Stuff You Should Know

The drum intro for Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks.

Like I don't think it's a it just it's basically like oh this this is Led Zeppelin sample rather than like that's a great thing about Amen Brother.

If we want to start out with trying to explain to people what a sample is, and most people know this.

There are no further places to look than James Brown's 1970 song, Funky Drummer.

That's Funky Drummer.

James Brown has been sampled, and this is not just that song, but a lot of it comes from Funky Drummer, 2,729 times.

You can make a case that Funky Drummer provided the basis for hip hop, like all early hip hop songs, especially in like the mid to late eighties, all use that drum break, right?

So you take the Funky Drummer from a James Brown song and you take Sly and the Family Stone's Trip to Your Heart, the background vocals.

Sometimes you're sampling stuff from like a TV show or a movie or like the Living Color song, Cult of Personality.

And if you want to hear a classic example of the Mellotron flute.

Aqualung. No. Ready? Aqualung.

That was the intro for the Beatles Strawberry Fields and that was Paul McCartney playing the flute sample of the Mellotron on the Mellotron.

In 1961 James Tenney took Blue Suede Shoes from Elvis Presley.

It's really hard to listen to. It is very hard to listen to. It's a it's a piece of electronic music that's deconstructed.

And ended up writing a cookbook called Meals to Die For.

If you remember and they hit it big in 1980 with the song Freedom which sampled Get Up and Dance by the band Freedom.

In 2003 the Beastie Boys I said the landmark case Newton V. Diamond.

The very beginning of Pass the Mic contains this six second flute stab.

And they got the rights the sample rights for the sound recording but not the compositional rights because they were like you know this guy played it so we'll pay him.

But it's three notes on a flute like we don't feel like we should have to pay compositional rights.

For instance, the second clip we're going to play, which is the Amen break from Amen Brother.

And it was a B side from a very little known song from a group called the Winstons.

That's the Amen break.

And dude, that one has been sampled thousands of times.

So that one gave birth to drum and bass in jungle.

So Bridgeport sued Jay-Z for sampling Madonna's Justify My Love.

So Bridgeport made a big flap in 2005 when they sued Jay-Z for his song, Justify My Thug.

Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan in 1956 had a more commercial version of I guess you would call it music concrete with Flying Saucer.

They took rock and roll hits from that era and mashed it up with a fake news report about aliens landing from outer space.

Remember all that mashup stuff they used to do like Bette Midler's From a Distance with like that during the first Gulf War.

It would be like Bette Midler's from a distance interspersed with patriotic speeches.

Well, in Guns and Roses on their song Civil War, remember at the beginning of that they played the Cool Hand Luke bit over the guitar and then Axl's weaselly little voice comes through.

And I also got a lot of stuff from a writer, a bunch of interviews and magazine articles on this guy John Birdzall who wrote a book called The Man Who Ate Too Much about James Beard.

Anytime before 2020 when John Birdzall's book came out.

And it's really interesting to see things that were written about James Beard in 1997 or 2010 or whatever.

But in some ways, it's like, man, it's too bad we can't go back to the happier interpretation of James Beard.

...wealthy straight parties at the time...the food itself, apparently in the finger foods and sandwiches are all kind of boring. And apparently this stuff was just way better and more creative.

And he got particularly good at creating cocktail party food, finger foods, canapes, hors d'oeuvres, that kind of stuff.

So much so that he ended up making it, writing his first cookbook on that, which we'll talk about in a second.

In his 1940 cookbook, Hors d'oeuvres and canapes, there's no mention of them.

There's no mention of any of the hors d'oeuvres, or of their ownership in hors d'oeuvres, I should say.

Wrote a lot of books from 1940 to 1983. He had 20 cookbooks, including in 1959, sort of his seminal work, the James Beard Cookbook that had, it was kind of like a kitchen Bible, which apparently he wasn't a big fan of those kinds of books.

And this was not even close to his favorite of his own.

But it was the best-selling and had everything in there from how to make like a French cassoulet to how to boil water and was, I think, the first cookbook to feature the chef on the cover.

It was just unheard of to do at the time. It was just, you know, the joy of cooking or whatever. You would just have text.

And he was the first person to put his mug on there.

...in his cookbook from 1949, the fireside cookbook, when he basically made what is an omelette peasant, which is a French for peasant omelet.

But he called it a country omelet.

And all he did was...put in smoked bacon.

And it just seemed completely American.

She describes how her future husband and his brother in law were living in the back of their feed store in town with the word batching.

And they said they were batching in the rear room or something.