Highly recommended. When a friend recommended it to me, I scrolled through the list to find a few favorite artists first. Then I started listeninng from the beginning, with swing jazz in the 30s (yes I know that is not really the beginning, but as the podcaster said, You have to start somewhere). I know a fair amount about the history of rock, but I know a lot more now, and I’m only up to episode 50. Click the link for an overview, but the app interface is better
This podcast is my favorite discovery from last year. I read the transcripts with a YouTube search window open in my browser so I can listen to the entirety of the songs referenced.
The Patreon subscription is well worth it. It gets you a bonus episode for every regular one. In the bonus episodes, Andrew covers some peripheral songs/artists that may have flown under your radar, or the fascinating stories of various one hit wonders.
I discovered this last year too and it is amazing. What an incredible amount of research and care Andrew puts into his work.
And I’m always amused when an episode is about a certain song and artist, but there is so much background to cover that they aren’t even mentioned for an hour or more.
If I recall correctly, the episode about “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds was mostly about Coltrane. This isn’t a criticism. This podcast constantly pulls me into parts of music history that I never thought I’d be interested in. I’m usually proven wrong on that account.
+1
A stupendous body of work. Not my usual frame of reference, but now required listening.
By the time Hickey winds his way through the back stories, twists and tangents of Song 172, Hickory Wind by the Byrds: Parts 1,2 & 3 you feel the necessity to take a long cold shower … and yet are hanging out for Song 173.
So much ego, chicanery, back stabbing, borrowing, stealing, plagiarism and crap music wrapped around the odd nugget of gold. Marvelous stuff.
Which will be…
Summary
“All Along the Watchtower” Part one on Bob Dylan. Part two; Jimi Hendrix.
I’ve been listening to this podcast after @Elmer_J.Fudd recommended it in the “Gaps in My Musical Knowledge” thread. I haven’t sprung for the Patreon subscription yet but probably will at some point, just for access to the mini-pods.
Bumping because I just finished episode 150, which was a marathon nearly four hour podcast on the Beatles from the period following the release of Revolver through the making of Sgt Pepper and up to/including the death of Brian Epstein. Wow.
The podcasts have gotten longer once he hit 100. The early ones were about a half hour, but since then it seems more often than not they are closer to an hour, sometimes 1.5 to 2 hours, and when I started the “All You Need Is Love” episode my jaw dropped when I saw how long it was.
And I don’t think these episodes really all needed to be that long. Did we really need half of the “Good Vibrations” episode to be a complete history of the guy who invented the theremin? Did we really need half of the “Tomorrow Never Knows” episode to discuss Timothy Leary and Ram Dass? But hey, it’s not my podcast, I’m just along for the ride. If Hickey thinks the deep dive is worth it, that’s his choice to make.
It looks like he has also made the choice to break some of these longer episodes into multiple parts, which seems like a good idea to me. It should at least make them easier to listen to.
Starting about three or four songs ago, the current practice is to break them up into two episodes. And separate them by about two weeks. The first episode of the most recent song (I Heard it Through the Grapevine) focused on the songwriters Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and the second half on Marvin Gaye. The one before that (All Along the Watchtower) was one episode on Bob Dylan and another on Jimi Hendrix. So the episodes are much more manageable now.
I also love this podcast. Started from episode 1 on New Year’s Day and I’m up to 115. I’ll be sad when I get up to date and have to wait two weeks for new episodes.
He’s said he already has an endpoint more or less chosen, in the year 2000. I know rock is dead but 2000 seems at least a few years early to me.
But anyway what do y’all think his end point will be?
ETA: I saw someone in an unrelated discussion cite Radiohead’s “Kid A” (released in 2000) as the end of rock because “the world’s biggest rock band put down their guitars and picked up a computer.”
I know the details can be quibbled over, but seeing as Andrew Hickey openly acknowledges that endpoints will always be arbitrary, I think this sounds like a poetic and very Hickey end to his podcast.
And arguably nothing really new happened in rock after that. New bands came out and for big with identifiable sounds, but I wouldn’t say anyone was really “innovating,” mostly just remixing previous trends in enjoyable ways.
I swear, I was writing “Probably something by Radiohead” before I saw your ETA.
2000 sounds like a good end point. I just finished watching a doc series on Lollapalooza and it was right around 2000 that the organizers realized that almost everything qualified as “alternative” and shut down for half a decade because how do you curate something that almost anything can be slotted into? The genre “Rock” as a descriptor of new music has no use in the 21st Century.
I was listening to the episode on (the) Small Faces and laughed so loud at the end that I think I startled some of my coworkers. “Oh, look at the time… I’ve got to go. We’ll pick this up again later.” 
Was it another Rod Stewart cameo?
There have been so many Rod Stewart near misses. Then at the end of the Small Faces episode, he’s talking about how Steve Marriott has split and gone to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, and the rest of the band decides to regroup as the Faces, but they need a new raspy voiced singer to replace Marriott… and oh look at the time.
Maybe somebody can help me out here. I’m hitting a little bit of a tech wall. I’ve caught up to the current podcast, so I finally got around to signing up for his Patreon so I could go back and listen to the bonus podcasts.
I also dusted off my old (free) Spotify account and have found the podcast there, which is good because it seems easier to navigate there than scrolling through Patreon. But I can’t figure out how to access the bonus podcasts on Spotify. I don’t want to have to scroll back through four years of posts on Patreon to find the early bonus episodes. Is there some way to link my Spotify and Patreon accounts so that Spotify has access to the bonus pods?
Note that I’m doing this all on my phone. Would it be easier from a laptop?
I’m still doing it the hard way, I guess. I just play the bonus eps off the Patreon page on my phone’s browser. Start at Andrew Hickey | Creating Writing and Podcasts | Patreon and there is a date sort* so you can just work your way up from the first bonus episodes back in 2018.
*Also, select Audio from the “Post type” menu to filter out announcements and such. Once you catch up, just keep an eye on the “notifications” alert on the left side to see when new episodes drop.
When was Radiohead “the world’s biggest rock band”? c. 2000 is also when the whole garage rock revival was brewing and rock was becoming cool again in the form of indie rock and lots of “The _____” bands. And, love it or hate it, nu metal was in the middle of its heyday.
The end of the Rock Era (sometime in the 1990s, I guess) wasn’t the end of Rock: just the time when it stopped being the predominate genre of Pop music. The last episode could be about the beginning of a new trend in Rock rather the ending of one. I don’t know what that could be, but that’s why I’m sticking around for 325 more episodes.
According to this, that would 1992:
It looks like it briefly matched R&B’s lead in 1994. My money is on “When I Come Around” by Green Day. I’ll be back to collect in 20 years.