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In this podcast episode, we’ll walk through where they came from, what shaped them, how they crashed into the United States—and then spend some real time inside Tommy: not just as an album, but as a story that refused to stay put, leaping from vinyl to concert halls, movie screens, and the Broadway stage.

Imagine that it is Post war England and you are in West London
Bomb sites are turning into parking lots and playgrounds. Teenagers caught between their parents’ memories of wartime suffering and a new world of consumer goods, television sets, and American rock records.

Roger Daltrey grows up in a working-class family, handy with his fists and tools, assembling his own future piece by piece.

Pete Townshend, the intense, sharp-nosed kid, is surrounded by music early—his parents are professional musicians—so the idea of a musical life is precarious, but not absurd.

John Entwistle is the quiet one, a brass-band kid who picks up the bass and makes it sing.

Daltrey starts a band called The Detours. He pulls in Entwistle. Entwistle brings Townshend. They grind through pubs, youth clubs, and dance halls. Then, after a name change detour as the High Numbers, shaped by managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, they emerge with the name that finally fits the impact:

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In this series, we’ve been spending time with artists who didn’t just make hits—they changed the language of modern music.

Today, we turn to a group that took blues, folk, volume, and mystery… and built a sound so iconic that entire genres still live in its echo.

Led Zeppelin.

Not just “loud.” Not just “wild.” Four musicians who fused session-honed precision, deep musical curiosity, and a taste for the epic into something that still feels massive generations later.

Tonight, we’ll look at where they came from, how they rose so quickly, why their time together burned so intensely, and how their shadow still stretches over rock and beyond.

Led Zeppelin doesn’t begin with rune symbols and stadiums.

It starts with working British musicians paying their dues.

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Today we meet an artist who doesn’t blow the doors off with volume or choreography, but with something quieter—and in many ways, just as radical.

A woman alone with a guitar in an open tuning.
A voice that can sound like a bell, a blade, or a diary you were never meant to read.
A songwriter who refuses to keep her feelings, or her harmonies, inside the lines.
But inwardly a mother with empty arms carrying shame that didn't belong to her and grief she poured into songs that people around her could feel even if they didn't know why both sides now Chelsea morning
Joni Mitchell.

In this episode, I want to explore:

Her background: prairie girl, painter, survivor.

Her influences: folk clubs, jazz giants, poets, painters, and her own wounds.

Her effect on music: especially the singer-songwriter era and beyond.

Her life’s arc: including the hidden child, the fame she never really trusted, the experiments that confused critics, the silence, the aneurysm, and the astonishing later-life return.

Because if Hendrix reimagined what a guitar could do, Joni Mitchell reimagined what a song could say.

Small-town skies, big inner world

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Our story begins not with sequins but with a housing project.

Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard both grew up in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass projects, one of the first federally funded housing developments for Black families. Diana Ross, who grew up nearby, joined that same orbit.

Detroit in the 1950s and early 60s was a complex place:
Automobile money and factory work.
Northern promise and stubborn segregation.
Church choirs, street-corner harmonies, jazz clubs, rhythm & blues, gospel pouring out of radios.

Music wasn’t a luxury; it was a language.
The three girls—at first part of a broader group of friends—found each other through that language. They called themselves The Primettes, designed as the “girl group” counterpart to a rising male group called The Primes (who would evolve into The Temptations).

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Today, we turn to a musician whose care there were moves separations long stretches were Jimmy simply simply had to figure things out on his own no one was buying but whose shadow is so long that every electric guitarist since has had to walk through it.

Jimi Hendrix.

He didn’t just play louder. He didn’t just play faster. He changed what the electric guitar meant. He changed the expectations for sound, for performance, for what a song could hold.

In this episode, I want to step past the posters and the legends—the burning guitar, the psychedelic clothes, the famous take on “The Star-Spangled Banner”—and really look at four things:

His background: the fragile, human story underneath the icon.
His influences: because Hendrix was not a meteor out of nowhere.
His effect on music: how he reshaped the instrument and the stage.
His life and his death: and the pressures and possibilities that surrounded him at the end.

At the end of this journey, we’ll eventually look forward—to some very different voices who were changing the sound of the 1960s in their own way: Diana Ross and The Supremes.

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Today we turn to a voice that has become a kind of measuring stick. A singer you can’t ignore, can’t casually imitate, and certainly can’t replace.

Aretha Louise Franklin.

You can line up all the adjectives: legendary, iconic, incomparable. But with Aretha, those words almost sound lazy. The real story is more interesting. It’s the story of how a shy, brilliant preacher’s daughter walked out of a Detroit church and, without surrendering where she came from, changed what mainstream American music could sound like — and what it could mean.

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If you grew up in a certain era, his name isn’t just a performer on a poster. It’s a weather system. A shift in air pressure. A bulletin from the fault line where art, politics, faith, doubt, youth, age, and trouble all collided.

And at the end of this episode, I’m going to tell you about one night—one Bob Dylan concert—that coincided with the most frightening turn my own life had taken up to that point, and how, in a way, it nudged me toward paying attention to people many others don’t see.

But let’s start with the man himself.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the mining town of Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range. Hibbing was not Greenwich Village, not California, not London. It was wind, work, winters, and radio.

Inside that small-town house, though, the signals of the wider world were pouring in: country music, blues, early rock ’n’ roll, gospel, and crooners—all collapsing into one restless imagination. He listened hard. He absorbed. And he did what born artists do: he tried things on.

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Today’s pairing may look odd until you start really listening:

The Beach Boys and The Grateful Dead.

Two California bands. Two American institutions. Two completely different ideas of what a band is for.

One built pop cathedrals in the studio and spent decades trying to bring that sound to the stage.

The other built a moving city on the road and treated the studio almost like a postcard from their real life’s work.

Let’s spend some time with both—and with the very different concert worlds they created.

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