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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for March 2020: Martin interviews Louie Kemp, author of Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures.
"It was at summer camp in northern Wisconsin in 1953 that I first met Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing. He was twelve years old and he had a guitar. He would go around telling everybody that he was going to be a rock-and-roll star. I was eleven and I believed him.'' So begins this honest, funny, and deeply affectionate memoir of a friendship that has spanned five decades of wild adventures, soul searching conversation, musical milestones, and enduring comradery. As Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan and Louie Kemp built a successful international business, their lives diverged but their friendship held fast. No matter how much time passed between one adventure and the next, the two ''boys from the North Country'' picked up where they left off and shared experiences that will surprise and delight Dylan fans and anybody who loves a rollicking-good rock-and-roll memoir.
Martin's interview with Louie Kemp was recorded on September 18, 2019.
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Body of Work: Whitney Houston
We talk about the ways that Whitney Houston has been or could be the soundtrack of our lives as we get into her body of work. Also, one of us may have been inspired to sing....
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Legacies Project Oral History: Nellie Hill Trapp
Born in 1922, Nellie Harrell grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She began dancing at age 14, and moved to New York City a few years. During the height of her career as a noted singer, dancer, and entertainer, she went by her married name Nellie Hill. Hill performed in early music videos called “soundies,” appeared on the cover of Jet Magazine, and frequented Black clubs such as New York’s Kelly’s Stables and Detroit’s Flame Show Bar and 20 Grand. In the 1950s she married James Trapp and had three children. After retiring, she volunteered at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
Nellie Trapp was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: George Ramsey
George Ramsey was born 1938 and grew up on East Warren Avenue in Detroit. He remembers experiencing the Detroit Race Riot of 1943 as a young child and the Detroit Riot of 1967 as an adult. He attended Northeastern High School with classmates who became famous Motown singers. Ramsey served in the United States Air Force and USPS before becoming a road manager for a Motown recording group in the late 1960s. He worked for Motown music producer Lamont Dozier in California in the 1970s.
George Ramsey was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Fred Lang
Ernst Frederick “Fred” Lang was born in 1916 in Detroit and grew up on Van Dyke Avenue. As a young man he played ragtime and jazz piano in Detroit speakeasies. He attended the University of Michigan LSA and the Medical School. After graduating in 1941, he married his longtime sweetheart, Virginia, and they raised four children. Lang was a radiologist at Harper Hospital in Detroit for 40 years and served as editor of the American Journal of Radiology. He passed away on September 26, 2014.
Fred Lang was interviewed as part of an internship at Applied Safety and Ergonomics in Ann Arbor in 2008 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for January 2020: Martin Bandyke interviews Alan Paul, co-author of Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Texas Flood, co-written by Alan Paul and Andy Aledort, is the first definitive biography of guitar legend Steve Ray Vaughan.
Just a few years after he almost died from a severe addiction to cocaine and alcohol, a clean and sober Stevie Ray Vaughan was riding high. His last album was his most critically lauded and commercially successful. He had fulfilled a lifelong dream by collaborating with his first and greatest musical hero, his brother Jimmie. His tumultuous marriage was over and he was in a new and healthy romantic relationship. Vaughan seemed poised for a new, limitless chapter of his life and career.
Instead, it all came to a shocking and sudden end on August 27, 1990, when he was killed in a helicopter crash following a dynamic performance with Eric Clapton. Just 35 years old, he left behind a powerful musical legacy and an endless stream of What Ifs. In the ensuing 29 years, Vaughan’s legend and acclaim have only grown and he is now an undisputed international musical icon. Despite the cinematic scope of Vaughan’s life and death, there has never been a truly proper accounting of his story. Until now.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Alice Sano
Alice Sano was born in 1929 in Los Angeles, California. When the U.S. entered WWII, her family was forced to move to an internment camp along with other Japanese immigrants. Eventually her father secured a job teaching Japanese to army military intelligence students at the University of Michigan, and they moved to Ann Arbor. Sano majored in music theory and cello at the U-M School of Music, and dedicated her career to teaching music.
Alice Sane was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2018 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Author Event | Linda Solomon: The Queen Next Door: Aretha Franklin, An Intimate Portrait
The Queen Next Door: Aretha Franklin, An Intimate Portrait is a book full of firsts, as photojournalist Linda Solomon was invited not only to capture historical events in Aretha’s music career showcasing Detroit, but to join in with the Franklin family’s most intimate and cherished moments in her beloved hometown. In this talk she reflects on this book which documents Aretha's life and career.
Linda Solomon met Aretha in 1983 when Linda was beginning her career as a photojournalist and newspaper columnist and was hired to capture the singer’s major career events, and to also document everything else. What developed over these years of photographing birthday and Christmas parties, annual celebrity galas, private backstage moments, photo shoots with the iconic pink Cadillac, and more, was a friendship between two women who grew to enjoy and respect one another.
Martin Bandyke, morning drive host on Ann Arbor's 107one, hosted this event.
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Rasa Festival | Music from the East and the West
Well known Indian and western musicians come together to talk about the concepts behind Indian and western music, and how they collaborate to create new music. This is accompanied by a short concert where they will present music based on these concepts.
This event was held in partnership with the 2019 Rasa Festival, an innovative India-themed multi-arts festival, produced by Akshara. The Rasa Festival is held annually in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti in September and is designed to promote a deeper awareness and appreciation for the effulgent richness and abundance of cultural heritage that stems from India. It is multi-arts and multi-disciplinary, presenting traditional as well as cutting edge work in performing, visual, literary, media/films, and culinary arts, in partnership with prominent Ann Arbor arts organizations.
Participating artists in the festival are local, national, and international Indo-American artists, artists from India as well as those who are highly inspired by Indian culture. It is a collaborative initiative, working through partnerships with key local organizations such as the Washtenaw Community College, Kerrytown Concert House, the Riverside Arts Center, and Literati Bookstore.
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Martin Bandyke Under Covers for November 2019: Martin interviews Jonathan Scott, author of The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record
In 1977, a team led by the great Carl Sagan was assembled to create a record that would travel to the stars on NASA’s Voyager probe. The Vinyl Frontier reveals the inside story of how the record was created, from the first phone call to the final launch, when Voyager 1 and 2 left Earth with a playlist that would represent humanity to any future alien races that come into contact with the probe. Each song, sound and picture that made the final cut has a story to tell.
The Golden Record is a 90-minute playlist of music from across the globe, a sound essay of life on Earth, spoken greetings in multiple languages, and more than 100 photographs, all painstakingly chosen by Sagan and his team to create an aliens' guide to Earthlings. The final playlist contains music written and performed by well-known names such as Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson, as well as music from China, India and more remote cultures, such as a community in Small Malaita in the Solomon Islands.
Through interviews with all of the key players involved with the record, this book pieces together the whole story of the Golden Record. It addresses the myth that the Beatles were left off of the record because of copyright reasons and will include new information about US president Jimmy Carter’s role in the record, as well as many other fascinating insights that have never been reported before. It also tells the love story between Carl Sagan and the project’s creative director Ann Druyan that flourishes as the record is being created.