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Etta James
Posted in: Videos on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
Etta James: Take It to the Limit
Years ago music legend Johnny Otis told me about the day he discovered one of the great R & B singers, Etta James. She was 14 or 15 years old and had been singing in a little know girl’s group with two friends when she went to audition for Otis. He said she was so shy that she insisted on going into another room to sing for him, so that he wouldn’t be able to watch her and she couldn’t see him while she was singing. Today that would sound like a takeoff on the beginning of a new season of the NBC show, “The Voice.”
Etta James died a few days ago, the day after Johnny Otis passed away. They both left a tremendous musical legacy. In the early eighties when I was doing the “On the Record” segment for the today show I was fortunate to get to spend some time with them for profile pieces on the show. For one of the stories I filmed a performance by James in a women’s prison where she had served time for what, as best as I can remember, was a conviction for writting bad checks. As James told me in a later interview, which is in this video piece, her real problem was an addiction to drugs, particularly heroin.
Whatever troubles she faced in her life, it seemed as if was able to channel all that emotion into her singing which made her vocals all the more powerful. This video from the early 80′s was part of a series on women in rock, and is a reminder that all these years later she set a standard for vocalistists that few since have matched.
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Open Hands: Meet the Band
Posted in: Videos on Monday, January 23rd, 2012
Individually the members of the band Open Hands have enjoyed great success playing and recording with some of the biggest names in music, but together as Open Hands they are at their creative best.
Good musicians who can look at notes and lines on a sheet of paper and transform those hieroglyphics into beautiful music always impress me, in part because that ability eludes me. Even more impressive to me are the musicians who can hear a tune in their head and then reproduce that melody on an instrument. But there is another skill that a very few musicians possess that to me takes playing to a whole different level, to a realm only the most talented inhabit. These are the musicians who start with notes on a page and them begin to improvise as a group and somehow make it all work together, or sometimes they don’t even have the notes as a jumping off point, they just call out a key and go to work. That’s the kind of musicianship that describes Open Hands.
In this video the members of Open Hands demonstrate their technical skills, show their improve ability and talk about how they do what they do. This is an introduction to Open Hands: Greg Mathieson, Justo Almario, Abraham Laboriel, and Bill Maxwell.
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Johnny Otis
Posted in: Videos on Saturday, January 21st, 2012
Johnny Otis died this week in Altadena, California at the age of 90. He lived long enough that for many young people today his name probably won’t ring any bells. If they hear a musician popular in the 40’s, and 50’s passed away, they might say, “Whatever he did, it doesn’t relate to what I’m listening to.” But in fact, Johnny Otis was there in the beginning to help lay the foundation for rhythm and blues, which would become the foundation for rock and roll. For people of a certain age, he will probably be best remembered for his hit record, “Willie & the Hand Jive,” but the musical influence of Johnny Otis extends far beyond writing & recording that one hit.
In 1950 alone, ten of his songs made Billboard Magazine’s R&B chart, and yet it was his ear for the talent of others that may be his biggest contribution to music. Otis discovered or produced some of the legendary R&B vocalists like Etta James, Hank Ballard, and Big Mama Thornton. He produced the original version of “Hound Dog” by Big Mamma Thornton, the song Elvis Presley would later record to help launch his career as the King of Rock & Roll.
I met Otis 29 years ago when I was doing my “On the Record” segment for the Today Show. In the time we spent together I learned how much more there was to appreciate and respect about Otis as a person and an artist beyond his fame as a performer on “Willie and the Hand Jive.” Rather than me retelling the details here, just watch this video I found from 1982 of my Today Show story about Otis.
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Flying With Whooping Cranes
Posted in: Videos on Friday, January 20th, 2012
operation migration & whooping cranes
According to the song, “Birds gotta fly,” but sometimes people have to teach them where to fly. If you’re a whooping crane chick hatched in capitivity in an incubator in Maryland and raised by humans at a wildlife refuge in Wisconsin then you have no idea how to get to your home in Florida your first winter. Somebody has to show you “The way to go home,” according to another song.
That’s where Operation Migration steps in as surrogate parents to several whooping crane chicks each year. They help raise the young birds and get them to imprint with an ultralight in the role of parent or really big bird. First the chicks learn to follow the delta wing or flying trike as it drives around on the ground. Next the young cranes take daily flights around the wildlife refuge following in a V formation behind the ultralight. By October each year the new whooping cranes are ready to begin their trip south to Florida and their winter home. After that first trip they manage to find their way back and forth each year on their own.
I was lucky to be the first journalist to fly with Operation Migration and the whooping cranes. It’s a special treat to watch these huge birds in formation off your wingtip. This week on my radio show National Geographic Weekend I talk with the co-founder of Operation Migration, Joe Duffy, about the effort to help save the whooping cranes. At one point we were down to only 15 whooping cranes left in the wild. We’re now up to a few hundred, but we’re still a long way from ensuring their survival.
This video shows how they train the birds to follow the ultralights and then we take you for a ride, flying with whooping cranes.
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Oldie But Goodie
Posted in: Videos on Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Andrae Crouch & The Disciples-\”Satisfied\”
Boy was I surprised today. I found an unlabeled video tape and stuck it in the player to see what was on it. It turned out to be a dub of some old 16mm film shot in the 70′s while I was working for the NBC TV station in Ft. Worth, Texas. In addition to all the pictures of me decked out in bellbottoms and flowered shirts, there was some rare footage I shot of Andrae Crouch and the Disciples in 1971.
I filmed their sound check before a concert at a local church for a story about the group on the evening news. The song was, “Satisfied.” I’m sure I had them sing it two or three times to get all the angles I needed, but I don’t know where all that film is or what happened to the cut story. I was thrilled and very surprised to find this one uncut take of, “Satisfied”. I was sure it no longer existed.
Forty years sitting in a box has taken its toll on the sound, which isn’t quite up to the correct speed at the beginning. Also I only had one mic on the camera to record the audio so the mix is not the best, but footage of Andrae and the Disciples singing in the early 70′s is so rare I think this is worth posting.
Fans of the group will notice this was done before Andrae added the band featuring Bill Maxwell, Hadley Hockensmith, Harlan Rogers, and Fletch Wilcy, and unfortunately this angle doesn’t show Bili Thetford although you can hear him singing and playing bass.
It’s an oldie but goodie and a fun trip down memory lane.
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Sippie Wallace Blues Pioneer
Posted in: Videos on Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Sippie Wallace recorded her first record in 1923. It was a blues classic with the songs “Shorty George” and “Up the Country Blues.” Fifty-seven years later I met Sippie in Detroit where she was still belting the blues in nightclubs on Saturday nights and then playing the organ and leading the choir on Sunday mornings. I spent some time with her in both the club and the church and then stopped by her home where she talked with me about her extaordinary career.
It was Sippie who first told me the only difference between the blues and gospel, the only difference between the music she sang on Saturday night and Sunday morning was the words. She said in the clubs she was singing “Baby” and in church she was singing “Jesus” She sang both for me for a series we were doing on American music for the Today show. This clip is another find from the Boyd closet of old tapes. Scott Goldstein was my producer at the time and we both were just looking for an exscuse to go meet some of the pioneers of the “roots” music we loved. The series also included stops in the “Windy City” for Chicago Blues and a stop in Louisiana for Cajun music. The series would become the inspiration for our regular weekly segment, “On the Record”.
Sippie was one of the big influences on singer Bonnie Raitt who would record one of Sippie’s songs, “Woman Be Wise,” and would also take Sippie on tour as an opening act. Two years after this story Sippie Wallace would be nominated for a Grammy and six years later she would suffer a stroke following a concert in Germany. Less than a month after the stroke, on her 88th birthday, she died in a Detroit hospital. Her contribution to the blues lives on in some of her most famous songs like, “Suitcase Blues”, “Woman Be Wise, “Up the Country Blues”, and “I’m A Mighty Tight Woman.”
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Aretha Franklin Recording Session
Posted in: Videos on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011
Aretha Franklin \”This is for Real\”
I Spent an afternoon in a recording studio with Aretha Franklin back in ’81 or ’82 filming and interviewing here for a regular segment I was doing on the “Today Show” called, “On the Record.” She sat at the piano for the interview where I was hoping to get her to play and sing something unrehearsed, something that wasn’t part of the album. Before we began the formal interview I asked if she still played much piano. She immediately started playing a gospel number, (not one of the classics), and asked if I could name the song. I’m assuming she was thinking there was no way I would know the title, and the odds were I wouldn’t, Songs titles are not my strength, but by a lucky chance this was a gospel song I knew and I think my correct answer helped put her in the mood to play and sing for me. If only I had the field tapes we shot from that session.
I did find this copy of the story that aired on the Today Show and it has a brief clip of her playing and singing, “Near the Cross” in Aretha’s unmatched gospel style. It also has her laying down the vocal track for the song, “This is for Real” which would be on her new album. Looking back at the tape reminded me of how much access we used to get to the music industry for our “On the Record” segment. At the time no network news organization was covering the music business on a regular basis until I started the “On the Record” segment. They were so thrilled to be getting the coverage and publicity that we were given permission to film this recording session with Aretha and put the story on the air two months before her album was scheduled to be released. Now the record company or the artists would film the sessions themselves, edit the material to their liking, and then try to sell the package.
When you look at the video you will notice the producer for the record sitting in the control room is a young looking Luther Vandross. This was the first of two albums he would produce for Aretha. This one would be her first gold record in several years. Of course in the early 80′s it was not only a young looking Luther, but a young looking Aretha and young Boyd, and even a young Chris Wallace who was hosting the Today Show that day.
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Nuking Nevada
Posted in: Videos on Friday, December 16th, 2011
Nuking Nevada. If you’re worried about someone setting off a nuclear weapon in the United States, it’s a little too late. We’ve already had hundreds of nuclear explosions within our own borders, the atomic fury unleashed by our own government. A little patch of desert in Nevada has been the target of more than nine hundred of those explosions as we developed and tested ever bigger and more destructive weapons.
For a while we even had a program called Operation Plowshare where we attempted to follow the Biblical admonition and beat our swords into plowshares by developing nukes for peace. Clearly that program to build stuff by blowing up stuff didn’t work.
I was reminded of my visits to the Nevada test site this week on my radio show, National Geographic Weekend when interviewing Lucy Craft who wrote the story about Japan’s Nuclear Refugees in this month’s National Geographic Magazine. Some of the towns around the compromised Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant are still to this day empty ghost towns.
On the show we discuss Japan and what’s happened after the Fukushima fallout and I also talk about my Nevada visits. Afterwards, I remembered a visit I once made to the National Atomic Museum, a museum where we pay tribute to our unique ability to blowup stuff.
This video has highlights of my atomic museum and Nevada Test Site visits. It’s a blast
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Icy Adventures
Posted in: Videos on Saturday, December 10th, 2011
Icy adventures. As we head into winter I was thinking back to one of the coldest days of my life. It was 1996 and we were in Minnesota to film a series of adventures for National Geographic Explorer. The day we arrived the temperature was hoovering around zero. That was as warm as it would get for the next week. I wanted to lock myself inside with my arms wrapped around a pot belly stove for the duration of our stay. But we were there to be outside, so I had to distract myself with all kinds of crazy adventures. We did ice fishing, ice carving, stock car racing on an ice track, dog sledding, and kayaking on Lake Superior where the water had the consistency of a frozen margarita.
It was so cold you had to put an electric blanket on the hood of the car at night so the engine would start the next morning. Several times I was sure my fingers had suffered frostbite. And my lips were so numb I could barely talk on camera without sounding like I was drunk. By the final day of our trip in Ely, Minnesota, the temperature had dropped to 60 below zero. We later learned that Ely was the coldest place on the planet on that day. It was also the day we choose to camp out, sleeping in our dog sleds.
I thought about that experience this week when interviewing two of our National Geographic Adventurers of the year on my radio show. Jon Turk and Erik Boomer this year circumnavigated Ellesmere Island by kayak and on skis. No one had ever done it before. You can hear about their frozen saga this week on National Geographic Weekend and hear about my own Minnesota winter exploits. And in this video you can see what it looks like to kayak in a slushy margarita and do an eskimo roll in icy water.
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Slicker Than Bat Guano
Posted in: Videos on Friday, November 11th, 2011
Have you heard the term, “slicker than bat ….. guano”? I think I’ve heard it before, but if not, I know for sure I have experienced it. On two different occasions, assignments for National Geographic have taken me to the bat caves of South Texas and the Devil’s Sinkhole. I was reminded of those experiences this week when talking to National Geographic photographer Joel Satore on my radio show National Geographic Weekend.
Joel was in a bat cave in Uganda when he looked up just as a bat flying overhead dropped a guano bomb. It was a direct hit in his eye. That’s a wet contact, the same as a bite for putting you at risk for a disease the bat might be carrying. The marburg virus had been detected in the cave so Joel was potentially at risk. The only thing to do was fly home and wait twenty-one days to see if he had contracted anything. It was a nerve racking time since death was a real possibility if he had been infected. Fortunately he was fine and you can see his pictures in the current issue of National Geographic Magazine.
But Joel’s story got me thinking about my own bat cave adventures and I shared some of those at the end of the radio show. There was the chance for contracting some airborne diseases in one of the caves I was in, but nothing like the marburg virus. To get into the Devil’s Sinkhole required a long rappel. But it turned out the real challenge wasn’t the rappel, or rabies, or respatory ailments, it was bat guano. I survived the bat caves, however my clothes weren’t as lucky. No matter how many times I washed them, the smell wouldn’t come out and the dog wouldn’t stop chewing them. I finally had to throw them away. This video shows some of the highlights of going into the Devil’s Sinkhole and the Eckert James River bat cave.