The Lipstick Pickup Podcast with Emily Vardaman Walters
A lipstick pickup is an electric guitar pickup with a captivating sound and appearance that has a devoted cult following that grows with each passing year. True to their name, they were originally chrome lipstick tubes stuffed with magnets and electronics that were the inspired invention of Nathan Daniel, founder of Danelectro. Born from his genius instinct for innovation as well as his devotion to a "rigid cost control" philosophy, they were an essential component of the guitars that helped stoke an affordable rock-n-roll revolution.
The Lipstick Pickup Podcast is an amateur (but very inspired), unscripted, rarely edited conversation devoted to the entirety of the subject. Hosted by Emily Vardaman Walters, The Lipstick Pickup Podcast is a fan-friendly primer on the subject of Danelectro guitars and their impact on the history of popular music of all genres.
The Lipstick Pickup Podcast with Emily Vardaman Walters
TRUE CRIMES OF CLASSIC ROCK WITH MUSIC WRITER AND HISTORIAN ANGIE MOON | The Lipstick Pickup Podcast Ep.21
On this episode of The Lipstick Pickup Podcast, Emily calls Classic Rock historian Angie Moon in Coventry, England to talk about her new book The Crime of The Century and the subject of her blog, The Diversity of Classic Rock. She discusses her personal journey through music, the healing power of sound, and the importance of accurate music history. Angie also touches on her future writing projects, including a focus on celebrity trials, and reflects on the cultural narratives that shape our understanding of music. In this engaging conversation, they delve into the intricate connections between personal history, music, and cultural identity. They explore the legacy of Oscar Wilde, The Kinks and how The Great Migration shaped American Music. The discussion also touches on the role of storytelling in history, the influence of Sitar in music of the British Invasion, and the significance of personal style in creative expression.
Follow Angie here:
https://www.instagram.com/angiemichellemoon
https://crazyonclassicrock.com/
Ring. Hello. Hello. This is Emily Vardaman Walters with the Lipstick Pickup podcast, and I'm calling for Angie Moon, the classic rock historian. That's me. Hello, Angie. Hi, Emily. How are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you for picking up.
SPEAKER_01:No problem. My pleasure.
SPEAKER_00:I am so excited to speak to Angie Moon today. This is Emily with the Lipstick Pickup, and I'm calling Angie Moon in Ireland. Dublin? Is that right? No,
SPEAKER_01:actually, I'm in England, Coventry.
SPEAKER_00:At some point, I thought you were in Ireland. I
SPEAKER_01:lived in Ireland for a decade almost, and that's where my husband's from. And two years ago, I moved to Coventry, which is just a bit outside of Birmingham and about an hour and a half from London.
SPEAKER_00:Lucky you. I love the UK. Okay. I called Coventry, England today to talk to Angie Moon about a myriad of subjects, and I'm extremely lucky to talk to her. And I want everybody to know that Angie Moon is a classic rock historian. of the finest order because she's self-taught for years. And I've learned a lot from her since I started following her. I discovered her blog in April of this year. I was doing research on my electric sitar and I stumbled onto an essay, I don't know if you call them essays, blog posts, called the Indian influences in classic rock. And I read it and I said, this young lady knows a lot about this subject. In fact, she knows a lot of the things that it took me years to discover. And she looks and sounds like a soulmate. So I found her on social media, on Instagram, Angie Michelle Moon. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's my middle name. So yeah, Angie. And it's all classic rock references. Angie Rolling Stones, Michelle Beatles, and Moon the Who. So the big three.
SPEAKER_00:It's a wonderful name. Anyway, I stumbled across your writings, and I'm going to have Angie talk to me about that essay that I'm in awe of. I want to know how she found all that great research. I want her to talk to me about her new book, which I'm a third of the way through. It's called... Yes, I'm blowing through it. Glad to hear. And I really love it. It's called Crime of the Century. Hold it up. She's... Holding it up for the camera. And most people are enjoying this on audio and video, by the way. So that's it. I love the color. It's a regal color. And here's another thing I want to tell you. You have a Flying V guitar on the cover. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Lots of symbolism on here, and I can't wait to share that with you. I
SPEAKER_00:love it because it's rock mixed with true crime. And one thing I love about reading it is because I enjoyed a lot of your interviews on YouTube and other ways before I started reading this book. So when I read it, I hear your voice telling me the stories.
SPEAKER_01:What an honor. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, you know how books on tape are appealing, you know, because it's another textural element and you have, um, um, a deeper voice and you also have an unusual accent. I'm going to ask you where all you've lived because that would explain why there's
SPEAKER_01:a whole story. Yes,
SPEAKER_00:I want I want to know all about it because you have an unusual accent. I love the way you talk. And it's funny. I looked at some interview you did three years ago and I looked in the comments section and somebody commented, I like the way you talk. And I thought, I like the way she talks, too. But when I'm reading that book, I can hear you telling it to me. You should do a books on tape, too.
SPEAKER_01:I'd love to make the whole celebrity true crime thing into a podcast and podcast. Whenever I can move on to my next adventure, that's what I want to do. But first, I got to write the next Celebrity True Crime book. And I can't wait to share that because I've been teasing it a lot on social media.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I'm excited. I love the book. I'm a third way through it. And you have been such a prolific blogger since what year did you start blogging?
SPEAKER_01:2015. So I started this whole blog as a school project. I originally just wanted to be a DJ. I did not set myself out to be a writer. I wanted to be a DJ, just like my dad. My dad was a DJ back in the 70s in a small town in California playing pop music and, you know, nothing too offensive. I think they said that the song by the Rascals, Good Lovin', was too wild for them. So that's one of my favorite stories from my dad's DJ days in the 70s. And yeah, like, My dad would always be playing music in the car, and I got into classic rock as a teenager. And when I was in university, I worked at the university radio station, and I had my own show, and I tried to make it as classic rock as possible. But it was a freeform station, and they wanted me to play other genres. And sure, I like all sorts of music, but classic rock will always be my one true love. And they told me, the music you're playing is too white, too straight, and too male. It's just straight white dad music. And I just sat there like, no, it isn't. Classic rock is really diverse. And I started making lists of all the, you know, different groups of people that play music. So I made lists of Black musicians in rock and roll, Native American musicians in rock and roll, Asian musicians in rock and roll, LGBT musicians in rock and roll, women in rock and roll. And I just compiled this list and sat on it for about a year. And then I decided when I was taking an intro to social media course in university, I was like, and this was while I was studying abroad in Ireland. This is when I met my husband, Owen. And I said, okay, now is the time to unveil The diversity of classic rock. So that's how it started. And then from there, I decided to make it all about classic rock storytelling because there's only so much you can go into with diversity. You know, diversity. So I want to make it about diversity of sound. So that's how we got Beyond the Sitar, Indian influences in rock and roll.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So 10 years and you've got How many entries do you have on your blog? It's a lot of research and writing. Hundreds.
SPEAKER_01:Hundreds.
SPEAKER_00:I'm in awe and I've read some of them. I haven't finished the book nor all of the, there's a lot out there, but it's all great. And remind me your website because, remind me what your website is.
SPEAKER_01:So the URL is crazyonclassicrock.com. So it's all one word. And I based it off of the heart song Crazy on You. And that was the name of my radio show was Crazy on Classic Rock.
SPEAKER_00:We are kindred spirits. You love the wordplay. Now, every time I see that URL, I'm going to hear Crazy on You.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I love wordplay. And I guess it's so fitting that I lived in Ireland for nearly a decade because it's a land of, you know, scholars and scribes. And Phil Linnet is like my favorite poet from there. I'm sorry, English majors, it's going to be Phil Linnet number one. I love Phil Linnet. Huge inspiration. Just that wordplay in Black Rose, a rock legend. It spoke to me. And this was an interesting story. I did a giveaway of my book around Halloween. And The winner of the book wanted me to sign with my favorite lyric. So I ended up using the wordplay from Black Rose Rock Legend and said, there's a hint of what my next book is going to be about in these lyrics.
SPEAKER_00:How much time a day do you devote to listening to music?
SPEAKER_01:Pretty much all day. Like, you know, I'll have like Spotify on at all times. I have Spotify Premium. I use it a lot. It is just that's how I do a lot of my research for my blog. That's that along with like Wikipedia rabbit holes and just research rabbit holes on Google. But it's gotten worse since, you know, the algorithm changed a few years back. So now it's all just AI content farms. It's miserable for, you know, independent creators like us. Definitely. It's just so sad. But I think video is now the new medium. Video killed the radio star.
SPEAKER_00:I saw that on one of your posts or an introduction. You said, They're trying to make video kill the podcast star because podcasts are moving to video, which is what YouTube was trying to grab. And that's why Spotify is grabbing because they offer this with video. I don't know if you know this, but when I post these, they come with video and that's what people want. 85% of the people who consume my podcast on Spotify watch the video.
SPEAKER_01:That's something I need to consider because I spent a lot of money when I moved here to England and I bought my house. I spent a lot of money on creating a Victorian style living room in this house. Now, this is a mid-century house, but I was like, there's going to be something Victorian in here and I got to make that the living room. And I was inspired by the peacock room. I was like, yeah, I'm going to make it peacock green, lots of gold accents everywhere. I have like an antique divan and an antique sofa, both from the Victorian era downstairs. I've
SPEAKER_00:seen your set. And it's charming.
SPEAKER_01:It's amazing. I just love it so much. I mean, aestheticism from the 1800s is a huge influence on me. And I nearly would argue that that whole movement was basically the precursor to the 60s peacock revolution.
SPEAKER_00:I believe it. I'm a believer. It definitely is.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. George Harrison in his William Morris jacket.
SPEAKER_00:Dave
SPEAKER_01:Davis's entire style.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And that's another thing that I've admired about you is your commitment to style too, because rock and roll is all about style and you're into the total package, as they say, in terms of, I'm going to get into it later, but the people who are like we are, I have learned is something called aesthetically sensitive. It's a good way to put it. Yeah. And it's a thing. So you're doing the whole thing. But I want to stop for a minute and talk about Spotify because you're admitting to using it. Here in America, and I live in Nashville and have a lot of people, a lot of friends who play music. And I'm constantly having somebody telling me that I should not be using Spotify. And I have always paid my own way. is a music lover. I have a room upstairs with thousands of compact discs. Many of them I paid$12,$14,$16 for in the 90s and in the 2000s. I've bought everybody's vinyls. I've bought all their t-shirts. But when I started my electric sitar hunt, I got on Spotify. I wasn't on Spotify before. Very useful resource library for me. Just like you, I have a premium account and I do tremendous research on there. And that is actually the whole reason why I was able to ramp up to this thing. I guess I'll go ahead and tell you how this started for me. And I'll try to be brief because I've let it already go on too long. In the winter of 2020, during the pandemic, I started to be fascinated with a real sitar. in music. Everything starts with the Beatles with me. I told you in our pregame, it started with Paul McCartney, and then it was all things Beatles. And then it builds on there to Badfinger and everything Beatles. You know, it's the cornerstone. It's the bedrock of my musical taste. It's anglophilic. It's dripping in classical elements, right? You know, the Beatles. And I So I started fixating on the song Norwegian Wood and what a revelatory moment that was in rock music because it was officially the first electric sitar track. I mean, not electric sitar, classical sitar. George Harrison played it. But And he's credited with breaking it out. But everybody was doing it at the same time. They were all messing around with it because India was, India, the smell of curry was very popular in London at that time. And you talk about this stuff in your essay about all the Indian fluence and world music. And Ravi Shankar is inventing a genre called world music and everybody's into it, right? It's a swing in 60s. But the reality is that And this is another thing that you nailed in your blog post. The Yardbirds almost beat the hymn to it. And so did the Kinks. It was all happening at the same time. So they weren't necessarily copying George Harrison. They were all messing around with it. And George Harrison, just when the timeline within months was the first to get it out there. So I started thinking about all the other bands who were using sitar and it exploded, right? Donovan, Traffic. You probably know more than I do because one thing you do in that blog post is you give adequate service to the difference between classical sitar and electric sitar and what they did with that. So, but that only lasted about a month. And then I asked somebody who is a very accomplished and busy session guitarist here in Nashville, hey, are people still putting sitar on stuff out there? And do you know how to play one? And he said, no, I don't know how to play a real sitar. And I said, What do you mean a real sitar? He said, I know how to play an electric sitar. And I said, what is an electric sitar? And I'm just like you. I want to look it up. But, you know, I'm a curious minded person who can go down a rabbit hole. So I Google it and I find out I've got one right here on the wall. I bought a handful of these instruments just to prove to people that I consider them artifacts. This is a Vinnie Bell vintage one from 67 right here. And so I looked it up and I was like, holy smokes, this instrument is all over the music that I grew up with. And they also applied for the patent the year I was born. And of all of the things... that I could learn about. This is ubiquitous, and you really nail that in your blog post. You talk about Redbone. I grew up listening to 70s music. You talk about Redbone. There's so many bands in classic rock that it's sitting right there, and most people don't know it's there because the instrumentation is so complex and interesting. What are some of the other songs that you mention in your blog post? I'm trying to remember So,
SPEAKER_01:yeah, there's like Spencer Davis Group. There's the Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix.
SPEAKER_00:No, Electric Citar.
SPEAKER_01:Electric Citar. Oh, Rory Gallagher. Rory Gallagher is definitely in there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Philby. Which is
SPEAKER_01:a great song. Great
SPEAKER_00:song. And I grew up. What is that? I grew up with all of these people being rock stars. I grew up with Thin Lizzy on the radio. You know, I'm a lot older than you are. And Thin Lizzy doesn't have an electric sitar track that I know of. But it was all over everything. And I want to tell you something about my ear for music and my diversity. I come from Mississippi. But the reason why I'm not a hillbilly and I have an interesting upbringing is that my father was a scientist. And he was a forester who studied at the University of Michigan. And he was also a World War II hero. But he went to work for Masonite in the late 80s after the war. Masonite is a building material in which these instruments have. And you don't play music at all, do you? I know a
SPEAKER_01:couple bits of bass lines and that's about it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I don't either. Unapologetically, it would get in the way of me loving music as much as I do. Because I think to be a musician, you have to dedicate some time to that. And I've never cared about playing a guitar that amazes people because I'm so into it. But I'd rather listen to other people play. I've tried once. I wasn't very talented. I'd rather watch other people play. Same. People keep telling me, you still need to learn. And I'm like, no, I don't. I promise I'm having a good time over here on the floor while y'all are doing all the work.
SPEAKER_01:It's like sports, you know, like for me, it's like, yeah, like other people love watching sports. I love watching musicians.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. These dental instruments are made out of Masonite. And my dad went to work for Masonite in Laurel, Mississippi, which is in the heart of the Pine Belt. It's not a remote area, but Mississippi has a reputation. But my father was no hillbilly. He was a forestry scientist, and he went to work for Masonite. And that's why I was born and raised in Mississippi. And When I first started this electric sitar hunt, I started coming up with this really interesting list, and it was the music that I grew up with. One of which, and I don't know if you know much about this genre, but one that I grew up with on the radio, which is Philly Soul. I know
SPEAKER_01:about it because my dad is a big soul and R&B guy.
SPEAKER_00:So Philly Soul was... That music was so familiar to me that I thought they made it in Jackson when I was growing up. The reason why it was on the radio in Jackson is that Jackson was starting to integrate in the 70s, and you have crossover music coming on the radio, the kind of stuff that's showing up on Soul Train. Right? Black people liked it. White people liked it. They called it Crossover for a reason. Everybody could enjoy it. And it was absolutely incredible. And of course, I'm just 100 miles, 200 miles south of Stax and all this other stuff. And I grew up with this music. And... There's electric sitar all over that music. It is the definitive sound of it. Didn't I blow your mind? You hear that? That's electric sitar. And when you talk about diversity in rock music and you want people to point out to people how diverse... it's more diverse than you think it is, you feel like you have to point out to people that, oh, you thought that guitar player was white, that guitar player was black, or, you know, whatever. Or you thought the person who wrote that song was a man, the person who wrote that song was a woman, you know. And I started preaching in my own gospel about this electric sitar that it was all about diversity because I was finding it on outlaw country, traditional country. They used it in Nashville in the late 60s and early 60s in a lot of those productions, I have a list that is close to 1,200 electric sitar tracks, and it will split your head open. And one reason why I was able to listen to all that music, which is very diversified, is this is my high school annual. I'm going to hold it up for you. I went to a nearly all-Black school in Mississippi because my parents believed that in public education when nobody else in Mississippi would do it because they were integrating the schools. And that's why many of the private schools in Mississippi were all founded in the early 70s is because the federal government made them integrate the schools. And that's when many white people left public schools. But I stayed and I'm a better person for it. And that is why I love Chaka Khan. From my hometown of Chicago. Chicago is a,
SPEAKER_01:is, how long did you live there? So, yeah, so, but, well, I'm from the Chicagoland area and the area that I'm from, Gurnee, is right next to Wisconsin. So I'm more of a, like, Chicago people go, you're more from Wisconsin, really. But yeah, Gurnee is like, I grew up like right near Great America, like 10, 15 minute car ride. That's Great America right there. like an amazing theme park. And I lived in Evanston as well. I also lived a little bit in Chicago proper. I worked in Chicago proper for a bit for my grandfather's accounting business. And yeah, I would spend... Even after we left Chicago when I was about 11, we would go there often for 4th of July because Evanston has a great parade. And Evanston is a city... A bit like yours, like my dad's secondary school was evenly split between black and white students. And my dad befriended a lot of the black students and played on the sport teams with them, talk about music with them, eating lunch with them and everything. He'd only ever dated interracially, which is an interesting fact about my dad. So my dad has never dated a white woman. His first girlfriend was black. And then every other girlfriend he had was black or Hispanic. And then my mom's from Venezuela. And then my dad learned Spanish in secondary school and then practiced it in university. And now he's fluent and can speak it better than I do. I speak it with a stutter. And my cousin says I sound I'm British when I speak Spanish, which is hilarious.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. That's why you have a lot of diversity, or at least you've had a lot of diversity in your own life, but then also you come from it. Most people aren't like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's shocking because when I was a kid, I grew up in a lily white suburb. Gurney's very lily white. And I was like the one kid that had parents from very different backgrounds. Mom's Hispanic, dad's white. And people didn't know until they started meeting my family. So they'd see my mom, they'd see my grandma, and especially my grandma because my grandma was of native descent.
SPEAKER_00:So she had
SPEAKER_01:very, very dark skin, very thick pinstripe black hair. And I remember just Chicago and Jackson,
SPEAKER_00:Mississippi have a very distinct relationship to each other. Do you understand that in the way of music? The Great Migration. Yes. This is another reason why I've had a very purpose driven is when I started learning about the electric sitar. I said, this is a great migration story where all the black musicians lived in Chicago who were playing blues and jazz. What do they call it? Little Mississippi.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like a lot of like my grandma's nanny was black and she was from the south as well. So yeah. Yep. They were all from the South. And then they came to Chicago. And yeah, it's just an incredible story. It's a pattern that you see a lot in the history of music of Chicago. So I did a whole series on Chicago music. I've
SPEAKER_00:got to
SPEAKER_01:get into that one. Yeah, I've got to send you the link. It's so fascinating.
SPEAKER_00:When I was growing up attending integrated schools, first of all, I started first grade in 1972. I started school early. And my first grade teacher was Black. And it was integrated. But by the time I graduated, as evidenced by that picture, many of the white kids had and white people had abandoned this idea that they wanted to integrate the schools. And they sort of dismantled integration in Mississippi. It's a fact. And it's still that way. The school where I went to high school is still predominant. It's still 100 percent black, except some people, some kids who live in a what amounts to a home or something. You know, it's the schools were in, they tried to integrate the schools in Mississippi and I enjoyed the, I enjoyed the benefit of it for 12 years. And I actually watched them slowly dismantle integration, which is why I wanted to use this podcast to talk about diversity. That's why when I found your thing, I was like, diversity in rock, and she knows exactly what I'm talking about. We're talking about gender, age, race, cultures. Hey, Redbone, that was an incredibly diverse band, and their sound was too. It was all about Native American influence, but they actually had... Do you know the whole story about Redbone? Not as
SPEAKER_01:much. There's just so much I've read about that sometimes it doesn't stay in my brain because I'm usually focused on my writing. And the thing with the diversity in rock and roll is it was there from the start. Yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it was called, since I'm from the Jim Crow South, and I am from the Jim Crow South, I was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and I know all the history that people love to forget. I watched it with my very eyes, okay? I watched the KKK handing out things. I heard people use the N-word with Cavalier Lee, and I know about this stuff. But they called it race music. Right in the beginning, rock and roll was race music. And that's why it was, I mean, the history of rock and roll and its bad, its image as, you know, rock and roll was about it being race music. And that's why it was, they tried so hard to tamp it down in the beginning. Yeah, Elvis and the Army. But the English kept it alive. And that's another thing you understand, too, about their bias for not as being as racist as we are in America is one reason why they were able to appropriate our music so well in
SPEAKER_01:the 60s. Yeah, and...
SPEAKER_00:That's why my podcast, you know, it's amateur. And here's another thing I'll say that I understood about you. Mission statement. On her website, she has a mission statement. And I read it. My thought process is if it's been done before, how can I make it better? And that's why I made the diversity of Classic Rock. I strive to make it the most comprehensive guide to Classic Rock you can find. And my goal is for readers to learn something new when they read my blog, which is why I pack every blog post full of facts and research, everything as carefully and thoroughly as possible. Commitment to accuracy. Because when I started researching about Dan Letcher, I kept reading things that were completely wrong. And people would say things completely inaccurate to me with great confidence. It is the funniest thing when people are confidently wrong. You can't change their mind and then they get really mad. And I don't know sometimes what I'm supposed to do, just go, okay, or, well, you know, I have to walk that thing where you can't be the great corrector or nobody will like you. Yeah. I bet you've had to do a lot of correcting in your time and content. Oh,
SPEAKER_01:yeah. And then nobody believes me because I'm just a 30-year-old woman or, you know, you know, I wasn't always 30. I was like, even when I was younger, you know, people even had more disbelief about me because I was like, oh, you're a 20-something. What do you know? You're a dumb millennial.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly why I like how much you know, because just because you're an old person does not mean you, by osmosis, know things. And here's a great example on more on my bio, which I'll return to. My mom was born and raised in Grenada, Mississippi, and she was a Bobby Soxer, and she went to high school in the fees. And Grenada is near Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis is from. And I did not grow up, my parents were not rock and roll people. I did not grow up with them listening to rock and roll. They were more jazz or classical. They enjoyed some things on the radio and the things that they did enjoy were excellent. And they had very good taste, but they weren't rock and rollers. So when I started getting into Americana music in college and I started really getting into Elvis and his influence, you know, rockabilly and that kind of end of it, I said, Mom, you were his age and you were that age of the screaming girls who loved Elvis. I said, were you into Elvis? And she's this is what she told me, Angie. I left Grenada, Mississippi to get away from boys like that. So just because she was from Mississippi and just down the road from Elvis did not mean that she loved him. And she actually, he was not her thing.
SPEAKER_01:It reminds me of what Canadians say about Justin Bieber.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And when I started learning about the Beatles, I would ask people who I knew were contemporaries with Beatlemania. older men or women, hey, how did you feel about the Beatles? And not everybody was into them. And so that's why your age doesn't mean automatically anything. And that's one thing that I was running into a lot and doing my work was your age doesn't mean anything about how much you know. In fact, sometimes I've discovered that it might be a hindrance because this whole time you've been ruining your hearing and your brain isn't what it once was, which I kind of joke. I've been joking with my friends that I'm going to quit arguing with men. I mean, people who blew their hearing out 20 years ago and also their memory too by being a rock and roll musician and touring takes its toll on you and especially the touring ones. Everything runs together. And the most honest ones will tell you, I don't remember, I don't remember. You know, when you ask them a question, hey, do you remember using this guitar? And they'll go, I don't remember. Hey, do you remember what that show was like? Hey, I want to ask you something. Were you playing this at that show? I have no idea. I don't remember. Because it's a busy world, you know, being either a small rock star or a big one. But anyway, I'm digressing. My dedication is to accuracy and being thorough because I kept finding a lot of lore that was not right in the Dan Alessio story, and I thought it was really enterprising. And my father was a wonderful person and a very enterprising businessman, and that's why I'm interested in business stories. Your dad's name is James. So is mine. Perfect. My dad's middle name was Money. And back to Chicago, Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi. Do you know that, Emmett Till, the story of Emmett Till?
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:He was from Chicago, and he went to go visit his family in Mississippi. It happened all the time, and when I was growing up in Jackson, in integrated schools, all my black friends... I'd say, hey, what'd you do over the summer? I'd go visit. I went to Chicago to visit my cousins. Everybody in Jackson had cousins in Chicago. And that was a weird bias for me as a white person. I was like, everybody black has cousins in Chicago. And I wrote to Isabel Wilkerson when she wrote this book on the Great Migration, the historian Isabel Wilkerson. This was published in 2010. And I wrote to her and I said, Now I know why all my Black friends had cousins in Chicago, because Interstate 55 is the blues highway. It starts on the coast, and it goes from Jackson, Mississippi, all the way up to Chicago. And that was where many people ended, and sometimes Detroit and Cleveland and all these places that promised something that looked like economic—not total equality, but something that was less brutal— And you could at least get a manufacturing job. You know, Chicago had racism, too, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it was in Jackson, Mississippi. Yeah, in
SPEAKER_01:Chicago, it was very much segregated. My grandmother, she's turning 99 this year, and I remember her always telling stories about how, because my grandmother tanned very easily, and she had a black nanny, and there would be times that she was mistaken for the nanny's daughter.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And refused service. And I remember she said that when she went back to the posh hotel that her family were living in, she had to go in a separate lift from her nanny and she cried and she was angry. Like, why does it have to be this way? Why? Yeah. Like, people forget that there is segregation in Chicago and it's still very much segregated to this day. And I think what you were saying about the Great Migration, it's very much like the American equivalent of the wind rush in the UK with the Caribbean immigrants going to the UK. Like, pretty much a lot of Caribbean people just know someone in Britain. And very much the same thing can be said about Indians. A lot of Indians just know somebody in the UK. Yeah. And where I live, there's a lot of Indians and Caribbean people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I noticed that the one time I went to London was 1989, and it was so appreciable. The Indian influence, also Greek, Middle Eastern. It would seem so international to me, which is why I really have a grasp on how the sitar... It was a British Invasion thing, and then the electric sitar was an American adaptation of it, invented by Dan Electro. You don't need to play a real sitar. We've made it easy for you. What could be more American than that? Dan Electro said, it's too hard to play this sitar. We're going to make it easy for you, and produce a sixth string. I've got two of them. I have the baby sitar. And they said, Doug, you don't need to learn all that and lug that thing around. Do it the American way, quick and simple.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was just like such a beautiful sound. And I love how it really changed psychedelic rock. And it's just seen throughout history. And actually, the first concert I went to after COVID lockdown was a sitar cover concert by a group called the Sitar Service. And they were playing classic rock sitar covers. Their album's on Spotify, and it has Twink, who was in The Pretty Things, on it. And it's just so great. And the guy from the band, Rodrigo, he's met Jimmy Page recently. which is so cool
SPEAKER_00:yeah
SPEAKER_01:and oh my god it was it's just awesome I love just sitar music and it just I felt something just inside me I was suffering from chronic pain because I had endometriosis and I was just like oh my god just the music the vibrations of it and everything it felt so good that I forgot about my back pain I forgot about my cramp pain I forgot about everything yeah because of music it's just so powerful it's healing
SPEAKER_00:yeah sitar has this you know they talk about Vibrations. And that's why people love this expression now. Keep your vibration high. And that's why I've been teasing people. You want to keep your vibration high with a buzz bridge. It's what makes this guitar. It's this bridge right here. And the lipstick pickups, which is what I explained to you, the guitar pickups. It's the buzz bridge that makes it buzz like a real sitar. And it really is sound therapy. And if you've seen Ravi Shankar perform in those, you know, like at Monterey. You know, you know all about that. I can tell from your readings. You know, it's like a religious experience. And so I'm not like a big believer, like in Nashville, they have all these sound therapists with sound bowls and like, we're going to cure everything that ails you. I'm like, no, go put some earphones on with sitar music. And I promise you that really is all you need because it's transcendental. It's the resonation of the sympathetic strings that gets that vibe. And it is, you are exactly right, the definitive sound of psychedelic rock. You have all these other stuff, Mellotron and all the other things that they were playing around with. But boy, it really is about the sitar being woven through that stuff. The paper, what is it? The traffic song. Paper
SPEAKER_01:song.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Unbelievable stuff. But anyway, that's how it all started with me. And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about why it escalated with Spotify. So I've started looking into electric guitar and I know a lot about music. I know a lot of guitar players and I was asking everybody, do you know anything about this instrument? Nobody knew anything. So I'm looking at being ubiquitous in music and then nobody seemed to know anything about it. And I was like, I've got a job to do. Because it's so stealth, they don't know it's all over Motown. You name-checked a couple of Motown songs. Stevie Wonder. Exactly. That gentleman who's playing on all those Motown tracks, that is Eddie Chank Willis, and he's from my mom's hometown. They were the same age. And they died within months of each other in 2018. And it's a small town. I'm sure their families knew each other, but it wouldn't have been in school because Eddie Chank Willis had to leave as a child just to get an education, which is how Eddie ended up in Detroit. Another great migration story. Eddie Chank Willis was from Mississippi. Anyway, but he put it all over Motown. And so I come up with about four, I'm at four or five hundred of these songs on Spotify's Letting Me Do My Research. because I'm doing research about the producers and studios that use them. And then I get on Spotify and I know, hey, this producer used it a lot. Or if it was, it was there at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia. I bet if I go listen to all this, I can find it. So I start doing all this stuff and the list keeps growing and growing. And at the time I decided to work on my handwriting. My father had excellent handwriting and like a lot of people's, mine has gotten terrible. So I started making this list of all the electric sitar songs and working on my handwriting and my little book. And I get up to four. I finished off the first book. I had come up with 400 songs that use electric sitar. And I thought to myself, Wouldn't it be great if I could get to 700 like my dad tried to do in 1979? He broke the American record for number of species cited in North America, and he wrote a book about it. It was published on St. Martin's Press and Hardback, and it's called Call, Collect, Ask for Birdman. It's a birdwatching record. This is now a big deal, birdwatching, and most people understand what species chasing is now, and my dad did it when no one else was doing it. And in 1979, 1979, he broke the record. They later wrote, did a movie about this with Steve Martin called The Big Year. It was about the record that my father broke. And you're going to love this, Angie. He broke it in a garbage dump in Chicago. See, the record, I can't remember what the record was for Specieside. It was like 648. So in the summer of 1979, I've got the picture right here. I'm going to grab it. I had an older father, which is one reason why my parents didn't rock and roll. He was nearly 50 when I was born. He was born in 1921. And this is him. It's a caption of him seeing the bird that broke the record. And it says, Birdwatcher Jim Vardaman breaks the record with number 658 in the American Woodcock in Chicago, Illinois. And, um, uplifting thing about bird watching is you can do it anywhere. And some birds actually like garbage dumps. You know, there's a certain amount of human activity that birds rely on. And American woodcocks you'll find in cities a lot. And he saw an American woodcock in a garbage dump on the south side of Chicago. There was a TV crew there and there's a video on YouTube. But his goal was 700. He wanted to cite 700 and he fell one short. So when I got my book, I said, what if I could get 700 songs? And that's when I had to go really deep and start learning about all the producers and people, guitarists who used it and had to go listen for it because it wasn't credited. And that's how the whole thing started.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating.
SPEAKER_00:I'm just mind blown.
SPEAKER_01:I'm like, wow.
SPEAKER_00:I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me and also my listeners. I appreciate you listening to the story about why I'm finding this instrument so fascinating. It was partly my father. He was a music lover. He loved it. And he is the reason why I did personality tests during the pandemic. And I came up to something called Open to Experience. And that is what aesthetically sensitive people are, is open to experience. And you're open to experience.
SPEAKER_01:definitely just like all the sensory kind of experiences sight sound feel everything like as a kid I remember one thing that I really enjoyed was touching velvet fabric so I would go to the department store with my mom and touch all the velvet dresses I just rub my face on I rub my hands on it and then I think one life-changing experience and this happened at the height of my chronic illness once again a lot of this revolves around my chronic illness because a lot of things were happening around that time because that was you know in the 2020 early 20s when it got really bad and I went to California I went to Hawaii with my family on a cruise. And then afterwards, we spent a few days in California with my family. And I got to try mushrooms for the very first time. And it was life changing. I was like, this, I just went to the mushroom world. It was the most amazing stuff. And then I had incredible cannabis gummies. It was amazing. It was just such a great experience. And yeah, it always makes me go, why is it illegal?
SPEAKER_00:It's a shame that it is. And if you know anything about the history of psychedelics in the United States, it's another thing that looks like a conspiracy theory, but it really is a conspiracy theory. The United States government does not want people to know how awesome psychedelics are.
SPEAKER_01:Because it'll get people thinking. It's like, you know, capitalism in a way. It's a cult, is what it is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And, you know, it's not just Emily and Angie saying this. There's been books written on the subject. The wife of the writer, Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, wrote a book on the subject of microdosing. It helped her with a lot of problems, anxiety problems she was having. And then the food writer, Michael Palin, I believe is his name. Is it Poland? Poland. Forgive me for not remembering. Is it Poland? Anyway, he's a food writer and he wrote, it's How to Change Your Mind is the book. And I read that. And he's got a great history on what the United States government has done to tamp down any decriminalization or exploration into the therapeutic qualities of psychedelics. So, and it's got such a benign history. You know, as a drug, psychedelics have a very benign history, you know, relative to the amount of people who have taken them. But Anyway, that's how that all started for me. Aesthetically sensitive. My dad was like that. He liked cashmere socks. He was, he's the one who taught me, you know, fiber content. And in his book, you would really love this book. And sometimes I find these for sale in England. I don't buy them because they're too much to ship. He broke records in England, by the way. He went on to break records. I think you would love this book. I'm going to find a way to get it to you one day, I promise. But he, in his book, it's ostensibly a birdwatching memoir. But what does he want to talk about? with these people in Alaska and somebody bakes some bread and we put peanut butter and marmalade on it and it's so delicious. And he wants to talk about how pretty things are, how gorgeous they are. And I miss my father very much and I can hear his aesthetic sensitivity. Most people aren't like that, you know, touch, feel, how everything sounds. I bet you're a person who appreciates good lighting. You know, you walk into a room, it's like a glaring bulb. Yeah, I
SPEAKER_01:have my LED lights, just the color changing RGB Yeah, I have that just in my room. I have like glow-in-the-dark stars in this room up there. It's
SPEAKER_00:just so much fun. Yeah, aesthetically sensitive. Yeah, you're sensitive to your environment.
SPEAKER_01:My goal is to get one of those lava lamp projectors, like the 60s style ones, and just have it in this room. That's why I don't want to have decorations too much in this room. I just want to put the projector on in here and then just zone out and trip out and just enjoy life because
SPEAKER_00:that's really
SPEAKER_01:it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we are kindred spirits on that. And that's my story about electric guitar. And I have got, in your, I'm going to jump to, I'm going to stop talking about me. And I want to talk to you about your perfect albums list. Because there's some of my favorite records on here and some I've never even heard of before. So Angie Moon is much younger than me, and she is teaching me something about music that my generation might know. You know, I don't know many of these albums, and I've got some work to do. Your perfect albums. This is an incredible list. And one thing I want to point out relevant to electric sitar, the meters, Alan Toussaint, one of the meters, the guitar player, Leo Nocentelli, he put electric sitar on a bunch of that stuff that was recorded at Cosimo or C-Saint Studios, which is one of the things that I had to go listen for. I said, whoo. Alan Toussaint had one of those in his studio and he liked to use it because to me, Alan Toussaint is the godfather of proto-funk. And you have the record that has it all over it on here. Life, love, and faith. Yeah. It's been a
SPEAKER_01:while since I've listened to it, but yeah, I want to listen to it again.
SPEAKER_00:It's got Leo notes. He's backed by the meters, and it's super funky. And Back to the Country, the song Am I Expecting Too Much is on there. It's got electric sitar all over, and it's super funky. And I actually know the guy who owns the sitar that was used on this track. He found it on eBay last year and lucked into it.
SPEAKER_01:The things that people find, like that's like one of my pastimes is just going on like online and just looking for cool vintage finds and antiques and stuff, thrifting, like what I enjoy doing most.
SPEAKER_00:Well, one reason why I was able to acquire these instruments and it was an indulgence is I was really careful about what I paid for them. And I learned a lot that you control eBay for everything. estate sales in which you'll find things that they would have prized on Reverb or a site that sells instruments that they just want to sell it on Reverb and you can get better price, I mean on eBay. And I bought this one. I bought a vintage Vinnie Bell and it came from an estate sale in Florida and it was priced as such. I didn't buy it from a reputable dealer and I took a risk doing it but he bought an electric sitar that was completely undersold from New Orleans and it came and then it these studio sitars that were used in the studio in the box they've got all this paperwork because they used it and they put it back in the box unlike the way individuals do and it comes it's got all the documentation and he's like this was owned by Cosimo Studios this is the one he's got all the history on it and it's this one and what happened Angie is Dan Electro when they were marketing this they were about to go out of business about to be shut down, actually. Dan Letro got bought by MCA the way conglomerates buy things when times are good. And we were in a short-term bubble in the guitar instrument market. Everybody jumped into the market in the late 50s, and now it was already getting overblown in the late 60s. And MCA bought Dan Letro and then closed it a year later. But in 67 or 68, they were hot to market this, and I'm convinced that they sent it around to the most influential studios, and they would have sent it to Alan Toussaint because he was extremely influential in recorded music at that time and the stuff that he was producing. But he's got it on life, love, and faith. I have found, so I can see that you're a Clash fan, and Mick Jones has a history with electric guitar. It's deep, but it's there. And on Sandinista, you can find it on Charlie Don't Surf. And you're talking about London Calling in your list here, but how many are on this list?
SPEAKER_01:A lot. Yeah, I haven't even gone to the 80s. And at the time when I started this blog, I wasn't too much into 80s music, but now I'm really getting into it. I'd say one of my favorite bands at the moment are a Soviet rock and roll band called Kino. And what's really fascinating is There's so much diversity amongst the lineup of the band. So the front man is a half Korean, half Russian guy named Victor Soy. Guitarist, half Armenian, half Jewish, Yuri Kasparian. And then you have a gay drummer named Igor Yanov. And then you have just a Russian guy on bass, Igor Tikomarov, I think is how you pronounce his last name.
SPEAKER_00:I've got to take
SPEAKER_01:this note. What was his name again? This band again? Kino, K-I-N-O, and that's the Russian word for cinema. It's also the German word for cinema.
SPEAKER_00:How about that? Yeah. To the listener, Angie's got this list of perfect albums and it has some of my favorite records on it and some that I've never heard of, which is astounding to me. And I'm not a person who pretends like I've heard of things that I haven't heard of. And I have just recently become aware of the band Pentangle. Pentangle, did I say it right? Pentangle? I did a podcast with a lead singer of the band Not A Surf, and he lives in England. He lives in Cambridge. Matthew Cawson, he sent me that one. He said, hey, you should go listen to this Pentangle. It's got a lot of sitar on it. And I don't think it has any electric. I think it's all classical sitar. But I said, what? There she is. She's got She knew about Pentangle. I didn't know anything about that band until he told me just a few weeks ago. There's just so many things on here that I've never heard of. And you also reminded me how much I love Supertramp.
SPEAKER_01:And I named my book after one of their albums. And I have the album on vinyl. It's just downstairs. But yeah, Crime of the Century.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, I grew up listening to Supertramp, but growing up listening to something on the radio and then going to rediscover it and go listen to the album from start to finish is a totally different thing. And when you, in the preamble, you're a book and you talk about how much you love Supertramp, I was like, I need to revisit Supertramp because I always loved them. I loved them. They got a reboot in the soundtrack of the movie Magnolia. I don't know if you watched Magnolia, the movie Magnolia. The Me, Me, Man, a bunch of other things. And they gave, it has two or three Supertramp songs. And what a band. So yesterday afternoon, in the afternoon, I like to water my plants and weed my garden. And yesterday afternoon, I put Crime of the Century on my headphones and weeded my garden. And it was amazing. What a record.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I got the album on vinyl when I was at a stall in Camden. And I think I found it for less than a tenor. And I was like, awesome.
SPEAKER_00:How old were you when you exposed yourself to that?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, my God. It must have been in my 20s.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And you were probably familiar with some of those songs, but it's a totally different
SPEAKER_01:matter. I was familiar with, like, the Breakfast in America era.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. What an incredible band. And you know a lot about them. And I didn't know anything about them until I read. Is it in the introduction of your book where you talk about
SPEAKER_01:this? Yeah. So, like, oh, my God. When I first wrote this book, I was manic day one writing it. I wrote 9,000 words in one evening. So I wrote the intro and then the chapter on the kinks and John Wayne Gacy in one evening. I was just like, this is it. This is my mission. Because I told my husband in the kitchen, I was like, okay, I'm going to do a blog post on classic rock and true crime and all the connections. Because I was just throwing all these, did you know that this rock band ran into this serial killer and that serial killer? And then he was like, that's not a blog post. That's a book. And I had friends urging me to write a book. And I was like, okay, I think this is it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I've stumbled onto something and I couldn't find any other books at the time all about this connection between rock and roll and true crime. And after the fact, I did find out there were a couple others, but they were very American focused. Yeah. And no British stories. And I was like, this is it. Yeah. We're going to really do it comprehensively. Sure, it's been done before, but I'm going to do it comprehensively. I'm going to do it in a storytelling kind of way and not to, I guess, toot my own horn, but my husband, when he was reading some of it, he was just like, The way that you write is so cinematic. It reminds me of just, like, Wolf of Wall Street or something. I
SPEAKER_00:would agree with him there, which is why I enjoyed interviews with you before I read it, because I hear it in your voice. You know, I hear it when I read it. I hear you telling the story. So that is also a cinematic. You're narrating it in my mind when I'm reading it.
SPEAKER_01:I have a habit of talking to myself as I write, so... As I write, that's exactly like the words coming out of my mouth.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I ask myself rhetorical questions a lot and you do too. What about this? What about that? You know, when you write, you'll ask a rhetorical question. Why should this? What is a perfect album? And good question. Answer yourself. Well, I want the reader to go check out your perfect albums. Go check out the whole website because it's killer. It's never ending stuff and everything's researched carefully and I appreciate the dedication to education. I consider it community service, quite honestly.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Yeah. And this is what I was doing while chronically ill. I was writing this whole book while chronically ill. I needed something to distract myself from the pain. And so I did it. And in a way, I kind of feel a bit like Aubrey Beardsley because that's what he was doing. He was doing all that artwork and he had tuberculosis and that's why he died at such a young age, 25 years old. And that's the art that I want to use in my next book which isn't going to be Crime of the Century 2 because my original plan was to do the other side of rock and roll and true crime where we talk about musicians who are murdered plus some stories I missed in this first volume but then I was like I gotta do Celebrity Trials I gotta do that that is just fascinating me because like you said about 1967 your birth year and then Dan Electro 1994 that's the year I was born that was While my mom was pregnant, the O.J. Simpson car chase was happening. And then I was born two months later. And then the O.J. Simpson trial was going on when I was a baby. I
SPEAKER_00:remember it. And then
SPEAKER_01:I'm obsessed with numbers. So I was like, the very first celebrity trial of our modern era was 100 years before O.J. Simpson. And that's where I came up with the concept of celebrity trials and the history of them.
SPEAKER_00:I really, I really love it because... And Red... At some point I read where you defend people who are interested in true crime as sometimes being interested in justice and why it doesn't always happen. You know, if you're interested in justice and what the justice system, you should be interested in the psychology of what makes people do this and why, you know, the people who get away with it and the people who don't and the people who get wrongly accused. And, you know, it's just another thing to investigate. And I'm obviously not nearly into the genre as much as you are, but I'd I told you before, me growing up in the 70s gives me, you just explained your own bias. It was coming in through the wound through osmosis. Your mother was pregnant. The white Bronco car chase or whatever. That
SPEAKER_01:was it. I think it was meant to be. I'm an atheist, but there's got to be something there. And something that I would talk about with a friend of mine was numerology. And that fascinates me. So on this book cover, I told you I was going to tease up the symbolism. Yeah, talk to me. is a tarot card motif. And you're probably wondering, what's the significance of the tarot card? I don't know how far you are into the book. Do you want a spoiler or not? No. If you can tell me, tell me, because I love... I'm going to tell you, because I love sharing the story. No, I'm going to share it, because I tell this at every book fair.
SPEAKER_00:Okay,
SPEAKER_01:good. So, January 1958, London, England. Joe Meek is basically the gay British Phil Spector, for better or worse, in both ways. Very innovative. but also a complete nut job. January 1958, he goes to a tarot card reading and his friend draws three tarot cards and writes down three things. Buddy Holly dies February 3rd. February 3rd, 1958 comes and goes. March 1958, Buddy Holly tours the UK. One of my favorite facts to tell people is that Buddy Holly played in more countries than Elvis. That is absolutely true. Elvis had never been to England. He'd only ever been to Scotland and that was just for a fueling stop at like Glasgow, Prestwick Airport, I believe. And there's a plaque, you know, commemorating that. But anyway, Buddy Holly plays in London. Joe Meek goes to his concert and warns him about February 3rd because he believes he will die on February 3rd. February 3rd, 1959, the day the music died. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper all died in that plane crash, Clear Lake, Iowa, after playing the surf ballroom. Now, who else was born February 3rd? Dave Davis, the popularizer of the Flying V. The Flying V, patented January 1958 by Gibson. Mm-hmm. That's numerology right there. And that's just in this book. Trials of the Century has even more like crazy numerology. And I don't know if you want to hear that, but that's not even the end of it. February 3rd.
SPEAKER_00:I love it. Keep it up because I, yeah, go ahead. I joke about numerology a lot. February
SPEAKER_01:3rd, 1959. So Joe Meek, obsessed with the death of Buddy Holly. He believes that he has this, you know, connection to Buddy Holly, does seances and stuff like that. And he believed that he would die at a young age. So in the early 60s, Joe Meek was arrested for being gay because being gay was still illegal in England until 1967. In 1967, February 3rd, Joe Meek kills his landlady, Violet Shenton, and then turns a gun on himself. Eight years after the death of Buddy Holly. His American counterpart, Phil Spector, he killed Lana Clarkson. February 3rd, 2003. And I remember that trial being all over the television. I was into true crime at that time. I was a kid. I remember it very well. So yeah, February 3rd, crazy day. Yeah, Dave Davis, popularized flying V, born February 3rd, 1947. Absolutely insane. Yes, I love that. And then February 3rd, the birthday of Kenneth Anger, who directed Scorpio Rising, which is considered the very first music video. And Kenneth Anger was born 20 years exactly before Dave Davis.
SPEAKER_00:You know what's interesting is that my birthday, when is your birthday? August 1st. Okay, my birthday is October the 6th. And I found that October 5th and 6th are the most common birthdays in the United States because the conception is right around New Year's Eve. And people celebrated. And people go, oh, I don't know about that. And then they try to do the math. And I go, no, I read a story. And that's why whenever my birthday comes up, people go, that's my this. And I have a twin brother, by the way. That's my friends. And I have all these people who say they have my same birthday. And I go, it's because it actually is a more common than other birthdays. And this is a thing, and it would be interesting to find out what the general conception date is for February 3rd and what the numerology of that is. I'm curious.
SPEAKER_01:Now, related to my... book that I'm currently working on. There is kind of a February 3rd connection. So the very first chapter, the 1895 trial, some people are wondering, who's that? Who was tried in 1895? Who was that? Well, it was the godfather of the Peacock Revolution himself, the Spongebob of English class, Oscar Wilde from Ireland. And I lived in Ireland for nearly a decade, so I'm very familiar with his story. So he was tried for being gay. Now, if you know your Rolling Stones history, you'll know in 1967, he made that music video for We Love You with his trial as the theme of the music video and they were comparing their arrests for using cannabis to his arrest for being gay. And honestly, I don't think it's that crazy of a comparison. I go really into his mother. Her name was Esperanza. My grandmother's name was Esperanza, and she was very much like a mother to me. Now, here's another crazy thing. He was born October 16th. My dad was born October 15th. My dad's a twin. And
SPEAKER_00:boy, what kind of twin does your brother have? I mean, your father. My dad.
SPEAKER_01:My dad. Okay. My dad's a fraternal twin. Both boys.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And funnily enough, Wilde was also deaf in one ear. My uncle's deaf in one ear. And I've lived in Ireland. It's crazy. Not in Dublin, though. I didn't live in Dublin, but I did live in Limerick and Killarney. But anyway... Yeah, his mother, Esperanza, died February 3rd. And then there's a whole 27 Club thing with like his boyfriend's brother. And there was like a whole scandal with him and like the prime minister of the UK and gay affairs. So it's really crazy. But there is a little numerology in the next one. So Oscar Wilde died age 46 in Paris and had three trials. Jim Morrison died, you know, 27 in Paris, both buried at Père Lachaise. Now here's the 46, three trials. Fatty Arbuckle, the first actor to be put on trial, like the first Hollywood celebrity trial, died at 46, three trials. Was it three trials? Yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_00:And then there's the whole thing of all these rock stars dying at the age of 27. I wrote a whole
SPEAKER_01:blog post about that, and it's more than you think. It's insane. Yes, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00:I want to tell you something. When I did these personality tests during the pandemic, you know, like a lot of people trying to get to know myself better, to become more of an effective person at everything, to understand what makes me different from other people. And I was quite delighted to find out that I was this thing open to experience. And another trait of people who are open to experience is that they are able to make novel associations very easily, which is why you go ding, ding, ding, and you go, and you see this, and you see these, and the word play, and It just comes to you. It's because you're able, and they use, in the psychiatric term, they actually use that expression, novel associations. It doesn't mean you made things up. It means you go, see this, see that. You recognize, you're able to recognize and make novel associations. And that's what I did when I started my list. And I was like, wow, these songs are like my dad's birdwatching. He got people to help him find birds. That's why he called it called Collect As for a Birdman. And I'm getting people, they're coming to me and going, Hey, I found a new electric sitar track for you. And I said, well, it's kind of the same thing. My dad's birdwatching and me looking for electric sitar tracks. That's a novel association. A lot of people would never think about that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like that comparison I made, the Godfather Peacock Revolution, because I made a post talking about celebrity lookalikes. I was like, Dave Davis looked a lot like him.
SPEAKER_00:It was
SPEAKER_01:just, I fell over. I was like, those photos were taken like over 80 years apart and they look that much alike. I just fell down. And he was actually the reason. Behind the copyright of photography in the United States. There was a whole Supreme Court case. Yeah. So the photographer who took those pictures in 1882 was a Canadian man named Napoleon Sereny. And he took these photos of Oscar Wilde. He also took photos like every other celebrity from like the 1800s. So like Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Nikola Tesla. That's one of his most famous photos. But yeah, people bootleg that photo of Wilde because it was an unusual photo for the time because he did not dress like everybody else. Yeah. The kinks are not like everybody else. And then there's another funny coincidence. So his boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas, he had a son named Raymond Douglas. Raymond Douglas Davis. And then just, that's just insane. Like, I just think about that. What? I couldn't believe it. I was like, what? Anyway, yeah. So then that photo, those photos of Wilde were ripped off, put into newspapers, put on advertisements and everything. And Napoleon Cerny took the Burrough Giles Lithographic Company that ripped off that photo and took them to the Supreme Court. And Napoleon Cerny won. And that's why we have photographic copyright in the United States.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and a good thing. I was telling you my middle name was Money and Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi. Money, Mississippi was named after my ancestor that It's the same reason why I have the middle name. So when people go, is your real name? Yes, Money, it was my dad's middle name. The whole time I was growing up, he had a money clip, had engraved on it, money is my middle name. He's a
SPEAKER_01:genius.
SPEAKER_00:It is genius, and it's also horrific, I'm going to tell you this, because I think you can take it. The thing that's interesting about my father ending up back down in Mississippi is that his grandfather is one of the most notorious populist racists in American history, and his name is James Kimball Vardaman. He's my great-grandfather. This is a book on him. It's called The Great White Chief. He was governor of Mississippi and then he was a U.S. senator. And he was a diabolical racist who helped invent the prison industrial complex.
SPEAKER_01:What a family tree. That is just some family lore there. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:And he died in 1930 and my dad never knew him and I never knew him. And I think recently you start to see all these stories about how we're all related. And when people go, I can't believe you would talk about your ancestors' racism, I go, listen, we're all related. You're related to terrible people and wonderful people. And you should never let any of those, your genetic entitlements or anything, prevent you from learning about history. And people go, people read about this guy in history books or about the Jim Crow South, and they say, how can you be his great-granddaughter? And I go, racism is not genetic. It's learned. And my father did a big service by putting Right? We're not all better than others, but we're equal as individual human beings. I didn't need God to tell me that. My dad taught me that. But that's my great grandfather. And he had a cousin named Hernando Money. And when my great grandfather was governor, he named the town Money after his cousin. They were involved politically. And he is my ancestor, Money. And that's where Emmett Till was murdered. Money, Mississippi is right outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The reason why I wanted to tell you that is I can't remember why I got into that. It's another reason why I was wanting I am wanting to tell the story of the Great Migration is that I want people to know this history because I know it firsthand. And it's people it's something people should know more about. And if you know the song Parchman Farm, do you know the song Parchman Farm? I think I've heard the name. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:I heard the name, but I don't know if I remember listening to it.
SPEAKER_00:Back to Chicago and Mississippi, this song, Parchment Farm, has been covered a lot. And from, well, you can look it up. You'll probably know more about some of the people who covered Parchment Farm than I will because you know so much about music. You know, you're an academic. Parchman Farm was written by a blues man named Buka White, who had escaped Mississippi and made it up to Chicago, and when he went back down for a visit, he got snatched off the street and incarcerated at Parchman Farm. It is still there, Parchman Farm. It's called the Mississippi State Penitentiary. And he wrote that song, Parchman Farm, about Parchman Farm. And when they came to do field recordings, he was incarcerated there and they wanted to record all these bluesmen in the field. Booker White said, you're not going to record me for free. I'm going to get out of here. And he went back up to Chicago and he recorded that song for Chess Records. My great-grandfather is the one who set Parchman Farm up as a... I'm not going to mince words because I don't need to do this with Angie Moon. She's a realist. He set that prison up as a genocidal concentration camp, and there's no other way around it. He campaigned under the, we got to get these Negroes off the street. We need to get them back in order. And that is why they instituted things called black laws. And it essentially made being black Against the law. So whenever cotton needed to be picked or anything needed to be mined or it was time to harvest the soybeans, they went and arrested people and they stuck them in the fields. And that is the truth of American.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's something that like whenever we talk about like race relations in the U.S. to my mother, who was, you know, an immigrant from Venezuela, she came to the U.S. in her very late 20s, like 29 years old. And she was just always shocked about this because in Venezuela, it's just so integrated. Almost everybody there is mixed. If you're white, you're very much a minority. My great grandma was a white person from Venezuela and she was from the whitest part of Venezuela, which is a state called Tachira, which is right next to Colombia. And then, you know, she was an orphan and she came to Caracas by herself at 16 years old and had to work for everything that she ever had. Like, yeah, like. But, you know, being mixed, nobody cared. My great grandmother, you know, she had children with a native guy. And then she had children with a guy who was of Black and Spanish descent. And nobody cared. Like, nobody said anything. It was just, that's just a normal family. That's just an everyday thing in Venezuela. My grandfather was of Black descent. And, you know, he was just, you know, it was just normal. Like, he worked a good job. He worked, he was a salesman. And he made so much money that he could afford to send four of his kids to private school.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Like, I just couldn't comprehend that. Like, like, you know, a Venezuelan would just be like, why is it so different in America?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So insane. It is different in America. And this historian that I like to read, Isabel Wilkerson, has written another book called Cast, which explains why America had to set up America the way it is. And it's all about economics. And because we built this country on slave labor. And when that was You know, when that started, especially in the agricultural South, you know, it left that after the abolition of slavery, it was an economic hardship. So you had aggrieved white people. Where the freedom of these other people somehow caught it and people were raised in this environment. So the Jim Crow South was about demonizing everybody who wasn't white. And that is what white supremacy was all about. And it was nothing more than an economic plan. Everybody was just trying to make more money than other people. There's a lot of money in separating people. And there's also a lot of money in putting people together, which is another reason why I love the electric sitar tracks. These songs came from mixed studios. I look at Sigma Sound in Philly. If you look at the Mother, Sister, Father, Brother band, you know, from there, it's a huge band. What is it? Mixed. Mixed Race. T and the NGs. Stax. Mixed. Mixed. Muscle Shoals. Sliding the
SPEAKER_01:Family Stone. The Equals. The Foundations. Oh, yeah. Definitely.
SPEAKER_00:All the best things. It was... Probably over two years ago when I said to a friend of mine that I'm finding that this is the great race mixer because it was adopted in country as well as funk and soul, and that's why I don't like it when people oversimplify its use. I'm like, it's everywhere. And Chess Records, they had one there, the band The Rotary Connection. Do you know this band, Rotary Connection? Yep, from Chicago. Yes, and they were making, it was Marshall, who's the guy who founded Chess? Leonard is the father. And that was another mixed race thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, diversity in rock is the best is diverse and the recording studios were too. And those are very successful race mixing stories. And that's why I cannot believe that we are still fighting over this in this country. And Isabel Wilkerson, the historian, makes a great argument that this is sort of the last gasp because when I leave my house, It's mixed everywhere I go. I just went to Houston and my husband and I went to the art museum in there. And I don't know if you've ever been to Houston, Texas, but it is an extremely ethnically mixed city. And it's been that way a long time. They have a lot of Southeast Asians there. And it's been that way since the conflict, you know, the Vietnam conflict. And then it's very black. That's where Beyonce is from. Beyonce has a very typical Houstonian story. You real stock. And so my husband, I go to the museum and I'm like, I get on every day and I see white people stressing that everything needs to be white. But I leave my house and everywhere I look, I can't. I'm the white person in the room everywhere I go. I am 5'9". My ancestor, Vardaman, was a Swede with a Dutch name. I have a very pure, waspy bloodline. And I'm 5'9 and a tall blonde. And when I go places, I am the minority everywhere I go. Doesn't matter whether I went to Houston, New Orleans, or New York. And that is the way America is getting, whether people like it or not.
SPEAKER_01:Definitely.
SPEAKER_00:Nashville is a lot more, Nashville has become this sort of white mecca, but the reality is that the reality of the population of the city is extremely mixed. We have one of the largest, we have a massive Arabic population here and Southeast Asian. It's everywhere you go in my neighborhood, it's It's very international. And people who want everything to be white are going to be in big trouble the longer this keeps up. And Isabel Wilkerson makes a great argument for that. That's why we have so much trouble is that it's the death rattle of whiteness because it just can't, you know, especially in America. People are breeding and they're mixing, whether you like it or not. They tried very hard to keep us separated, but it's just, you know, the interracial marriage thing is not nearly the difficult thing it once was. I don't know what your parents dealt with in Chicago. My parents dealt
SPEAKER_01:with nothing. It was all good. Like everything was fine for them. My dad never had an issue. He was lucky. And then, well, most of my family, I'm multi-generation mixed from Venezuela. Like the furthest, I can't trace back my ancestry very far because record keeping in Venezuela is not very good, but I had an ancestor who was a Galician who married a black Venezuelan. No problems at all. My grandpa was part black and Galician, and then my grandma was white and native. And yeah, there were no problems there. They weren't married, but they had my mom and that was it. And no, there were never any problems.
SPEAKER_00:But did your parents in Chicago ever have any issues? And you described the neighborhood where you grew up as being very white. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, mostly. Although my next door neighbor was Chinese and she was one of my closest friends. Yeah. And no, it was very white. A lot of Jewish people. There were lots of Jewish people, including my own family. Yeah, it was. I definitely stood out like a sore thumb because I have very, very black hair and very pale skin, which is quite unusual if you're not Asian. So my coloring is most similar to East Asian. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I definitely looked very different. Like I was easy to spot in every photo. But like, you know, until people met my family, you know, it was such a weird place to be in. Although for my brother, it's very different because he has an afro and green eyes. And then his skin's a little darker than mine. And he's very tall. I'm quite small. I'm 5'6". But that's not small compared to my mom's family because I'm the same height as the men. And then the women are tiny, like maybe 5'2". Venezuelans are just tiny people. And then my dad's side of the family, my great aunt's of Lithuanian descent. So my grandma's side, Lithuanian descent. And yeah, that's why my great aunt was like 5'10". And stood out like a sore thumb.
SPEAKER_00:It's, you know, it's not just shallow to talk about these genetics. The only genetic entitlements I believe in are the fact that, you know, the way you look. Those are the only... These are the only genetic entitlements I believe in. This is another reason why I know that you and I could talk about politics, but the whole No Kings movement, I was like, OK, this whole No Kings thing, y'all's obsession with the monarchy needs to end, too, because I'm sick of people riding on their bloodlines.
SPEAKER_01:I hate it. I hate it so much. I'm like, no, let's give people a chance. Let's make it just more egalitarian. And, you know, one thing that I say a lot about, you know, One thing I want to say to transphobes is that your birth is not the be all end all. You can become what you want to be. And what's the problem with someone being trans? You know, people change their hair color all the time. People wear contacts. People get plastic surgery. What's the big deal? Just let people be who they are.
SPEAKER_00:And, you know, and that's another thing in classic rock. We have a great history of that. From David Bowie, all of the legends.
SPEAKER_01:That's all the greats. Yes. They did not let their birth determine everything. It's not the be-all, end-all.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I didn't know a lot. Oh, by the way, I want to tell you I'm a massive Kings fan, which is another thing that makes it. I love
SPEAKER_01:them. They got me through the pandemic. They got me through my chronic illness. I love them. Ray Davis is just someone I relate so much to.
SPEAKER_00:He is my king. I've been joking. Not no kings, some kings.
SPEAKER_01:And it's just Ray Davis. I love that guy. Like, I love that he was left wing. He's left wing, but like not an SJW about it. And I just love him for that. I love the socialists and the gay themes in his songs. It's just like, wow. This is like the perfect band for me.
SPEAKER_00:He brought intelligence. He's so intelligent. So many of those songs, just like Randy Newman songs, they go way over people's heads, just like Lola. But the reason why the Kinks mean so much to me, and I bet you're like me, you don't like to rank these bands. And in the United States, the whole Kinks or Stones thing, I'm like, do not trust anybody who asked you to choose between the Kinks and the, I mean, the whole Beatles versus Stones thing. Do not trust anybody who asks you, Beatles or Stones, do not trust anybody who would ask you to choose. I would never choose. But the reason why the Kinks are a cornerstone for me is social commentary. Ray Davis is that, you know, I always say, I'm bad about saying Davies, Davis. His social commentary is next level, and it's probably the reason why, you know, they couldn't enjoy the success in America like some of these other bands because it was just too... Piercing
SPEAKER_01:I mean, that's what happens to all the great social commentators. I mean, England has such a tradition of these, you know, plays and works. Like that's a lot of what English class is about is stories that, you know, critique, you know, social norms and how people interact with each other, how fake it is. I was thinking about that, you know, at work and how people have to talk in this very corporate way. And I stand out at my job because I talk like a very normal person, no jargon, no bullshit, just straight shooter. And a lot of people hate it. And it's just something that annoys me. because I'm like, what's wrong with how I talk? You know, what's the problem? What is this? Are we going to just start turning me into Eliza Doolittle Pygmalion kind of shit going on here? I don't want to turn into someone else. I just want to be unapologetically me. Like Radius. I'm not like everybody else.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm not like everybody else. And so many songs. Arthur. I mean, that record. God,
SPEAKER_01:that is such a brilliant album. I love
SPEAKER_00:it. I've had people say, I don't like their concepts records. And I'm like, that's their best work. You must be joking, actually. I needed people like Ray to teach me things, you know, over the years. When I was growing up and I would love music, anybody who made me look things up is a win. And I love The Police, by the way. How do you feel about the band The Police?
SPEAKER_01:I haven't listened to them that much, really.
SPEAKER_00:They were my favorite band when I was like 11 or 12. And that was late, more another layer of British Invasion. You talk about this in your writings about different waves of British Invasion. And, you know, their early records were really great to me, but they used words I'd never heard before and had to look them up. You know, and my parents were pretty, were very well-read, intelligent people. But any songwriters that Amazing!
SPEAKER_01:I got to see this.
SPEAKER_00:And we're going to name it after my dad. It's going to be called The Birdman. I
SPEAKER_01:love it. Because
SPEAKER_00:the flying V. Birds. And that's part of my novel associations, okay? Birds and music go together. Free bird, everything. Flying, the birds, everything. Birds and music. Blackbird. Everything. The women, they're birds. That is a flying V and it's going to be really unique and it's going to have lipstick pickups and a buzz bridge and it's going to be a flying V. Because what was my dad's last name? Vardaman. And people, whenever he would tell people his name, they would hear it, Vardaman B. And whenever he was on the phone or at a hotel counter or anything, he'd say, my name is Vardaman. V as in Victor. Victor, Victory. And he was a World War II veteran, and that's why I wanted to have a guitar made after him in his honor. I
SPEAKER_01:love it. I love it so much.
SPEAKER_00:And then I'm going to have to find somebody to play it because I don't know how to play it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. I told you we were going to go over and it's going to be... I'm
SPEAKER_01:like, this has to be unabridged because like there's so much great discussion here. This is like easily one of the best podcasts I've ever been on. Incredible.
SPEAKER_00:I hope people will enjoy it because I want to talk about tone in my podcast, you know, and that's why I make all the references to the telephone and the tone. Everybody in music, tone, tone, tone. And I want everybody to think about the tone of everything, from the tone of the color of your wall to the tone... of the way we talk to each other, to everything. And, you know, big picture is that, you know, talking to you about the history of rock and roll and you really know about what I was talking about with the bus bridge and the whole tone of it. And I hope the listeners that I have built so far will enjoy this and that people want to know more about you will enjoy me waiting in here. And I can't thank you enough for letting me talk about my family. It was a pleasure because
SPEAKER_01:you have such a fast I'm just now
SPEAKER_00:learning it. I didn't understand it when I was young. It's now that I'm in my feast. My dad has been dead nearly 20 years and I understand him and my parents. I loved having an older father because he was just more everything than everyone else. I always tell people he was the greatest generation and he was also the greatest father. But it meant, you know, he would be long gone before I would understand some of the things that he did. And he was a very precise person. And this is all, he's my inspiration because he really loved music. And I appreciate you letting me talk about him because I'm doing all this to explain to people what Masonite is and that my dad worked for them. And he taught people how to grow trees. He was an enterprising businessman. And in a world where capitalism justifiably gets bashed a lot, I like to point out who the good ones are. And my dad was a really good one. He taught people how to make money growing trees. He wrote this book after he went to work for Masonite. He taught people how to farm trees so they could sell them to Masonite. Well, this one's made out of solid wood, but this one is made out of Masonite. This guitar is made out of Masonite, which is why it's not nearly as heavy as it looks. Masonite is a composite of wood, and my dad worked for this company. It's an American company, but I cannot thank you enough for letting me ramble. It's a
SPEAKER_01:pleasure. I love hearing your stories. You're a great storyteller.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. You are too. And I hope everybody checks this book out. And I know that you're busier than a one-armed paper hanger, as they say, but I want you to get into the podcast. I would love to have a podcast with Angie Moon. I would tune in. Maybe I should start with
SPEAKER_01:this book. A lot of people ask, when's an audiobook coming out? And I'm like, what if I just make it a podcast and I just give it to you guys as a gift? It's in line with my socialist ideals. It's just a way to get people reading because that's what I want. I want people to talk about Crime of the Century. I want people to know about all these connections and just know the magic of classic rock storytelling and rock and roll storytelling and just the connections between true crime. Everything is just connected in this world. Everything.
SPEAKER_00:Every single thing is connected. Everything.
SPEAKER_01:I've
SPEAKER_00:already learned so much from that book. For the listeners, I never knew who the Cray brothers were until I started reading this book. They're twins. The Cray twins. Twins, yep. Reggie and Ronnie. K-R-A-Y,
SPEAKER_01:and it was Cray. The most notorious gangsters in this country. They were the most notorious ones. Everybody in this country knows who they were. Like, you know, you'll see references to them all the time. They were photographed by David Bailey against, you know, the mafia's advice of don't be a public figure. Don't do your own dirty work. They were so arrogant and ignored all of that.
SPEAKER_00:Some of the best villains are so flamboyant. I'm not going to name names, but some of the most diabolical people are the most flamboyant that people can't even believe how atrociously bad they are.
SPEAKER_01:Those are the people I'm most fascinated by are like the gay villains, like, you know, the Krays, George Santos, Lord Alfred Douglas. I'm fascinated with those those guys. Fascinated. Absolutely. I
SPEAKER_00:mean, real flamboyance. And my great grandfather, who was a terrible person, he liked to dress in white from head to toe. That was his thing. And I've been doing that for years before I even knew he did it. He was really flamboyant. Before we sign off, I want to ask you, what else do you want us to know about your book, Crime of the Century, to implore the listeners to, can you buy it? What is the best way to buy your book if you are in the continental, if you're in the continental U.S., what is the best way to buy your book?
SPEAKER_01:Honestly, I would say the most convenient way is Amazon, but there's also bookshop.org for those who hate Amazon. I have a whole list of distributors on my website, but if you really want to sign copy, and here's the coolest thing, I didn't even show this yet. This is why you wait till the end to watch. You watch the whole thing. It's because you can get it signed by my cat, Bowie. Nice. And then funnily enough, right in here is just the thing that I use to sell my book is talking about Buddy Holly dies February 3rd.
SPEAKER_00:Numerology. Funnily enough, it's just in there. You get a numerology rating.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I just love telling that story to people. I have the tarot cards out, too. I mean, I have a little bat. I make it like a kind of a psychedelic, gothic sort of aesthetic. And I'm going to be continuing that, I guess, with the next book. Because I don't know if you've seen my website, but I talk a bit about writing the first chapter of Celebrity Trials. And it's going to be like I already have planned the book cover because I go in with every project with a vision in mind. And that's always what I do with all my work. There's always a vision in the beginning. And, you know, Crime of the Century Celebrity Trials, 100 Years Celebrity Trials. I wanted to combine the 1890s and the 1990s. The 1890s, one of the big artists was Aubrey Beardsley, who did this sort of black and white thing. And you're probably wondering, what's the significance of Aubrey Beardsley? What's the big deal? Hey, classic rock fans. His work influenced Klaus Vorman. It influenced that Procol Harum 1967 album cover.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:There was an actual Aubrey Beardsley artwork used on an album cover, Humble Pie's self-titled 1970 album that used one of the drawings from Salome, which was one of Oscar Wilde's plays. And yeah, my plan is just to take an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, and put rainbows in it, not just for, you know, the gay aspect, but because of the 90s and one of my favorite, you know, kind of art styles from that time, Lisa Frank, which is something I grew up loving as a kid. I had a whole folder full of Lisa Frank stickers just covering the entire thing. Wow. I was obsessed with Lisa Frank as a kid. And I just want to take a bit of my childhood, take a bit of history and smash it together.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. I love the cover of the book. I have a question. Do you do tarot cards? What do you think are the relevancy of tarot cards? Because I think for somebody like you who's good at making novel associations, you can give them a card and you can see, you can use that as inspo, as we say. Like, what are your thoughts about the...
SPEAKER_01:I think tarot cards are really just improv for people who have that kind of mystic sort of fortune teller occult vibe. That's what I think. It's improv for those guys.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. A prop or something. You mean when you say
SPEAKER_01:improv, like just like how improv comedy, like, you know, you make things up. It's just like a yes and you just. You roll with it. That's what tarot cards are, in my opinion. I don't really believe too much in superstitions. I just find them fascinating to read about.
SPEAKER_00:Same here. And so tarot card reading is big in Nashville because Nashville has a lot of people who are recovering from evangelical Christian and they pile into other faith-based things, I've noticed. You always got to replace it with something. Yeah. And I grew up going to church, but a lot of people in Nashville grew up in oppressively religious environments, which they will be the first to tell you. You know, where they tell you this, that, and if you wear your pants too tight, you're going to because, you know, I've been around snake. I call them snake handlers. I'm from Mississippi. Snake handlers. But a lot of people have been told that every single thing that ever happened to them was for a reason. And that's a tough thing for some young people. Something bad happens to them. It makes them think that they did something to deserve it. And then if something good happened to them, it's only because they're lucky. And I think that's very disempowering. And it's the way I look at it. I like to say not everything happens for a reason. Some things happen for a reason. And many of the things that happen for a reason, they're actually scientific. But, you know, all this other stuff, it's random. So use the word superstition. And that's what I'm not superstitious either. I would... People around here sometimes use tarot cards to lead their life. I need to talk to somebody with a tarot card because I don't know what to do. And I'm like, no, this is actually not the best route. I think it's better form of, what's the word you said? Improv. It's
SPEAKER_01:just fun.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I'm a big
SPEAKER_01:fan of Carl Sagan and Cosmos. And, you know, I still need to read The Demon Haunted World. But yeah, like Carl Sagan, huge influence. I just love, you know, his books. his approachable way of talking about science and really demystifying it for people and making it approachable because that's really what I want to do with my work. You know, communicate about rock and roll and show that it's not that scary because I often find the reason I don't get into something is because I find the fandom or the people in it, the experts, are just so intimidating. Like, I'm scared of them. I'm like, oh no. And there's just so much. Where do we begin? And I want to just find a way that you can easily get there. Yeah. And understand it. And, you know, I think we can all learn from each other. You know, both young and old people, I think newcomers, veterans, we can all learn from each other. We all have something to share. We all have something for the table. Everybody's got their story.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I've learned a lot from you, and you're quite young. And I've learned a lot from so many other young people. And I've learned a lot from people my age and older, but then I'm also dealing with this idea that people think they know everything. I don't do it. You know, I don't pretend to know. That's why your list of perfect albums was such a head splitter for me, because much of this stuff I don't know anything about. And I've got some work to do. So you got me on the way. Is there anything else that we can talk about of service to you, Angie? Have you had a good time today? I
SPEAKER_01:had a blast. This really cheered me up. This made my week. Will you come back anytime you want to? Absolutely. I'd love to join and just talk all things rock and roll. I
SPEAKER_00:want you to grab some tarot cards and read me tarot one day. I
SPEAKER_01:got to just improv better because my husband is a great storyteller. Maybe I get him to... Join as a guest. Although
SPEAKER_00:he's a bit camera shy. I'd love to have him come in the room.
SPEAKER_01:You'd be very entertained by his accent because he's Irish. Although he doesn't have the strongest accent. Yeah, he's definitely Irish. How did y'all meet? So Tumblr 2014. I was just looking for someone who was living in Ireland, going to the same university as me. Because my original plan was to go to England to study abroad. you know, because I just love British culture. And then the only English-speaking country that my university offered for exchange students was Ireland. And I was like, okay, well, it's next door to England. Okay, I don't want to go to a country where I don't know the language, so I'll go to Ireland. And I was just nervous. And then I went on Tumblr just going, hey, does anyone go to UL? Because I'm going to be going to University of Limerick to study abroad. And then one day, you know, just My husband, Owen, well, he wasn't my husband yet at that point. I didn't even know that was going to happen. He'd answered the message and I started talking to him. And then that same summer, my grandparents' Irish friend named Kathy told me, I think when you go to Ireland, you're going to fall in love with someone. And that happened. I went to Ireland in September, September 2nd, 2014. I arrive in Limerick and then Owen comes to my door and then we just walk around. Three weeks later, we start dating. And then three years later, we were married.
SPEAKER_00:Luck of the Irish.
SPEAKER_01:Indeed, indeed.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I was lucky to discover you. I can't even remember what I was Googling when I discovered your blog, but I was like, Kindred Spirit, she knows. I told her before we started that she's the only person who knows as much about this instrument and popular music as I do. And I'm going to stick to that. I don't think I know that much. I just wrote it down. You know, you... Even experienced guitar players I've talked to, even some people who play the instrument, don't know where all it is in music. And you did a lot of research. We didn't even get into how you came up with all that. It
SPEAKER_01:was just like Wikipedia rabbit holes and just searching online. Just that's all I do. I just search, search. And that's how I spent my days in university. That's how I spent my days when I couldn't find work. I would just research rock and roll
SPEAKER_00:and
SPEAKER_01:try to, you know, let's say 100% it as a, to put it in a gamer format, like when you 100% a video game, that's what I'm trying to do with rock and roll. Or at least now I'm just trying to do that with celebrities and true crime. Let's see what I can do. I'm excited about
SPEAKER_00:this
SPEAKER_01:book. I just like, I like retro stuff. So maybe I will stop in 1995. Cause that's really my specialty is 20th century history.
SPEAKER_00:Cause I
SPEAKER_01:find that time just so fascinating. Like what you were saying about how things were happening so quickly in the sixties.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That time period. is like the industrial revolution for music. Yes. A handful of years. Yeah. Very much the industrial revolution. Exactly. And I'm fascinated by the industrial revolution, fascinated with classic rock. It's a time of just so much change. And that's why I love the 20th century. I mean, you begin in 1900 and the fashions from then are so different from, you know, the 1990s. It's just like, Wait, that's all from the same century. But even then, if you go into the 60s and you look at the music and you start with something like, say, Run Around Sue and then Whole Lotta Love, you know, the ends of the decade, and they're so different.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Back to numerology, 79 being the year my dad made that record. 1979 was a huge year in rock and roll. I think any year that is about to end a decade or the perception that a new one's coming, 1980, it sounded so... It sounds like this is
SPEAKER_01:reminding me so much of a discussion I had with a Bob Dylan expert and just pop culture or pop music historian named Jim Curtis. And he was also from Mississippi. And he wrote like a whole thing about music eras, rock eras, I think was what his book was called. And it split rock and roll into five year periods. And that just blew my mind. And that completely that whole interview just changed my entire just view of music. Huge influence on what I do. And he described himself as kind of like a bridge builder and just making connections between things. And I was like, that's one of the few people that I've ever spoken to that truly understands you and him. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I recognize you as a kindred spirit and I cannot thank you enough. I told you that I have never asked for any sponsorship or anything. And I also haven't spent much money. This is a$120 mic I've got here. And all the money that I spent on my podcast, I spent on these instruments because I feel like I've lent them out to people and I enjoy having them. And I drive an old beater. This guitar right here is worth more than my car is. I drive a beater car. It makes sense for me to buy this if I don't need what other people need and I don't need a fancy car. I don't even need an average car. I need almost no car. My dream is to have no car. I don't have a car. I wish I could do it.
SPEAKER_01:England is just great for that. That's like my favorite thing about living in England because I don't drive because of my anxieties. And it's even worse because I've driven in the US. I've only ever driven on the right. I just cannot do that here. I'm just scared. I'm terrified. And there's so many car accidents and rock and roll. That's the thing.
SPEAKER_00:Eddie
SPEAKER_01:Cochran.
SPEAKER_00:I always tell people about motorcycles. Listen to Bob Dylan. He got on one. Next thing you know, he'll tell you not to stay off of motorcycles.
SPEAKER_01:That's how my aunt lost her, you know, the love of her life. The motorcycle accident in Venezuela.
SPEAKER_00:Motorcycles are really dangerous. And my parents never wanted me to be on them. And now I know why. And that makes people mad when I talk because motorcycles are very rock and roll. And I'm like, I'm not kidding. Yeah, they're dangerous, too. I owned a scooter and got in an accident on that. And see, I'm like you. I'm a pretty good driver and a confident driver. But more and more, I drive a Mini Cooper. And I live in Nashville and everybody's driving a big luxury SUV and I'm sitting there like this. I can't see them. They have pitch black windows. I can't look around me and everybody drives very... I find that when people drive big cars, they drive more aggressively. And I have found anecdotal evidence in articles that bear that to be true. And I'm driving a Mini Cooper and I don't like to drive much these days. But... I'm rambling, but the only money I spent on were on these instruments because I wanted to prove to people that I consider them artifacts, and I'm very glad that I am.
SPEAKER_01:It's a museum. It looks like a museum back there. I love it. I love the display. I've
SPEAKER_00:got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I've got eight of them, and I'm having another one made, and I'm going to stop there. Oh, exciting. But I drive an old beater car. Most people drive at least a 10 or 20 or 30,$40,000,$50,000 car. And I don't do that. It means I don't pay money on the insurance or anything else. And I have this on my wall unapologetically. No, I don't know how to play it. But that is why I have not spent any money and that's why I've not asked for donations or tried to sell anything, but that is all about to change because the gentleman who has helped me with my graphic design work and I are designing a bandana that we're going to call a bandano and it's going to be... Oh, there's my
SPEAKER_01:husband! Hi! Sorry, I forgot you had your... Sorry
SPEAKER_00:about that. Hello from America. What's his name again? Eoin. E-O-I-N. Yeah, it's an unusual spelling. Is this an Irish spelling, this name?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So there's like three different spellings of Eoin. So there's O-W-E-N. E-O-I-N is one of the Irish spellings and E-O-G-H-A-N is the other one.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. It's a killer name. But anyway, we're working on a bandana, and we're going to get it handmade here in Nashville, and it's going to be extremely stylish, and it's going to be all genders, multi-seasonal. And is there anything more rock and roll than a bandana? That's
SPEAKER_01:like, look at what I'm wearing right now. You have neck scarves. It's like the best accessory. It's how I survive in a workplace where you can't really express yourself much. It's like, makes a statement.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Or it could be a hat. When I started thinking about this, I went and looked at all the rock and roll bandana style from everybody from Bruce Springsteen to, you know, the bandana is a major rock and roll motif. And so we're working on this and I hope people will be happy when it's ready. And yes, I'm finally going to ask y'all to buy something just like Angie's book. I need y'all to buy Angie's book. And when my bandana is ready, we're going to need your dollar bills. I can't thank you enough. We're going to say goodbye now. It was my pleasure. I think we went over an hour over, but...
SPEAKER_01:It was an incredible discussion. This is easily one of the best interviews I've ever done. Easily. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:I'm an amateur, but it comes from the heart.
SPEAKER_01:Like, that's the thing. It's not about, like, fancy equipment or, you know, experience. It's all about what's in the heart. And that's really what it is. It's all about having a vision, you know? And it's something I get frustrated with at work. Because some people will think, oh, it's all about the equipment, having fancy equipment. I'm like, you don't need fancy equipment. You don't need, you know... fancy training or whatever. You just need a great idea. You need a good brain and you need a vision, just a lot of creativity, heart and soul. I mean, one of my favorite YouTubers was literally Shoe on Head, who would make videos with her MacBook webcam or whatever. And that's all you need. You need just a personality, an idea, just a little basic equipment. And that's really what it's all about. I just love old school YouTube.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And... In summary of our talk, some of the most influential rock music was made with very primitive instruments. They weren't fancy or anything else. And so the story of rock and roll is about DIY and doing with little, you know, a lot of these influential records. They weren't made with fancy guitars. They were made with modest guitars. And that's part of the Dan Lecce story. Link Wray, I saw you wrote about Link Wray, Rumble. That's a Dan Lecce. One of the best
SPEAKER_01:instrumentals.
SPEAKER_00:The tone in that song, it got them banned off the radio, right? Because it was just too whatever. What he's playing on that track is a Dan Electro guitar lend. That is the tone of that song, Rumble. Next time you go listen to it, Dan Electro is what you hear. He played a bunch of different instruments, but in the early days, he was playing a Dan Electro guitar lend. So that's another reason why I love Dan
SPEAKER_01:Electro. Amazing. I've learned so much about guitars from this. Like, wow, I'm I think a couple of my friends are going to love this podcast because I have one friend who's just, I have a few friends who are total guitar nerds. And then I have one friend who nicknames himself Dan Electro. So I got to send him this.
SPEAKER_00:There's a live music club in Houston called Dan Electro's. Dan Electro's. And I went there and it was, I rented an Airbnb in Houston and the place was three doors down and I had no idea until I got there. You want to talk about kismets.
SPEAKER_01:Pity is just the best thing ever. Like I love just things that happen by chance. That's why I love thrifting. That's why I love, you know, just meeting people online. You never know. And that's, I think that's the best thing about life is just, you don't know what's in store the next day. You don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Open to experience is what we are, Angie.
SPEAKER_01:Angie! I
SPEAKER_00:love your name.
SPEAKER_01:Michelle, my belle.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Hey, Emily, that's a pretty musical name. See Emily play! Yes, one of my favorite
SPEAKER_01:songs. That's my favorite Pink Floyd song. I love Sid Barrett. That era.
SPEAKER_00:And, um... Bowie does a great cover of that. I love it. name because it's beautiful. But anyway, the girls in my family all have family names. And my sister Kimball is Virginia Kimball Vardaman, and they're all family names. And I asked my mom once, why did you name me Emily? Because I love my name. And she said, I just liked it. And I thought about for Emily, wherever I may find her. So I'm going to go from work Yeah, these were rockers, if they would be considered, you know, Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, or what is the name of the record that has For Emily Wherever I Might Find Her? I think it is Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. I can't remember. Anyway, I asked my mom. They love Simon and Garfunkel, and I asked my mom. She chose that name and she said, I just loved it. She would have never told me. I liked the song that I heard on the radio. She would have never told me that because she wouldn't have cursed me with that. I thought to myself, that was on the radio when my mom was pregnant with me. And that is my absorption. I think it might have had something to do with my parents choosing it as a name. And I really love it. It's a beautiful name, Emily. I
SPEAKER_01:like it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I've had girlfriends that grew up with names they didn't like and they had them changed and I never did that. I always liked my name. So, and I like yours. Okay. Thanks. We are going to sign off from the lipstick pickup. We went like nearly two hours and it's all killer and no filler. Thank you, Angie Moon for coming on my podcast. My pleasure.
SPEAKER_01:I had a blast. I had a great time. Definitely made my week. Lipstick pickup. Learn something new today.
SPEAKER_00:Say goodbye. I'm going to hit stop and then I'll stay there and I'll say goodbye to you off camera. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. If you hear excellent tone and the sound of birds chirping, it means you've made it through an entire episode of the Lipstick Pickup podcast. You're as free as a bird now, but I hope you'll join me again soon. Comments or questions? I can be reached at emilyatthelipstickpickup.com