Let It Roll EXTRA

Nate Wilcox
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Nate Wilcox's "Let it Roll" is a podcast about the history of popular music from the 19th Century to the 21st. letitrollpodcast.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    The Holy Trinity of Texas Gospel and a Devilish Businessman: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.3

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Michael Corcoran’s method came from a piece of advice and a baseball adage. The advice was Mack McCormick’s - the great unpublished Robert Johnson biographer, who nearly shut the door in Corcoran’s face the first time he turned up. What Corcoran took from the evening was that if McCormick had already worked a subject, it was picked over, like arriving a…

    The Holy Trinity of Texas Gospel and a Devilish Businessman: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.3

  2. 4d ago

    The Grateful Dead were the pied pipers of psychedelics

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com “Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America” is not a band biography. It is a book about a substance and the country it moved through, and the Grateful Dead are the connecting thread rather than the subject - the vector, to borrow the word Ted Anthony used about Alan Lomax. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes author Jesse Jarnow who starts with the problem of scope, because you cannot write about every acid head in American history and Jarnow had to choose. What he chose was the line running from the first explosion of psychedelia in the 1960s all the way into the 21st century: the Dead, and then the internet, hip-hop, Keith Haring, electronic dance music, the jam bands and Burning Man, all of it connected by the same underground and often by the same people. They get to the Dead’s own strange relationship with capitalism - the band that built one of the most sophisticated commercial operations in American music while remaining, in most people’s minds, the opposite of a business. They get to the tape culture and the archive, and to Dick Latvala, whose Dick’s Picks made the live recordings a canon rather than a rumour. And they get to what Jarnow finds when he looks for the scene now, which is not a wake: there are still, in his words, fantastic weirdos out there doing interesting things with psychedelics, off the grid or on whatever grid they build for themselves. He says that makes him happy, and it is the last thing he says. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” The Grateful Dead’s first single * “Dark Star” - from “Live/Dead” * “Cassidy” - Bob Weir * “Here Comes Sunshine” - from Dick’s Picks Volume One, the song Dick Latvala chose to open his first compilation

    The Grateful Dead were the pied pipers of psychedelics

  3. 4d ago

    Seance Roll 2: The agony of mid-20th century classical music

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com There is no guest on this one, and that is the point. The Seance Roll series is host Nate Wilcox in conversation with authors who are dead, or simply unreachable, whose work shaped his thinking anyway. Henry Pleasants was a music critic who lived from 1910 to 2000, and in 1955 he published “The Agony of Modern Music” - a polemical attack on where 20th-century classical music had gone and an argument that jazz was the true master music of the age. Its opening is not hedged: “Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through its slag pile.” Nate takes that seriously rather than dismissing it, and the episode is built out of the two halves of taking it seriously: playing the music Pleasants was condemning, and then asking what he could not see from 1955. So you get the Schoenberg violin concerto, Webern, Berg, Boulez - the actual sound of the thing being called a slag pile - and you get Gershwin as Pleasants’s counter-example. And then the trouble with the argument. Pleasants was writing at the moment jazz’s grip on the pop audience was already loosening; the apotheosis he was reaching for was the swing era, a decade behind him. He never really confronts the modernists - no Charlie Parker, no Dizzy Gillespie, no bebop, no Miles - let alone free jazz, and rock was not yet on anyone’s map. Which sets up the thought the episode keeps returning to: that jazz was about to run the same cycle Pleasants was condemning classical for - innovating so fast it lost the room - and that rock would run it again, faster, abdicating the dance floor with “Sgt. Pepper” just as Elijah Wald argued. The music that replaces the dead art has a habit of dying the same way. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Schoenberg, Violin Concerto Op. 36 - Hilary Hahn, violin * Webern, “Sechs Bagatellen” Op. 9 * Berg, “Verwandlungsmusik” from “Lulu”, Act 1 * Boulez, “Le Marteau sans maitre” Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

    Seance Roll 2: The agony of mid-20th century classical music

  4. 4d ago

    House of the Rising Sun Before Bob Dylan And After The Animals: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.2

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Host Nate Wilcox and Ted Anthony, author of “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song”, work through what a “version” even is when a song has thousands of them: the keyboard solo, the famous opening riff, who heard what from whom, and Anthony’s conclusion that we are never going to sort it out and that this is fine. Songs like this one came out of nowhere, moved around in the shadows, surfaced when they got popular, and went back into the shadows to mutate again. We’re re-presenting this episode which originally dropped in 2019, as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning…to the End series which puts all the episodes in chronological order by subject. In 1937 Alan Lomax pointed a recording machine at a teenager in Middlesboro, Kentucky named Georgia Turner and captured “The House of the Rising Sun.” He printed it in “Our Singing Country” in 1941, and Ted Anthony’s description of what Lomax was in that moment is the best line in the episode: a vector for the virus. The book that carried it went straight into the hands of Lead Belly, Josh White, Woody Guthrie and the Weavers - the men and women who were, in that moment, inventing the idea of American folk music. Josh White took it into the minor key, or Dave Van Ronk did, and even Anthony cannot fully settle which. Dylan took it from Van Ronk and put it on his first album, which Van Ronk regarded as not cricket. And in Newcastle upon Tyne a young man called Eric Burdon found that album in a record shop, recognized a song he already half-knew, and two years later the Animals made the version the whole world knows. Anthony calls that the biggest inflection point in the song’s life, and it is also where the story turns ugly. The Animals were told to credit a single name for arranging the song on the 45 and sort the details out later. The name chosen was Alan Price. The royalties and the recriminations followed from that one decision, and they were still following decades later - Burdon told Anthony his version of it, their drummer John Steele told a different one, and Price never returned Anthony’s calls in all the years he tried. What makes the book more than a detective story is what Anthony went looking for next. He tracked down whether Georgia Turner - who grew up, had a family, and never had any part in what the song became - ever saw a penny of it. She did, a little, around the time of the Animals’ record. He calls finding that out the most moving experience of writing the book, and he did not expect it. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “House of the Rising Sun” Georgia Turner, recorded by Alan Lomax, 1937 * “House of the Rising Sun” Josh White * “Amazing Grace” The Blind Boys of Alabama - not a version of the song at all, but sung to its melody * Snake Farm, “Rising Sun” - a 21st-century take that came out after the book was written

    House of the Rising Sun Before Bob Dylan And After The Animals: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.2

  5. 6d ago

    The Velvet Underground Brought the Avant-Garde to Rock and Presaged Punk

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The Velvet Underground are the standard example of a band whose importance has nothing to do with how many records they sold. What gets lost in the retelling is how strange the arrangement actually was: a Long Island pop songwriter who had been grinding out knock-offs for a budget label, a Welsh viola player out of La Monte Young’s drone ensemble, and a pop artist who wanted a band the way he wanted a film camera. Victor Bockris - co-author, with Gerard Malanga, of “Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story” - joins Nate to go through it. They get into what John Cale actually contributed, which was not decoration but the thing that made an ordinary band extraordinary - sustained tone, drone, and the beat repetition that gave the psychedelic material a rigor nobody else’s had. They get into Lou Reed writing lyrics as literature rather than as a vehicle for a melody, and what that did to rock and roll. They get into Angus MacLise walking out because the band agreed to start and stop at fixed times, which he regarded as a line he could not cross. Then the Warhol years: the Delmonico Hotel gig, an extremely unusual booking for a rock band; the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which Bockris puts ten to eighteen months ahead of anything else happening; Nico, and the oil-and-water quality that made the first album what it is; the worry inside the camp that Lou Reed did not have the charisma to front a band. And Tom Wilson, the A&R man who was starting Verve at MGM and signed them - the same man who had just signed and produced Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. And then the long unravelling: Cale out, Doug Yule in and doing what he was told, the third album, the management fight with Warhol and Paul Morrissey over publishing, a record sleeve that is a photograph of Doug Yule alone in the studio, and Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker pushed steadily into the background - before the whole thing turns up again, a decade later, as the blueprint for punk. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “I’m Waiting for the Man” - The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967 * “Sister Ray” - White Light/White Heat, 1968 * “What Goes On” - The Velvet Underground, 1969 (the third album, after Cale and Nico had gone) * “Sweet Jane” - Loaded, 1970

    The Velvet Underground Brought the Avant-Garde to Rock and Presaged Punk

  6. 6d ago

    The Band That Broke Czechoslovakian Communism: Plastic People of the Universe

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Joe Yanosik, author of “A Consumer Guide to the Plastic People of the Universe,” joins host Nate Wilcox to tell the whole story: the tapes smuggled out of the country in the mid-seventies, the album pressed in Ireland and released in London by two expatriates without the band’s knowledge, the copy that made it to a New Orleans record shop where Yanosik finally found it after years of looking, the gatefold booklet that told him the whole history while the record played. Vratislav Brabenec, the saxophonist, driven into exile in Canada. And in 1997, President Havel more or less ordering the band to reunite and play for his cabinet. Yanosik’s book is a guide to the music as much as the myth, which is the point - most people who know the Plastic People know the arrests and one album, and there is far more to hear. You always hear about revolutionary bands. This is a band that actually caused a revolution. A seventeen-year-old named Milan Hlavsa heard a smuggled copy of “The Velvet Underground and Nico” - “I’m Waiting for the Man” in particular- that hammering rhythm - and thought: this is simple enough that I could do it. He started a band a few weeks after Warsaw Pact tanks came into Prague in August of 1968, and named it after a Frank Zappa song. From the other side of the Iron Curtain, the distinction between those two records was invisible. What they had in common - somebody doing exactly what he wanted, in public, at volume - was the only part that mattered when the alternative was a state-licensed band playing state-approved songs. The Plastic People lost their licence. They played weddings, because a wedding was a private event the state could not easily stop, and their friends got married two and three times so there would be somewhere to play. Their artistic director, Ivan Jirous - a man who wanted to be their Andy Warhol - staged festivals disguised as wedding celebrations. In 1976 the band was arrested and tried, and that trial is what produced Charter 77, the human rights manifesto that turned Vaclav Havel from a banned playwright into a dissident leader. Thirteen years later he was president. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Prší, prší” (”It’s Raining, It’s Raining”), 1974 * “Metastáza” (”Metastasis”), 1984 * “Mladé dívky” (”Young Girls”), 1985 * “Z rohu do rohu” (”From Corner to Corner”), 1985, from the “Půlnoční myš” (Midnight Mouse) album

    The Band That Broke Czechoslovakian Communism: Plastic People of the Universe

  7. 6d ago

    Yoko Ono Brought Classical and Avant-Garde Techniques to Rock

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Yoko Ono does not get a fair shot. She is one of the most famous people alive and one whose name-ID-to-listener ratio is possibly the worst of any massive celebrity and most of what is believed about her is either wrong or beside the point. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Madeline Bocaro author of “In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono.” The book is not a straight biography. It runs 558 pages of individual stories about the work - the artworks, the songs, the albums, one at a time - written over years for other fans and friends. It is an appreciation by someone who has actually done the listening. Nate and Bocaro start where the story actually starts, which is not 1966 and not the Beatles. Yoko was born to wealth and privilege in Tokyo, Japan. She received extensive musical training in both Western classical and Japanese traditions. Her first husband was Japan’s leading avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. She first emerged in her own right after moving to New York where she dived into the avant-garde scene as a conceptual artist and musician: her loft at 112 Chambers Street hosted the concert series that helped establish La Monte Young, and she was working in the circle around John Cage and Fluxus while the Beatles were still in Hamburg. Her sense that a work is not finished until someone else completes it - that the audience is the other half - is the premise under all of it. Nate and Madeline get to the singing, which is the thing people think they are objecting to and mostly have not heard in context: the Japanese folk forms behind it, the enka tradition, a voice used as an instrument rather than a delivery system for words. They get to Ornette Coleman. They get to the marriage, the myth-making, the Peter Brown book, and what the record actually shows about whether she broke up the Beatles - including Bocaro’s account of Paul McCartney, in her telling, being “really nice” about it and effectively saying: go be with her. And they get to “Walking on Thin Ice,” which John Lennon was carrying home from the studio the night he was killed, and which is one of the best records either of them ever made. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE “ * Sakura” - a traditional Japanese folk song, sung by Yoko on The Mike Douglas Show * “Don’t Worry Kyoko” - Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band, featuring Eric Clapton * “Mrs. Lennon” - from the “Fly” album, 1971 whose melody might be familiar to Big Star fans from “Holocaust”, but Yoko wrote it and got songwriter’s credit for the Big Star song. * “Walking on Thin Ice” - 1981 The free cut runs 42:07 and stops just before Bocaro answers the question everyone asks - whether Yoko broke up the Beatles. That answer, “Walking on Thin Ice,” and the last quarter of the conversation are behind the paywall. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

    Yoko Ono Brought Classical and Avant-Garde Techniques to Rock

  8. 6d ago

    From Louis Armstrong to the White Stripes, 'St James Infirmary' Connects Folk Traditions to Jazz and Rock: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.1

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Season 3 of Let It Roll: From the Beginning… opens with host Nate Wilcox talking to Robert W. Harwood about “I Went Down to St. James Infirmary” - a book about one song and about how confidently the history of a song can be wrong. Almost everything widely believed about “St. James Infirmary” turns out to be untrue. It is not a variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” the British broadside that gives us “Streets of Laredo” and “The Dying Cowboy.” That connection was made by A.L. Lloyd - a figure Nate describes as something like the Carl Sandburg and the Pete Seeger of British folk music rolled together - in a single transitional sentence in a five-page article, with no evidence offered for it at all. Lloyd barely cared about the song; it appears twice in his writings, once for a single sentence. But he was influential enough that the assumption held for decades. Harwood’s image for it is a pig rolling over a piglet in a tight stall. Blind Willie McTell did not write “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” as a tribute to it either. He told Ed Rhodes a long and convincing story about having written it for a friend, and most people still believe him, but the song had been recorded twenty years earlier by Martha Copeland and copyrighted by Porter Grainger. Grainger is one of the recoveries of the book: a songwriter for Bessie Smith who played in her orchestra, arranged for revues, and vanished so completely that nobody had established even his birth year before Harwood went looking - not because it was hard to find, but because no one had been interested enough to look. His death date is still unknown. From there the trail runs through Carl Moore and Phil Baxter and the two Texas towns that each claim the song, then to Don Redman - university-trained, the arranger who made Fletcher Henderson’s band what it was - who is the vector that carries the song to Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives. And then to Irving Mills, who copyrighted it under the name Joe Primrose, a southern nom de plume who never wrote another song in his life and appears nowhere else in the copyright registers. When the copyright came up for renewal in the 1960s and the controversy had died down, Mills quietly put his own name on it. He had also written a modified version years earlier - opening with “Why Am I Always Moaning?” - purely to secure a second copyright on the same song. Nate and Harwood close on where all this lands now: the blurred lines verdict, attempts to copyright timbre, and hip-hop records with thirty names on the credits. As Nate points out, if everyone with a claim to “St. James Infirmary” had lawyered up in the 1920s, that is roughly the number you would have had. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Louis Armstrong, “St. James Infirmary Blues” (1928) * Jimmie Rodgers, “Those Gambler’s Blues” * Bobby “Blue” Bland, “St. James Infirmary” * The White Stripes, “St. James Infirmary Blues” This episode originally dropped in 2022. We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

    From Louis Armstrong to the White Stripes, 'St James Infirmary' Connects Folk Traditions to Jazz and Rock: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.1
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About

Nate Wilcox's "Let it Roll" is a podcast about the history of popular music from the 19th Century to the 21st. letitrollpodcast.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Nate Wilcox
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    216
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Nathan Wilcox
  • Show Website
    Let It Roll EXTRA