The Echo Chamber Brandi Howell

On March 6, 1971, a group of some of the top musicians from the United States -– Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, and more -– boarded a plane bound for Ghana to perform in a musical celebration that was dubbed the “Soul to Soul Festival.” Thousands of audience members filled Accra’s Black Star Square for a continuous 15 hours of music. The festival was planned in part for the annual celebration of Ghana’s independence, but also as an invitation to a “homecoming” for these noted African-American artists to return to Africa.

This episode revisits the famed music festival on its 50th anniversary and explores the longstanding legacy of cultural exchange with African diasporans originally set forth in the 1950s by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Tune in for interviews with noted musicologist John Collins, poet and scholar Tsitsi Ella Jaji, concert goers and more.



This story was originally produced for AfroPop Worldwide.  To hear more stories from this Peabody-award winning show, visit www.afropop.org..

As we gather this week to witness the inauguration of our new president, we find our nation in a state of great political unrest.  While certain recent events of violence at the Capitol are no doubt unprecedented, it is certainly not the first time an inauguration in our country has been met with divide.  



In 1973, the United States was reaching the concluding stages of our involvement in the Vietnam.  And while the war would soon come to an end, the proceeding weeks leading up to the inauguration were met with some of the most intense and deadly bombing campaigns  the war had witnessed.  The anti-war movement was unhinged.  They had marched, they had protest - all to seemingly no avail when it came to changing the foreign policies of Richard Nixon.  



So what to do next....  American conductor, Leonard Bernstein, gathered an impromptu orchestra and choir to perform a "Concert for Peace", following his belief that by creating beauty, and by sharing it with as many people as possible, artists had the power to tip the earthly balance in favor of brotherhood and peace.







Special thanks to Michael Chikinda, Alicia Kopfstein, Matt Holsen, and Bernie Swain for sharing their insight and memories of the musical events surrounding Nixon and his second inauguration in 1973.

A Plea for Peace: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon, and the Music of the 1973 Inauguration

ARCHIVAL:  Not everybody is here this weekend to celebrate. Thousands of demonstrators are expected. They've spent weeks organizing and are here to protest the war.  "This is one anti-war demonstration that Mr. Nixon is not going to avoid.  Past demonstrations he has fled town, nobody sees him now. He's never explained to the nation why he ordered these saturation bombing rates on Hanoi and Haiphong, but this is one time he's going to have to be present.  We know he's not going to be out of town and we want to be there at the same time."



Alicia Kopfstein (AK):  The number of people who were in DC, it was thousands upon thousands. 18,000 were at the cathedral alone.   To have the cathedral so full like that... full to the gills. There was no room. It was just overwhelming, to try to find a place to park, of course, but to be with so many like-minded people.  Contrasting with so many protests now where there's violence, it was so peaceful. There was such an attitude of goodwill and camaraderie and companionship. That was just incredible. I'm Dr. Alicia Kopfstein, I teach at American University and I'm a contributor and co-editor of a recent collection of essays called Leonard Bernstein and Washington DC. I was a singer in Leonard Bernstein's "Concert for Peace" that happened at the Washington National Cathedral in January of 1973. 







ARCHIVAL:  Introduction to the three official inaugural concerts tonight. There's a fourth unofficial one. Leonard Bernstein is conducting what is called a "Concert for Peace" at the Washington Cathedral.  Admission is free, arrangements have been made to pipe the program outside.  It is thought that 10,000 persons might show up, many of them anti-war protesters.  



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ku9HUWZDas



AK:  There was hope, there was desire for peace, there was love, but there's also a resignation, a fear because people had done their utmost to try to protest the war and it didn't seem to change anything.  Years and years and years of protest still led to the Christmas bombing.  So it was just, we're getting desperate. Let's do everything we possibly can.



The Vietnam War went from 1959 to 1975. When Nixon was elected the second time, it was shortly after some more horrors in the Vietnam war. We had Kent State and the Pentagon papers, the My Lai massacres. Films and photographs were available in Time and Look and all the major magazines and newspapers showing women and children and young people just lying d...

Some candidates have their campaigns for presidency planned out before they can even vote.  For others, such as General Eisenhower, it took a little Broadway magic to coax him into the race.  On this episode of The Echo Chamber, we bring you a special election episode – filled with a closer look into some unknown, and perhaps surprising, facts about campaign songs and how they have helped shape presidential history.



Special thanks to David Haven Blake, Cheri Burk and Juliet Cesario, Paul Christiansen, and Bob Gardner.  And to the archivists at the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford Presidential libraries for their hard work and dedication to preserve this important campaign material.

This is an expanded version of a story that originally aired on KALW in 2018 when Yoko Arimichi and her Powell Street Blues Band were celebrating their 40th anniversary at The Saloon in North Beach.  The band formed when Yoko was busking around Powell and Market Streets in the late 70s.  



Yoko Arimichi and her Powell Street Blues are currently one of the longest running acts at The Saloon, one of San Francisco's oldest bars.  Yoko can wail on an electric guitar with a flair that combines B.B. King, Chuck Berry, and Neil Young.



"We arrived [in the US] the same date, different year, but same date, that The Beatles first came to the United States. Every year February 7th I see The Beatles anniversary and I always think, mine too!"

She was born in Japan and raised playing classical music, but her life changed when The Beatles came to the Tokyo Budokan in 1966. She swapped her classical flute for a guitar, finagled passage on an American cargo ship toting Mazdas from Hiroshima,  and never looked back.  



Special thanks to Yoko Arimichi and her Powell Street Blues Band, Myron Mu and all of the staff at The Saloon.  This story was produced in collaboration with Mary Franklin Harvin.  

On this episode of The Echo Chamber, Shonen Knife – a story of cultural exchange through the cassette tape.



But also a story of an era in history just before the stronghold of the looming internet drastically changed, among so many other things, the way we consume and discover music.  It was a time when culture – as writer Karen Schoemer said – was precious, you really had to fight for it.  



A closer look at how cassettes, alongside fanzines and college radio, all worked to create an environment that made possible the seemingly improbable circumstance of an all-girl band from Osaka, Japan eventually opening for Nirvana – one of the biggest musical acts of the 90s, and how these women have retained their status of cultural influence some 40 years after their bands' origin.  



This episode features interviews with Shonen Knife; Karen Schoemer, former music critic of the New York Times; and Brooke McCorkle Okazaki, Assistant Professor of Music at Carleton College and author of the forthcoming book, Shonen Knife's Happy Hour: Food, Gender, Rock and Roll

The Osaka Ramones – The International Impact of Shonen Knife

Naoko Yamano (NY):  Sheena is a punk rocker [sings The Ramones "Sheena is a Punk Rocker]



NY:  I'm Naoko, I play the guitar.



Atsuko Yamano (AY):  I'm Atsuko, I play the bass guitar.



Risa Kawano (RK):  I'm Risa.  I play the drums.



NY:  Shonen means boy in Japanese and it's a very old brand name of a pencil knife.  And the word 'shonen' has very cute feeling and the knife has a little dangerous feeling, so when cute and dangerous combined together, it's just like our band.  So I put that name. 



Originally I liked The Beatles a lot when I was a child, and then in the late 70s, punk pop movement was happening and I became a big fan of The Ramones or Buzzcocks.  First I listened to their music through radio. There was a radio program in Osaka and they played The Ramones or Buzzcocks.  Many punk music...



When I was 15 years old I got an acoustic guitar.  The strings were so hard and I hurt my fingers so I couldn’t play the acoustic guitar but after I get an electric guitar a few years after that. I rather like pop melody line punk rock, and inspired by such kinds of bands, I wanted to start my own band.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsOGXEwl1Z8



Brooke McCorkle Okazaki (BM):  Shonen Knife – they formed in 1981.  Naoko decided to form a rock and roll band after she heard some Ramones on the radio.  My name is Brooke McCorkle Okazaki.  I am an Assistant Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and I am the author of "Shonen Knife's Happy Hour: Food Gender and Rock and Roll".  Michie and Naoko were currently working as secretaries and workers in a machinery company in Osaka, and Atsuko was actually still  a high school student.  She wound up graduating and going to fashion school.  They all worked day jobs until 1994 when they went on the big North American tour.  And it was then when they decided to quite and become full time musicians.  So they were slugging it out for a good 13 years before becoming full time musicians.  And they've been full time musicians since then which is just amazing.



NY:  The Japanese Minna Tanoshiku means “Let’s have fun together”.  We recorded it at our friend’s house and everybody was very DIY.  One day a guy who’s record label is called Zero Records came to our show and he offered that he would like to release our record.  For that cassette album we copied 40 cassettes and we put our kissmark on each jacket. 



First I got postal mail from Calvin Johnson from K Records and then we exchanged letters because there was no internet at that time and of course there was no facsimile too.  So Calvin Johnson said he wanted to release our album from his label K Records.

On today’s episode, Maximum RocknRoll – the story behind the famed punk institution.



Beginning in 1977, a group of Bay Area music fans led by Tim Yohannan, began a weekly radio show out of the studio at KPFA in Berkeley, California. The driving impulse behind the show was simple – an unabashed uncompromising world of punk rock. By 1982, the punk scene had grown into a worldwide movement and the founders of the show launched Maximum RocknRoll as a print fanzine, dedicated to anti-corporate ideals, leftist politics and relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands from every inhabited continent of the globe. Over the next several decades, what started as a do it yourself labor of love amongst a handful of friends had extended to include literally thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of readers. For many, it became the punk rock bible. The inky smudge of the black and white newsprint providing a voice in community for young teenagers around the world, introducing them to bands and a sense of creative expression they had not known before. By 2019, the landscape of the punk underground as well as print media itself had dramatically shifted and MRR announced the end to its print publication. Over these 42 years with over 1600 radio shows and 400 issues of fanzine to its claim, MRR came to represent a certain do-it-yourself ethos that extended far beyond the music itself.



As the print scene came to an end last year, I invited some well the longstanding Maximum contributors to come together for a night to talk about that the zine and its lasting impact on the global punk scene. Here’s our conversation..



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Special thanks to BetaBrand for hosting this event. And thanks again to Paul Curran, Martin Sprouse and Matt Badenhop participating in this conversation. For more information on Maximum Rocknroll, or to get involved, visit www.maximumrocknroll.com