Search Results for: oral history

All Hail Veruca Salt: The Oral History of American Thighs

Longreads Pick

With unprecedented speed after forming, the Chicago band recorded and released an album whose sound helped define the early 90s alternative era. This is the album’s story, timed to the album’s 25th anniversary.

Source: The AV Club
Published: Sep 25, 2019
Length: 42 minutes (10,651 words)

The Oral History of Serious Eats

Longreads Pick

In the early days of food blogging, these food nerds’ ambitious experiment helped shape how online food journalism could look, but the struggle for financial stability, editorial integrity, sleep, and work-life balance was never ending.

Source: Grubstreet
Published: Jun 18, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,757 words)

The Oral History of Office Space: Behind the Scenes of the Cult Classic

Longreads Pick

At one point, Twentieth Century Fox Film Group tried to convince Mike Judge, Office Space‘s director, to cast Matt Damon, feeling the film wouldn’t draw audiences without a star. Twenty years later, it’s inconceivable that anyone but Ron Livingston could have played Peter Gibbons.

Published: Jan 11, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,043 words)

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

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Three Feet From God: An Oral History of Nirvana ‘Unplugged’

Longreads Pick

Twenty-five years ago, Nirvana turned down their amps and played the most memorable, original, and tender performance of their career. Here’s how history was made.

Source: The Ringer
Published: Nov 14, 2018
Length: 35 minutes (8,958 words)

‘We Changed Culture’: An Oral History of Vibe Magazine

Longreads Pick
Source: Billboard
Published: Sep 27, 2018
Length: 27 minutes (6,985 words)

Little Bits of Paper Everywhere: An Oral History of Snipehunt Magazine and Kathy Molloy

Longreads Pick

Between 1988 and 1997, a vast network of volunteers and freelance writers designed, published and distributed an independent culture magazine called Snipehunt in Portland, Oregon. It. Then it abruptly ended and its charistmatic editor disappeared.

Published: Sep 27, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,087 words)

Going All In: An Oral History of ‘Rounders’

Longreads Pick
Source: The Ringer
Published: Sep 20, 2018
Length: 44 minutes (11,214 words)

Oral History Project Grounds Story of Monticello in the Lives of the Enslaved

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's House, in Virginia.

For Smithsonian magazine, author Andrew M. Davenport discusses the work of Getting Word, an oral history project that, since 1993, has collected histories of African American families who lived at Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, Monticello.

By identifying descendants of families owned by Jefferson—like the Herns, Gillettes, Grangers and the many branches of the Hemings family, among others—and carefully recording their oral histories, the project’s founders, Lucia “Cinder” Stanton, Dianne Swann-Wright and Beverly Gray, and their successors have learned from dozens of American families from the mid-18th century until the present.

The fact of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s relationship is now considered a “settled matter” by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, due to the work of Getting Word and years of scholarship by historian Annette Gordon-Reed. A space where Hemings is thought to have lived is now open, for the first time, to Monticello’s public.

At one point, according to Davenport, “about 400 enslaved laborers” called Monticello home. Getting Word conducted more than one hundred interviews and additional supplemental archival research over the years; they’ve unearthed a sprawling black community at the plantation, made up of individuals whose lives most people know little about.

In the summer of 2016, [descendants] Velma and Ruth had been contacted by Gayle Jessup White, a community engagement officer with Monticello and the only descendant of Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family employed there. From their aunts and uncles, Velma and her cousins had heard stories about descent from Monticello’s African-American community. They had heard stories that one female in each generation was supposed to be named Sally for Sally Hemings.

White had been researching her third great-grandfather, Peter Hemings, an older sibling of Sally Hemings and a talented man who served as a cook for Jefferson after being trained by his brother James, who had studied the art in France and is widely considered the finest chef in early America. Peter also learned to become a brewer and a tailor. In a letter, Jefferson once described Peter as a man of “great intelligence.”

No surviving papers in Peter’s hand have been found. White learned that Peter and his wife, Betsy, enslaved at Thomas Mann Randolph’s Edgehill plantation, named one of their children Sally, after Peter’s sister. She would become Velma and Ruth’s great-grandmother, the mother of their grandfather Anderson. White’s great-grandmother was Anderson’s sister. In a memorable phone call, White confirmed the stories Velma and Ruth had heard and invited them to participate in Getting Word.

Later, Davenport describes how Getting Word got its start and considers how the project will likely change how the nation engages with narratives of its founders.

African-Americans were by far in the majority at Monticello. Monticello was a Black space. People of African descent shaped the entire landscape: how the food tasted, what the place sounded and felt like. Though Jefferson considered himself the patriarch, and though most every American identifies Monticello with Jefferson, it is important to recall that people of African descent, from the time the first brick of his “autobiographical masterpiece” was laid until Jefferson’s death, were in the majority…

“Jefferson was not a great man unto himself,” says [descendant] Jay. “He had unpaid, enslaved individuals who were extremely skilled and talented. And for the most part, they’re all from the same families. These five to eight families from the beginning to the end.”

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An Oral History of the Muppets

Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson on set of "The Muppet Movie" in 1979. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.)

Studio 360, the public-radio show and Slate podcast, shares an oral history of the Muppets. In the early years, before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show made them famous with kids, creator Jim Henson struggled to find the right setting for his personality-packed foam-and-felt creations; their origins were in violent, adult-themed shorts, including a brief stint on Saturday Night Live.

Love the Muppets? Read an interview with the man behind Big Bird, or a story on the man who tried to keep the Muppets going after Jim Henson’s death.

Herships: Seitz says the Muppets remind us of ourselves.
Take the relationship at the show’s heart, between Kermit and Miss Piggy.

Seitz: It’s a really dysfunctional relationship. For starters, Miss Piggy, let’s be honest, here—Miss Piggy is a handful. There’s just no denying that Miss Piggy is about as high-maintenance as it gets. And also Miss Piggy is a pathological narcissist. She really is. Like, if I was going to diagnose her, that’s probably where I would start.

Herships: So what’s coming in to mind right now is, wow, they need to go to counseling. Like, marriage counseling.

Seitz: If Kermit were my friend, I would actually set some limits. I’d have to say, look Kermit, I love you man, but either you have to break up with Miss Piggy, or you need to never talk to me about your problems again. Those are your two choices. I can’t have any of this grey-scale anymore ’cause it’s killing me. But if they were actual people that you knew, it would be a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. You wouldn’t know which one of them to block first on your phone.

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