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Dec 29, 2014 Top Stories From Music's Most Trusted Source News Madonna's 'Devastating' Album Leak: Guy Oseary on the 'Circus Show' of Getting 'Rebel Heart' to Fans Longtime manager Guy Oseary spoke to Billboard just days after successfully launching Madonna's new album... four-and-a-half months ahead of schedule. View All Recent News News  Jessie J on Writing 'Party in the U.S.A.': 'It Paid My Rent for 3 Years' News  Apple's (Very) Serious Chinese Competitor Xiaomi Is Now Bigger Than Uber News  Here's Nicki Minaj Throwing a Phone in Her High School Theater Class News  Man Charged in Drunk Driving Crash Involving Jennifer Lopez, Leah Remini Follow Billboard        You are currently subscribed to the Billboard Daily Digest newsletter as sdcinternetics@msn.com.     770 Broadway New York, NY 10003 You can find our privacy policy here.  To unsubscribe from this email, click here.  Manage your subscription

TRAKSTREAM - THE SEARCH ENGINE FOR MUSIC CREATORS

TrakStream is specifically designed as a search engine for the creative process because, as we all know, inspiration strikes at a moments notice. Search, Stream & Create!

Chris Weaver Band

Chris Weaver was born to perform. Mixing southern rock, soul, and country blues, Chris and his band are inspiring crowds all around the world on the heels of releasing their sophomore CD, American Dreamer.

Attending a Chris Weaver performance is a spiritual experience you don’t want to miss!
Born in West Virginia, Chris Weaver grew up in a music inspired house hold which helped shape his unique sound and style. Chris’ father played in bands and helped introduce Chris to influences ranging from Tom Petty and Bob Seger to John Mellencamp and Joe Cocker. “I wanted to write like them and sing like them but just do it in a way that would be my own,” says Chris. “It’s all I ever remember wanting to do.” After short stints in politics and radio, Chris moved to Nashville and “played every place that sold chicken” to get his start.

In 2010 Chris released his first album, Standing in Line, showcasing his vocal, writing and performing abilities. The band toured for a year around the country before releasing the album to college, americana, AAA, and country radio. The album, live performances, and radio support helped propel Chris to being named as one of Billboard’s “10 Artists to Watch in 2013.”

Collaborating with legendary producer, Josh Leo (Alabama, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Timothy B. Schmit, Bad Company, Lynyrd Skynyrd) for American Dreamer, Chris and his band hit new heights. The sophomore release showcases Chris’ soulful, gritty passion for songs that define the American fabric – determination, love, family life, faith in a higher power, and the hopefulness of the American Dream. Guest performers on the record include Jack Pearson on slide guitar and Kim Carnes on back ground vocals. Chris also co-wrote all songs on the album. From the emotive album opener “Gravy Train,” soulful tracks “Raise the Dead” and “California High” to the breezy ballad “I Should Have Said That” and the Springsteen-esque “Time Has Wings,” Weaver is a lyrical craftsman whose music is both riveting and unclassifiable.

“It’s been quite the journey to this point” says Chris. “Standing in Line opened a lot of doors for me. American Dreamer is me.”

Kenny Smith - Hailstorm - from the CD - Black Son - KSR Records

Kenny Smith - Hailstorm -  KSR Records
Written by Kenneth Howard Smith
Published by [c]2014 Keristene Music, Ltd. (BMI)
[c] 2014 SDC OmniMedia Group

Music Connection Weekly Bulletin

Weekly Bulletin

March 12, 2014

Jobs I Gigs I Freebies

	We're Giving Away 15 Copies of Michael Bloomfield Book/CD Package!
	#ZyaStar Contest Invites Players to Compete for Cash, Label Deal
	UMG Seeks Lifestyle Marketing Rep, Minneapolis
	Publishing Deal Competition
	USC PopFest Will Present Top Student Acts
	Producer Needed For Radio One In Detroit
	MC Blogger Michael Dolan: "Crazies Rule!"
	Copyrights: The Basics For Musicians
	Music Punk Offers Artists Chance To Perform At Legendary Hollywood Venue (All Expenses Paid)
	Industry Vets Launch Airtime PR
	Unique New Collab Platform For Artists

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Jobs I Gigs I Freebies

We're Giving Away 15 Copies of Michael Bloomfield Book/CD Package!
Music Connection, in association with Hal Leonard Inc., is giving away 15 copies of a new book/CD pack that gives guitarists an inside look at the guitar style of the extraordinary and highly influential Michael Bloomfield, rated #22 on Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list. The Legendary Licks series presents the music of a band or artists in a comprehensive play-along package. Each book contains note-for-note transcriptions and detailed performance notes on how to play a multitude of classic licks, fills, riffs, and solos--complete with recorded demonstrations of each exercise and gear setup tips. The CD is playable on any CD player, and also enhanced so Mac & PC users can adjust the recording to any tempo without changing the pitch. To enter to win, simply email intern@musicconnection.com, subject line "Bloomfield."

#ZyaStar Contest Invites Players to Compete for Cash, Label Deal
Zya, a mobile game allowing anyone to create studio-quality music like a pro, has announced a new contest offering players the opportunity to both win a recording contract and go on tour. The #ZyaStar Contest will select finalists each month beginning in May and running until the end of the year. Contestants will be judged based on the songs they create using Zya's music platform. All of the finalists will then compete for the chance to win the Grand Prize, which includes $10,000 cash, select tour performances on DigiTour 2015 thedigitour.com and a recording contract with Emblem Records emblem-music.com, the record label behind award-winning artists including Matchbox Twenty, Rob Thomas and Gloriana. Download the app for free here. For complete details, visit http://bit.ly/1nHmHDUM.

UMG Seeks Lifestyle Marketing Rep, Minneapolis
Universal Music Group is currently seeking a College & Lifestyle Marketing Representative for Minneapolis, MN. The College Reps are often the "it person" or "key tastemaker" on campus and are heavily involved in many campus and community activities. Get full details at http://bit.ly/1fSaiMJ. The company is also seeking reps for New Orleans, Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Minneapolis and more. For a complete list, see http://linkd.in/1gkTVHd.

Publishing Deal Competition 
Three music brands have combined forces to give songwriters and artists of all genres a shot at a $20,000, one-year publishing contract. The contest will be powered by Songspace, a Nashville-based startup and partner company of American Songwriter Media. Songspace provides a song catalog for music businesses fed by a collaborative app for songwriters. Entries are open to songwriters not currently under contract with any other publishers, Deadline: April 25. See www.thepubdeal.com.

USC PopFest Will Present Top Student Acts 
The University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music's annual PopFest will be Friday, March 28, 4pm - midnight and will have over 20 acts that were selected from over 50 submissions. The event will happen at Tommy's Place on the university's Los Angeles campus. USC's Senior Showcase will be at the Troubadour on April 7th 7:30pm. For more info, contact Chris Sampson at sampson@thornton.usc.edu.

Producer Needed For Radio One In Detroit
The producer of Radio One is responsible for the daily technical operation of the show, and for the implementation of program strategy as assigned by the Program Director in a professional and competent manner. Negotiated job responsibilities will be maintained at all times. Six months experience required. Visithttp://bit.ly/1lvMMEB for more information and to apply.

MC Blogger Michael Dolan: "Crazies Rule!"
On the newly launched Music Connection Blogs corner, Music Connection magazine founder Michael Dolan gives artists unique perspectives and advice on how to proceed with their art and career. "Thank god you don't need a stinking manual! In fact, others are looking to YOU for the answers. Why? Because they know you're different. They know you're one of the crazies--a 'creative type.' They know you have..." Continue reading at http://musicconnection.com/mcblogs.

Copyrights: The Basics For Musicians
While not the newest submission from the Disc Makers blog crew, it still holds weight in today's music industry. Keith Hatschek breaks down the basics of copyrights that every musician should know. "While most songwriters or their publishers copyright a song and register the copyright with the Library of Congress (LOC), due to the way the law is written, a copyright actually exists the moment you fix your song in any tangible medium. ... So why bother to register your new song with the Library of Congress? Because until such time as it is officially registered as a new work with the LOC, you have some, but not all of the various protections...(continue reading at http://bit.ly/NXl8Fs.

Music Punk Offers Artists Chance To Perform At Legendary Hollywood Venue (All Expenses Paid)
MusicPunk, a concert calendar APP, has announced its Rockstar For A Weekend competition. Every gig an artist uploads into the app database will be one entry into the contest. The grand prize winner will receive airfare and accommodations for a trip to Los Angeles to perform on the stage of the legendary Whisky A Go-Go. Merch packs will also be awarded. Available free for iOS and Android, MusicPunk is a band--and fan--friendly concert calendar app. Though partnerships with venues, promoters, agents and managers will help populate the site, musicians themselves can upload gigs, whether weeks in advance or night-of, with ease from either the app or the website. All genres of music and all sizes of venues are supported. Seehttp://musicpunk.com/contest.

Industry Vets Launch Airtime PR
Veteran music executives Robert "Bob" Bradley and Scott Austin have launched Airtime PR, a boutique marketing and public relations firm that specializes in the online promotion of musicians, celebrities, and innovative businesses. Based in Orange, CA and Austin, TX, Airtime provides focused campaigns that harness tastemaker relationships and social media outlets to maximize brand awareness for its clients. The company is helmed by Bob Bradley, former Head of New Media for Authentik Artists and Fearless Records, and Web Manager for Purevolume.com. Co-Founder Scott Austin is a seasoned entrepreneur and music executive who has held roles at Warner Bros. Records, Madonna's Maverick Recording Company, and Capitol Records, and he has advised dozens of clients including NBC's The Voice. Seehttp://www.AirtimePR.com. Contact: Bob Bradley, 657-333-2631, Bob@AirtimePR.com.

Unique New Collab Platform For Artists
Seeking to "change today's music industry by empowering artists" with a web platform that enables musicians and music fans to collaborate online, AudioCommon, a company rooted in the MIT Sloan School of Management, will begin offering open access to its unique platform on March 12 at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2014 in Austin, TX. "AudioCommon is giving artists tools to create active listeners and is giving the public the opportunity to experience a new emotional connection with music," says the site's co-founder, Phil Cohen, whose blog post offers further information: http://wp.me/p2HrZM-18B.

For More Jobs, Gigs and Freebies Check Out the All-FREE Digital Edition of MC at www.musicconnection.com

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How, Why, and When to Advertise Your Music

The following is a guest post from Aaron Ford, digital advertising manager for online media distributor The Orchard. Aaron regularly helps recording artists advertise on various networks, so we feel like he probably knows what he’s talking about when it comes to advertising music. We hope this is of interest to recording artists and readers who are curious about the decisions artists face when contemplating how, why, and when to advertise their songs.

Deciding to spend money to increase awareness of your project is a big decision. You’ve probably already spent a ton of money creating your art and the idea of spending again may be anathema to you. You may have already gathered the funds for a large-scale media purchase and are ready to go. I don’t know this and have no supernatural powers. I’m just writing a blog post for The Daily Rind and trying to help.

Managing our clients’ and our internal advertising budgets, I’ve seen the gamut of situations in which advertising could be useful and have executed campaigns. I’ve found that a step-by-step thought-process prevents one from completely blowing it. Completely blowing it can mean wasted money or a project no one knows about. This is my process and the one I recommend to others.

1. Define your goals – What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to grow awareness, or drive those that are already aware to a place to purchase?

2. Define your message – What is the message you want to deliver? Go through the process of creating a simple sentence “Promote the new video duh!” is not good. Your message is something like “Watch this video and learn more about this artist.”

3. Research your fans and potential fans – Who should receive this message? You may not know who your fans are as much as you think you do. Even if you’re the label, you can lack perspective. You have no objectivity and that’s normal. Rely on data and numbers to combat your definite bias. Use tools such as Facebook Insights. Pay special attention to the “People” tab. Those are the ones who engage with your page. Some people are lazy and just Like pages they do not plan to engage with. The “People” tab shows you who the engagedfans are; the people who will buy your stuff. You may also find tools like Google Analytics, Beluga (free), Next Big Sound, Musicmetric, and others handy. Create useful names for the different segments: “18 – 24 year old bros in Arizona who love action sports” or “Hipsters that pirate your stuff in Silverlake.” All of this is valuable if you create segments that mean something to you.

4. Identify your targets – Who do you want to receive the message based on your research? Maybe you’ve found that your audience is “75 – 85 year old vagrants with an iPod touch and Starbucks WiFi.” This is not an audience that is worth your hard-earned, borrowed, or stolen ad dollars. If your goal is to create awareness for a video, even though most of your audience are these vagrants, you should target the small part of your audience that is of a demographic using the platform on which your video is published. If your budget is limited, you should focus first on the fans most likely to purchase and only go outside of that fan-base after you’ve given the core fan-base every opportunity to give you money. They can be best targeted through tracking pixels from third parties such as Google, Facebook, or The Trade Desk.

5. Devise your strategies – In what voice do you want to deliver your message? What’s your angle? Are you enticing people with a free track?

6. Decide which tactics you will use – What tactics will you employ to execute the strategy? Video? Search Ad? Retargeting Landing Page visitors with banners? Asking a question in a promoted post? Leveraging memes such as Doge (such link. so lol)?

7. Identify the platforms / technology you will use – Where will you deploy your tactics? Facebook? Google Search? Bing Search? LinkedIn? Banner inventory on the coolest sites? Video inventory?

8. Execute your campaign – Double-check everything. A misspelling or typo can be absolutely devastating to your cause. You don’t want that. We don’t want that. Deploy your campaign at hours of peak traffic for your audience, strategy, tactic, and platform. This may mean that you deploy each part at a different time.

9. Optimize your campaign – Don’t just let it sit there spending your money. Constantly optimize. What’s working? What’s not? Don’t be alarmed by lower click-through-rates (CTR) on banner ads than you see on Search ads. Banners are about impressions and you are billed per impression. Search is about clicks and you are billed per click.

10. Recap your campaign – Even if you are doing your own digital advertising, you should do this step. Create a document that is an overview of the campaign. You will find nuggets of information in this document that you will not find by just looking at numbers on the platforms.

11. Learn from your campaign – After you have created this document ask yourself if it was a success. Go back to your goals. Did your video get more views than they would have without it? Did your Facebook page see a higher rate of engagement? What would you do differently next time?

Spending money to promote your work is a big deal and it’s worth your time to go through this process to make sure you don’t completely blow it. I’d love to answer any questions (no centaur questions) or address any feedback so do not hesitate to comment.

Major Lazer - Lose Yourself feat. Moska & RDX

Major Lazer - Lose Yourself feat. Moska & RDX by majorlazerofficial

Discover our new EP #APOCALYPSESOON available on preorder now: http://po.st/ApocalypseSoonEP 

Like our Fan page : http://po.st/majorlazerFB 
Follow us on Twitter : http://po.st/majorlazerTW 
Go to http://majorlazer.com 

Director: Diplo 
Assistant Director: Shomi Patwary 
Director of Photography: Shomi Patwary, Thuan Tran 
Editor: Thuan Tran, Shomi Patwary, LILINTERNET 
Color / Post: Robbie Elliott Simmons 
Jib Operator: Asha 
Producer: Chad Ghiron, Carleene Samuels, Karmaloop Media 
Associate Producer: Shomi Patwary, Renee Brodeur 
Choreography: Blacka Di Danca & Mela Murder 
Dancers: Mela Murder, Lafayette Bless, Mystic, Tiffany 

2014 Mad Decent / Because Music

Harry James

 Ground Quake is proud to realese the new Harry James the Italian Cowboy album titled "Suitable for Faming". The first single is the inspiring song titled "Trinity Lane". Harry James, the Italian Cowboy has performed his music all over the country with: Jo Dee Messina, Ronnie Milsap, Alabama, Razzy Bailey, Wayne Newton, Olivia Newton-­John, Vince Gill,Daryl Singletary, Charlie Daniels, George Jones, Exile, Collin Ray, Darryl Worley, Dolly Parton, John Conlee and many more! What they are saying about Harry James, The Italian Cowboy "Harry James is like hot lightning in cowboy boots! His fiddle show will knock your sock off! Randy Owens Recording Artist, Alabama "Harry James is an undeniable musical talent and entertainer, whose singing and fiddle is guaranteed to have you coming back time after time." Dan Wunsch, Editor of Nashville Music Guide "The Harry James Gang is sure to wake everybody up with their toe tapping hand clapping performance." Karen Cornelius, journalist The Photo Vermilion Journal

The Rosy Shades

The Rosy Shades

 

The Rosy Shades are an indie rock band from Tallahassee, Florida, consisting of Tim Rock, Jon Little, Nathan Louis and Thomas Pritchard. In 2009, Jon and Tim - natives of Jacksonville, Florida - began writing songs together. They drew influence from 60's classic rock, rhythm and blues, indie rock and other genres that drive the band ’s stylistic driving rhythms, beats, blazing guitars and soaring vocals.

 

Tim moved to Tallahassee shortly after beginning his collaboration with Jon. Soon he discovered that a local venue, The Warehouse, had an open mic night which he frequented. That's where Tim and Nathan first met and realized a mutual taste in music. In fact , Nathan wound up blown away by Tim’s open mic sets, and saw that he had a natural gift for music.

 

He told the Florida State University news, “Certain people just have that thing . I heard something. It was unrefined , but it was there.” The two musicians quickly bonded and began writing and jamming together on a regular basis. This spurred Jon's relocation to Tallahassee, and the fledling trio began their first recording sessions.

 

With the help of fellow open mic night performers, The Rosy Shades became a fixture of Tallahassee’s thriving original music scene. Over the ensuing months, the band worked tirelessly to self-record the growing number of songs for Morning Spirits. The band self-released the EP in October of 2012, shortley after which Thomas Pritchard joined the group - contributing to the remastered and re-released edition in 2013.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Samantha Schaum 

561.445.5343

Press@TheRosyShades.com

TheRosyShades.com

Captain Beefheart and Merrell Fankhauser article in Gonzo Magazine

<a href="http://sdcogradio.blog.com/files/2014/01/Untitled_1.241d7976-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-70" src="http://sdcogradio.blog.com/files/2014/01/Untitled_1.241d7976-1.jpg" alt="" width="566" height="800" /></a>

COVER STORY: Merrell Fankhauser remembers Captain Beefheart and more

The other week I was interviewing the ever fascinating Merrell Fankhauser about his forthcoming archive project, when our conversation wandered off onto more arcane subjects...

Merrell: Yeah, the thing is, you know, the Captain, Don [van] Vliet, he’s passed away now, and the bass player from MU that was also in the Exiles - Larry Willey - he’s passed away so a lot of these guys aren’t even around anymore and I know they would just get the biggest kick out of hearing this stuff that we all just forgot about. I’d write three or four songs a week back then in the early sixties so we were recording them just one after another, you know, so I totally forgot about them. If I didn’t recognise my voice, you know, I wouldn’t even know that I’d written the song!

Jon: Do you have any of them that actually have got the Captain on?

Merrell: No. He and I jammed a lot together and we jammed in his house and jammed in Woodland Hills. See, the Exiles was formed before he formed Captain Beefheart. Frank Zappa and he went to high school together in Lancaster and then Frank moved down south, down to – ooh gosh, I can’t remember the name – it was southern California. And they still, you know, communicated and he helped him produce that Trout Mask Replica album and that was the last time I saw Frank, when we were all living in Woodland Hills and they recorded some of that in his house. Don Vliet would drive over and sit in his Jaguar outside of my garage and listen to the different musicians I had playing in the band as we were rehearsing and he’d have these guys go over and say “Who’s playing that guitar?” “Is Merrell singing on this?”

[Jon laughs]

Merrell: So he would go try to recruit my musicians and he got John French first and then much later on he got Jeff Cotton. And then I don’t know if you read the story that Nigel Cross wrote – it was in Bucketfull of Brains and some other UK fanzine thing – about how when we formed MU and we were living one canyon over in Woodland Hills and Jeff left the band and they were all very angry about it and they kidnapped him one day and held him in the Beefheart house, and I had to go over there and have like a four-and-a-half-hour battle of the brains with Don to get Jeff back and take him back home with me.

[Jon laughs]

Merrell: And it was really a strange scene, Jon. This has all been written about. I think it’s in the book too, you know. You’d go over there and Don and I were friends and we’d jam and stuff together. And some of it got recorded, to answer your question, on little tape recorders and stuff but who knows where any of that went? But I’d go over there once in a while to visit them – and this was before Jeff joined me – and John French would have a splint on his finger – a broken finger. And then the bass player, Mark Boston, would walk out and he had a bloody lip. [laughs] So the Captain would decide who’s fucking up the band and he’d have the rest of the members go beat that guy up!

[Jon laughs]

Merrell: Yeah.

Jon: Jesus!

Merrell: Yeah, and he painted the whole living room red because he said “That’s the only way I can keep these guys awake and alert, Merrell.” And so you never knew who was gonna be the bad guy. And what happened at one point, Jeff Cotton turned out to be the bad guy – this was when he left the band – and they beat him up so bad they broke a couple of ribs, and he had to go to the hospital so his parents got him and took him back up to Lancaster, and he was up there for a while recuperating. And Jeff wanted to join me and his parents were afraid to let him go back down there because they were afraid the Beefheart guys would get him. And so everything was fine, you know, for about five or six months and then they found him down at a music store. He had walked down the street from my house, and it was Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston and John French, and they kidnapped him – literally grabbed him off the street and took him up to Beefheart’s house. And I found out where he went from the music store owner so I went up there to retrieve him, and the poor guy was slumped in this bathroom, in the bath tub, whimpering and crying. Don would have a way of psychoanalysing people, you know, and really make them feel worthless and at one point Jeff was saying “Don’s right, Merrell: I gotta re-join his band.” And it took me a while to talk this out. I was in very good shape back then, Jon, and I’d been used to fighting [laughs] Mexicans in high school and those guys knew they couldn’t mess with me, you know, so I just grabbed Jeff and took him out of there. It reminded me of a book, The Devil and Daniel Webster, and several of the guys in the band, if you’ve read any of those books, they still harbour ill feelings against Don Vliet, you know. And a lot of them believed he was the devil. [Laughs] And Jeff Cotton still believes that Don was the devil.

Jon: Good God.

Merrell: And the girlfriend – I know I’m rambling on – the girlfriend –

Jon: Carry on rambling; I’m enjoying this immensely.

Merrell: The girlfriend, Lori – she would dose them with LSD in their hamburgers at night and so they would start coming onto this drug and not known that they’d been dosed, and they thought it was Don’s power; that he had some power, that he was doing this to them. And then he had Zappa put all of this portable recording equipment in the house and he had his cousin Victor, who ran it, and when these guys would get all high he would go “OK, tonight we’re going to play a strawberry,” and so you were supposed to imagine whatever a strawberry would sound like. [Laughs] And they’d all start playing and he’d say “it goes like this,” and he’d play these abstract notes on the piano. I’d been there when he was doing that. And he’d try to get the guitar players to play this melody that he was making up. That’s how some of that stuff was recorded: they were high on acid and they didn’t even know it.

Jon: Good Lord!

Merrell: [Laughs] It was sick. A lot of people said it reminded them of the Charles Manson deal but at least nobody was getting killed! [Laughs] People were getting beat up and severely psychologically damaged. And I think it still damaged Jeff because he won’t play music anymore. After MU moved to Maui he met this beautiful Hawaiian/Chinese girl who was a Christian, he then all of a sudden believed that the music, and the music business in particular, was the devil’s work.

Jon: Good God!

Merrell: Yeah. It’s a shame because he’s a talented guy and you know, he was my guitar student at age fourteen when I met him.

Jon: It’s interesting you said that people – ‘cause I thought that what you were saying about the way that Don did this sort of psychic mind control of his –

Merrell: Yeah.

Jon: I was thinking that sounded very Charles Manson.

Merrell: Yeah. Very much so.

Jon: And of course they were both in the desert at roughly the same sort of time, weren’t they?

Merrell: Well, let’s see. No, Manson went up in the desert later. The odd thing about that, if you read my book, when we formed MU Randy had a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles that went into this like deserty area, where there was this Spahn movie ranch, where the Mason gang was living and you can see this ranch, Jon. It’s in old late-1940s and early-fifties movies. A cowboy’ll ride by this rock with some Indians chasing him and that’s right on the outskirts of L.A. Well, Randy ran into two of the Mason girls once when he was hiking in this stream, and that’s in my book. Manson then fled out to the desert when he did those murders so that was later that Manson lived in the desert but yeah, they did both end up out in the desert. Don Vliet later moved way up to northern California and bought an old boy-scout camp, and that’s where he tried to keep the band going and then he ended up getting M.S. and died. He was a creative guy but he was just, I would say, the ultimate control freak. He could definitely captivate an audience just by talking and he had this scary air about him that reminded me of Lon Chaney Jr that played the wolf man in the werewolf movie.

Jon: Oh, yeah, I know him.

Merrell: In a way. People were – they were afraid of him. I could see how they would be afraid of him. When I had this battle of the brains with him, with Jeff Cotton stuck in the bath tub, he had a screen cage and he would catch these various spiders in the house, and sometimes a black widow and he would put them in this cage and watch them fight. And one time he said to me, Jon, when we were talking and he goes “Isnt’ that heavy? What would you think if I could make one of those spiders smoke a cigarette?” I said, “Well, that’d be a good trick, Don.” But, yeah, he was really something. He could’ve been a great actor, I think. He really had that way of commanding an audience.

Jon: I so wish that the tape recordings of you two jamming hadn’t got lost.

Merrell: Yeah. You know there was just so much bizarre stuff going on and bizarre behaviour. I am playing bottleneck slide on ‘China Pig’,– if it’s the same take ?– I think they gave the credit to Doug Moon on that because they didn’t know who had played that. But I listened to all of those recordings to see if I was on anything and several people thought it was me playing slide on this song called ‘China pig.’

Jon: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Merrell: Yeah. I’m on a few Spirit songs too that Mick Skidmore had something to do with putting out and they didn’t give me credit for playing on that either. I played slide and bass and acoustic twelve-string on a couple of songs that were on that. I think Evangeline label; California Blues; one of the last  Spirit albums that came out.

Jon: Good Lord.

Merrell: Yeah.

Jon: I’ll tell you one thing that surprised me as well, when you were just talking about Manson, I didn’t realise that Spahn ranch was right on the outskirts of Los Angeles; I’d always assumed it was right back, deep in the desert somewhere.
Merrell: No, it wasn’t, Jon. It was out, actually just past Woodland Hills in Chatsworth. Woodland Hills is where I lived and I’d moved there with HMS Bounty, and Beefheart had moved down from the desert and he lived just one canyon over. And we bumped into each other at the music store, and he’d say “Oh, come on up and jam,” and he’d come over to my house and jam once in a while. Chatsworth was going just sort of towards the desert foothills and it was just out of the San Fernando Valley, actually. They used those areas a lot for cowboy movies and stuff because it looked very rugged. There was a lot of interesting rock formations, things like that.

Jon: Oh, that changes my whole sort of mental picture.

Merrell: Yeah.

Jon: Because I’d assumed it was miles away.

Merrell: No, he ran off to the desert after he had murdered all those people and he was afraid that they were gonna find him there. Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys, met him, and went up there and hung out with him, and was even trying to help record some of Charles Manson’s songs. They weren’t very good but somehow he got interested in them.

Jon: I’m glad you’Jon
I corrected a few wrong words and repeats in a few sections, it flows nicely now. If you copy and paste it as Ive corrected it then you can use it.
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Best Always,
Merrell say that because I’ve heard them and I didn’t think they were any good either.

Merrell: Yeah.

Jon: But you know, I don’t know what it was about them that people – ‘cause Neil Young thought he was a very good song writer but I always thought they were terrible.

Merrell: Yeah, yeah. Most of the people I knew too didn’t think they were very good. I mean, I think Dennis Wilson is probably lucky he didn’t get murdered because Charles Manson got mad and upset because he couldn’t get a record deal.

Jon: Golly!

Merrell: Yeah!

Jon: Was he a sort of fixture on the outskirts of the music scene, then?

Merrell: Well, I guess he was trying to break in any way he could and Terry Melcher, I know, had met him and he was trying to get Terry Melcher to get him a deal, and when he couldn’t do that, and Terry Melcher and lived in that house where he had –

Jon: Cielo drive

Merrell: Yeah, and so I think he thought he was getting back at Terry Melcher when he killed all of those people and Sharon Tate.

Jon: Wow.

Merrell: Yeah. Yeah, that was a very strange time and the odd thing was we were watching TV, Randy Weimer the drummer from MU, and I, and they announced this thing: that they’d zeroed in on these people from Spahn Ranch, that they thought had something to do with the murders, and they mentioned Charles Manson because he was on probation or something, and Randy went “Oh, my God! Those two girls I met up the creek when I was hiking were two of Charles Manson’s girls!” And he just realised that and figured it out when we got this news over the television.