews that went just right down the toilet.
You know, Andrew Gill reminded us we should probably listen to our 500th episode, which we celebrated looking back on 500 at that point. Right. And I got to say, Greg, my worst moment on sound opinions is still the same from episode 500. It happened in 2008, episode 153. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds came in to perform. Now, you and I have interviewed Nick Cave.
individually for our newspaper gigs, probably half a dozen times total. And he is a brilliant artist, poet, fiction writer, songwriter, intellectual. I remember having...
an hour-long conversation with him, I tossed out one question. You know, he has so much Old Testament imagery in his songs, and he had had a young son. And I said, how did you introduce the concept of God to your son? And we talked for an hour, right? Yeah, right. All right. But it's like 10 o'clock in the morning on like a Monday or Tuesday. The bad seeds...
on the best day, look like a gang of pirates who have been at sea for nine months, you know, eating and drinking nothing but hardtack and rum without a shower. And that's how they rolled into Navy Pier, WBEZ. They were cranky. I don't think they knew.
why they were there. He was like, you're going to tape an interview and performance for a live national radio show. We had both raved about the Bad Seeds' new album, Dig, Lazarus Dig, and Nick Cave's side project, Grinderman. But every once in a while in an interview situation, the band seems determined.
to prove that they are cooler than the interviewer. Now, every single person you or I have ever interviewed in any context is cooler than us. That's a given. We give that to them. We're not trying to be cooler than anybody we've ever interviewed. And we're just trying to get a conversation going that'll illuminate their art. We certainly knew inside out Nick Cave's story and his...
recent work and his older work uh they just decided to mess with us and i think they were performing for each other oh yeah can we can we uh rattle these hosts for the benefit of our own amusement at 10 o'clock on a monday morning i said something about um uh about how anti-nostalgia and
anti-aging Nick Cave's art was that he still had the energy he had when he was a teen, you know, in Australia making this punk rock. And, you know, he was like, well, you know, whatever. I'm not about growing old, right? And I said, yeah, but, you know, like you see Lou Reed today and he stands in front of a microphone stand with his, a music stand with his lyrics. Oh, boy.
The fact that I dared say something mildly critical about Lou Reed got Nick set off, and he's like, it's not for us to stand in judgment of that man. And then Warren Ellis is basically calling me an idiot, one of the bad seeds. I'm like, you know, gentlemen. I was cracking a joke. And we all just get along. Yeah, you know, I got the banana album tattooed on my arm.
You see Lou Reed today, and he plays with the music stand in front of him, and he's reading the lyrics to his new songs as if he's giving a college lecture. Whereas... I saw him play, last year, play guitar at a kind of Leonard Cohen thing, and he was amazing. He got up there and just slammed into his guitar, and there was none of that kind of stuff. So he was nasty again? I don't know if it's... He's amazing.
He can kind of do what he wants anyway, can't he? It's not really for us to stand in judgment of that man. Us lesser mortals. I'm not actually talking about myself here. Right, right, right. You're talking about yourself, Mick? No, I think he's talking about you. We do not hold a grudge but Nick Cave's album last year, Wild God, was the worst of his career.
Yes. And last word to Jim DeRogatis on Nick. Yeah, Nick, Nick, Nick. I'm still here, brother. When we return, Jim and I are going to share a few more memories. These will be probably a little more pleasant than the ones you just heard. Memories from the past 1,000 episodes. And we'll hear from some of our listeners. That's in a minute on Sound Opinions. Hey, guys. It's Holly from Goat Girl. Thank you so much for all your support in the past. And a massive congratulations on your 1,000th episode airing.
Lots of love. Bye. Hello, Nico from Freeco here. Congrats, Jim and Greg, on your thousandth episode. I've been listening to Sound Opinions since I was a kid. Chicago forever. Hey, Sound Opinions. This is Sophia from Free Range. I just wanted to congratulate you guys on your thousandth episode. Love what you guys do so much. Thank you.
And we are back. We've been having a little bit of fun reliving some moments from our first 1,000 episodes. I got another 1,000 in me, Greg. I'm eager to move forward. Yeah, let's go, man. Let's keep going. But what other highlights come to mind for you? Well, you know, the first one that popped into my head when we sort of bandied this idea about, the one I can't forget is Alan Toussaint.
It was a perfect match that, you know, I've talked lovingly about that grand piano at the WBEZ studios. And I will do once again, because that is a beautiful instrument. And Alan Toussaint sitting at that beautiful instrument, describing how he wrote some of these classic songs, you know, one of the pioneers of New Orleans music in terms of the modern era. arranger, producer, songwriter, performer. He did it all.
And here he is telling us how he wrote these masterpieces, and he's demonstrating. I started out here, and it went there on the piano. Well, such a gentleman. I remember we were sitting a respectful distance away behind microphones, and he's like, no, no, no, come over here. Pull your chair up right next to my piano bench, and I'll show you. And the delight on his face when he would start performing some of these things, I'll never forget.
The other thing I'll never forget about those moments in that piano gym is Mary Gaffney. Oh, yeah. The great engineer. She was the linchpin of that whole aura around that studio there, where you could make a state-of-the-art record if you wanted to. Mary was one of the great recording engineers in Chicago music history. Pioneering as a woman in that position. Absolutely. She passed away recently, but left behind an incredible...
body of work so and alan toussaint is now gone as well but we have this memory of this moment of this day with alan toussaint at the piano doing things like fortune teller and uh the southern nights you know these classic songs that he wrote and and performed influence is, it's a New Orleans thing. You were warming up with it. You were kind enough to tell us you'd play anything we wanted to hear. So that'd be a great place to start.
There's a bitter tip between us. Anyone from New Orleans knows exactly what I mean. Anywhere I go. Yeah, you know, Greg, we endeavor mightily to both be there.
All the time. There are a handful of moments where I was on a story or out of town or sick. You got to talk to Lindsay Buckingham on your own and Mary J. Blige. That's the one I'm really envious of. I don't know where you were, but we had the opportunity to talk to Boy Genius in April of 23. And episode 906. And so Alex Claiborne, producer, filled in.
was my partner in talking to these three extraordinarily talented women. You know, when people say something, we did a classic album dissection of Joni Mitchell's Blue, you know, and a listener ran into me at the Jewel, the grocery store, you know, there's no albums like that today. And I said, oh, yeah, you know, Boy Genius, the album. And they're like, what are you talking about? And I was like, you know, what that record means.
To the current generation is what Blue meant to you. You know, three brilliant singer-songwriters, all in their late 20s, 30 is looming. It is about discovering yourself and finally becoming comfortable in your own skin. The key line to me that started the interview I threw out to them, when you don't know who you are, you mess around and find out. And they were finding out as a trio of friends.
The Bad Seeds, our best friends, right, just came off the pirate ship, and they decided to turn that against us. But with Alex and me talking to Phoebe Bridgers, Julian Baker, and Lucy Dacus, it's like they invited us in to be part of the inner circle. We're laughing. We're joking. We're vibing. I will add that all three were laying in bed. This was COVID times, right? We're on Zoom.
They're in a room together in each other's circle. And it's like Alex and I went to bed with Boy Genius. And, you know, the other magical thing was they were just about to explode from being these three underground acts who could play mid-sized rooms of a couple of hundred, maybe each on their own. And soon they're going to be headlining Madison Square Garden. You know, we caught them at the exact moment when the rocket was taken off.
And, you know, I envy you guys being able to do that. I remember that this was the one opportunity to do it. I had to be out of town. And, you know, I said, you guys got to go grab that. And you did a great job. I think it helped, too, that Phoebe and Lucy had both been on the show previously in their solo incarnations, you know. So I think they felt comfortable already with you guys. They trusted us. The interview was great. And it was their year. They owned that year, without a doubt. What did you say?
Well, we have this massive guitar riff, and then I hear a little synth, but it might be something else. Oh, synth, yeah. I thought you said sin-enhancing. No, no, no. A synth-filled analog synth. And I was like, it is also sin-enhancing. I wish rock music was still sinning.
like sometimes it just feels like now it's just beer commercial is is like the baseline not the baseline god is the starting point for all guitar based music and and you're trying to beat you're trying to beat the corporate uh accusations not the hell accusations now
I do have a memory that comes to mind is from probably 15 years ago when you did one of your guilty pleasure episodes, which I wish you would bring back because it was hilarious. Jim was talking about his unabashed love for prog rock, and he played the acapella layered vocal intro to a gentle giant song, Words from the Wise.
So I always remember Greg laughing during the pause in that because it started out going, and then during the pause before they start the next line of the a cappella intro, Greg is laughing in the background, just cackling slightly off mic. And I always thought that it always stuck in my head as a funny and just hilarious and very endearing moment of what I love most about the show and the dynamic between you guys.
Hello, Jim and Greg. This is Luke calling from Tokyo. I'm a big fan of the show. I've been listening on the internet for over 15 years and I just wanted to share my favourite memory of listening to Sound Opinions. I was listening on my headphones walking through downtown Shibuya and it was the music of the civil rights movement episode.
And we started playing the song Driver Man from, we insist, Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. And the song just totally blew me away. And I just happened to be passing a second-hand record shop at the time. So I ducked into it, located a vinyl copy, paid for it, and was back out on the street by the time you were barely finished talking about it, really. And I've since come to really, really love that album and still play it regularly.
I just wanted to say thanks for introducing me to it and sharing my memory. So yeah, thanks again. And yeah, good luck with the forthcoming shows. Keep them coming. Cheers. While we're in glad handing mode, we have people we have to thank.
Going back to the beginning, you know, Sound Opinions would not have ever made it to national distribution without the great Tori Malatia at WBEZ. And for the first more than 10 years, all the way up through and after Show 500, Jason Saldana and Robin Lin foolishly wasted part of their careers as longtime producers of this show. PRX does an amazing job with distributing us. Goose Island has been in our corner for a very long time. Chicago's beer.
Couldn't do the show without the support of the Goldschmidt and Staines Family Foundation. Absolutely. Mark Koush does a great job on the radio and keeping us in touch with the public radio stations that air us. Gary Yonker, our ad rep. And I always feel like Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I say that this.
Our attorney is Dino Armiros. You know, Hunter and the attorney. I was somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to tackle. And Andrew Gill, Alex Claiborne, Max Hatlam, and on social media, Katie Cott. That's our ace team right now. We also have to thank the Patreon listeners, Greg. The folks who support us through Patreon and through PayPal.
are key to keeping the show going. It takes those three things, underwriter support, foundation support, and most of all, listeners. So since we became independent in the midst of the pandemic, We have been thanking them with a bonus podcast that we add songs to the Desert Island Jukebox, sometimes do interviews that wouldn't fit the regular show, a midweek bonus music podcast that goes out to the Patreon supporters. But...
But it's like, why have one bonus when we could have two? So for 2025, we've launched. We are always talking about before and after taping the show, streaming shows that have got us excited. Books we've read, movies we've seen, dinners we've cooked. Maybe someday you'll talk about basketball and I'll understand it. I doubt it. You know, and so we decided, hey, why not do another bonus, a bonus bonus podcast? Everything.
else from sound opinions so we launched that this year well speaking of listeners greg uh we got to give some of our favorite memories we love hearing from listeners if you got something that stands out over a thousand episodes uh leave us a message on our website and we'll share it on the show meanwhile anti-nostalgia what do we got next week well we're going to kick off the uh next 1000
With tributes to two giants that left us in recent weeks. Jimmy Carter, a great documentary by Jimmy Carter that we've discussed on the show. On his fondness for music. Absolutely, the Jimmy Carter music connection. And then Stanley Booth, the greatest chronicler of the Rolling Stones in particular, but just one of the great music critics of all time.
who passed away recently as well. We're going to bring back our conversation with him. And don't forget to check out our bonus podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for our Monday podcast.
Everything else. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this program belong solely to Sound Opinions and not necessarily to Columbia College Chicago or our sponsors. Thanks as always to our Patreon supporters. Thanks as always for listening, everyone. And thank you to everyone I thanked earlier. And thank you to people I forgot. It wasn't intentional. Onward!
In addition to support from listeners like you, Sound Opinions has opportunities for corporate sponsors to reach our smart and engaged audience. Email us at sponsor at soundopinions.org and we'll fill you in on the details.