Transcript
Chris (0:04)
Double Elvis.
Zeth (0:07)
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Chris (0:38)
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Yeah, me too. This is the podcast that comes after the Podcast. Welcome to Disgraceland. The Afterparty. Welcome to the Disgraceland bonus episode. A little thing we like to call the After Party. This is the show after the show. The party after the party. The bridge to get you from one full episode of Disgraceland to the other. The backyard to dig into the dirt. Our mission? To uncover the truth, to confront the myth, to reclaim the story. On this bonus episode we are discussing incredible stories of rock and roll redemption. Everybody from Tina Turner to Ozzy Osbourne, Frank Sinatra and you know, everyone in between. In the exclusive portion of this after party, we dive into some of the weirdest number one song New Year's Day music history, getting into your emails, comments, DMs, and as always, a whole lot of Rosie. This is the podcast for the musically obsessed, the outsiders, the independent thinkers who know that the best history is the history that gets buried. Disgraceland is where I tell the stories they didn't want told. The kind you'll end up telling someone else. All right discos, let's get into it. Alright, it's officially the New year, so Happy New year. I hope 2026 is everything that you want it to be. I love this time of year. For me at least there's. There's always so much hope. And you can feel it. You can feel it in the air. You can feel it with your family, hopefully you can feel it with the people you work with ideally. And you know, for me, hope is, it's, it's like a drug. I mean, what else are we doing here if we're not hoping for, for something, something more, something better, hoping to become better versions of ourselves. And you know, maybe I think that way because I'm creative and I'm constantly trying to create something different and new and say things in, in new and in different ways, say things that with more clarity, say things above familiar subjects with unique perspective that I haven't necessarily shared before. So I'm always thinking about this type of stuff and hope is a big component to that thinking. And for artists, I feel like if hope is more than a drug, it's like oxygen. The hope that the new year brings can be a catalyst for creative change. Like I mentioned, and as we look at music history, that change for a lot of rock stars meant redemption. And that redemption lends itself to incredible storytelling stories of redemption that are, are so dramatic that if you handed them in as Hollywood scripts, Hollywood would be like, no, this is, this is too fantastical. This goes out of the bounds of reality. Let's look at Ozzy Osbourne. April 1979. Ozzy Osbourne was kicked out of the band that he co founded, Black Sabbath. And he spent the next few months holed up in a hotel room in Hollywood, spending, I think he had like almost a hundred thousand dollars as part of a buyout that he got from, from the band. And he used it all on drugs. And he just did a bunch of cocaine while he was in that hotel room licking his wounds. But by the end of the year, by the end of 1979 for Ozzy Osbourne, hope had overcome despair. Ozzy had a new band and a new album in the works. Blizzard of Oz. Ozzy hoped that Blizzard of Oz would launch his solo career in that next year, in 1980. And that's exactly what happened when 1980 rolled around. Blizzard of Oz went on to sell well, like cocaine, which is to say it sold very well. Blizzard of Oz went platinum without the help of a radio single, but on the back of Ozzy Osbourne's Hope. And all of a sudden Ozzy Osbourne wakes up in a new decade and he's more popular than the band that he was just kicked out of. Incredible story of just, you know, lows and highs and highs and lows and ultimately redemption. In the end, then, it doesn't end here, obviously. Ozzy's story goes on and on and on, and there's more highs and lows, including the, The. The. The point where he almost murders his wife and he manages to somehow come back from that fantastic storytelling. Like I said, redemption. At the end of 1987. Here's another one. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anthony Kiedis, their front man, decided that by 87, it was time that he and his band's guitarist, hello Slovik, face their addiction to heroin because their life's work to this point, the band that they were in, the band that they loved, the Chili Peppers, the existence of that band was on the line. And their latest album, 1987, Uplift Mofo Party Plan, it had entered the Billboard 200. So now these guys, they've got some. They've got stakes to their story. They've got a real chance to break through as a band. So Anthony and Hillel, at the end of 1987, they decide to give up heroin together before touring Europe in support of their new record, Uplift Mofo Party Plan. They were going to go on tour in January of 1988. So, you know, right in the new year, right? Given a heroin for the new year, that's the plan. Okay? Now, giving up heroin worked for Anthony Kiedis, but it did not work for Hillel. He relapsed on the road in Europe, was kicked out of the band briefly while they were on tour, and then asked to rejoin to finish the tour. And that's what happened. Chili Peppers returned to the States and they were a mess. And they all go their separate ways. And then they start to resurface, but they can't find hello. Turns out his body was found in his Hollywood apartment on June 25, 1988. Now here we are at the bottom, the lowest of the low. The thing that Anthony Kiedis and the rest of his band feared the most had happened. One of the Red Hot Chili Peppers had died of a heroin overdose. Now, as 1988 progressed, the loss of hello Slovak, their guitar player, proved almost to be too much for their band. Drummer Jack Irons quit, saying that he didn't want to be part of something that could kill him or his friends. New drummer and a new guitarist briefly joined the band. But by the end of 1988. They were both replaced by Chad Smith and John Frusciante. As 1988 became 1989, the new Red Hot Chili Peppers were readying themselves to start January pre production for what would become their classic album, Mother's Milk. And they're starting this process with 50% new band. Okay, not an easy thing to do. Not at all. I don't care if your bass player is named Flea. It's really hard to replace, never mind one member, two members, especially a drummer and a lead guitar player. I mean, come on, it's not like they're just slotting in a. Well, not like you could replace. I was going to say slot in a bass player, but I guess Flea is the one guy you absolutely could not replace in the Chili Peppers. That's all beside the point. They're going in in January of 1989. They're going into pre production for Mother's Milk. Whatever their hopes were, you have to think first and foremost it was the hope that they didn't suck. Okay? You have to think that anything beyond that was a win. But now we have hindsight and we have biographies, autobiographies, excuse me. And we know that Anthony Kiedis and the rest of the Red Hot Chili Peppers were hoping for more than to just not suck. Okay? Uplift. Mofo Party Plan was a Billboard charting album. They wanted their next record, Mother's Milk, to be a mainstream breakthrough, which is not easy for any band, never mind a band that's replacing 50% of its members. And that's what they were hoping for. And that's exactly what happened. Mother's Milk went gold and set the stage for what would become the band's not just a hit record, but a culture defining moment. When they released the follow up to Mother's Milk a few years later with Blood Sugar Sex Magic, an album that. It was everywhere when it was released. All over mtv, all over the radio. It was the song for My Senior Hop. It was just an explosive record. People who had no idea about alternative music knew or had heard at least of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They became a household name. And just a few years prior to that, on the verge of 1989, they were basically dead in the water. Hope went to work just like it did in July 1976 when Anna Mae Bullock left her abusive husband after a final violent altercation. Anna May had only 36 cents to her name when she left her husband. She didn't seek money in the divorce from her rock star husband, just the right to continue to use her stage name, Tina Turner, and she won that right. And for the next six New Year's Eves, Tina Turner plied her craft on crummy stages in third and fourth rate nightclubs, lounges and cabarets, fighting her way back to what she hoped would be a respectable career in Entertainment. And on December 31, 1983, Tina Turner watched herself in a pre taped performance on Barcelona television, performing with a new look. Heavily teased hair, bangs, big hoop earrings, trademark legs for days. And she thought about the future. She thought about the hope that she had for a new album that she'd begun production on for Capitol Records. A new record that she hoped would re establish her as an entertaining force in her own right. Without her abusive husband, Ike Turner backing her. Tina Turner hoped that this record would make her own name, Tina, ring out. Private Dancer was released in the spring of 1984. The album was instantly adored by critics. Its singles played endlessly by FM radio, its videos rotated heavily by mtv, and it sold millions and millions of copies. Tina Turner, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, like Ozzy Osbourne, and like so many other artists we've covered in disgrace Night. Johnny Cash, Iggy Pop, ac, dc, Frank Sinatra. They were down and nearly out. Their careers seemingly over. But were it not for this crucial ingredient that seems to be in abundance this time of year. Hope. Hope makes for great storytelling. Hope makes for a lot of great things. It's hard, it's hard to list them all without sounding like a total fucking cheeseball. But it's part of what gets us up in the morning and gets us going. And it comes into focus for me at least, and you know, for a lot of the artists we cover around this time of year, I hope it does for you as well. I hope you guys are having a great holiday season. I hope you're all gearing up to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve this year, whether it's global superstardom like Tina Turner or perhaps something more modest like a few more quiet nights at home with your family, perhaps some peace of mind. Whatever it is, I hope you get it and I hope to keep talking to you here in Disgraceland every week. We got a lot of great stories planned for you guys in 2026, in addition to these weekly after party episodes. One thing that we're going to start doing beginning next week here in Disgraceland is laying out our new full episodes for you guys with a little bit more information and a little bit more intentionality. Now, one of the things that's changed in Disgraceland over the last few years is that Disgraceland, the show used to be much more of a seasonal show where we release 12 weekly episodes seasonally and then take a bunch of weeks off before releasing a new season. Now, the cool thing about this was, you know, in addition to having, you know, a whole lot less work to do, but that's, you know, I'm only kidding about that. The cool thing was as a result of this schedule where we were sort of releasing seasons and batches, when these batched releases would happen, it would create these moments of excitement around discovering which artists we'd all be digging into at the same time. And now that we publish episodes every week, we've lost those big reveals. So what I'm going to start doing is once every three or four months, I'm going to pop into the feed with a reveal episode, so to speak, a behind the scenes episode. We're going to talk about what artists are coming over the next 12 or so weeks, coming immediately. And we're going to give you guys insight into those stories, the crimes, the myths, the transgressions, all of it. And we're going to give, like I said, a bit of behind the scenes peek at how these stories are chosen and how they're being put together in real time. What we're doing for research, what we're planning on doing for music, which parts of the stories we're leaning into, which parts of the stories we're leaving on the table. I'm also doing this in part because what we've got going on in Patreon for 2020, if you're in on the $10 tier, if you're a $10 tier All Access member in Patreon, you're going to have the ability to meet with Seth and I, and perhaps Matt as well, to help determine and choose which artists that we're going to cover in these new behind the scenes episodes, like the one you're going to get next week, they're going to take on more weight and relevance. You're going to get to hear, if you're a $10 patron, you're going to get to hear sort of the results of your thinking and your choices coming to life right alongside our thinking. So that's all, that's all happening. It's all happening in 2026, that behind the scenes episode that the seasonal reveal is coming your way next week. And then right after that, we start the new year with our brand new episode on Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls and the mystery surrounding his death. And from there we're going to get into brand new episodes. I'm not going to burn them all now. You're going to have to wait till next week to hear which ones we're coming at you with. But I'm very, very excited. You know, we did rely heavily on the suggestions that you guys have made over the past few months, just throughout the year, really, here in the afterparty with your voicemails and your texts, emails, of course, DMs, we listen. We tried to incorporate a bunch of your suggestions, a bunch of new female artists as well that I'm really excited about. So that's all coming. It's all coming next week. You're going to hear all about that. In the meantime, we are rewinding this week for New Year's with Hank Williams, who famously died on New Year's Day 1953. So obviously there's some relevance there. More on New Year's Related Music in the exclusive section of this after party where I'm going to be reviewing some of the stranger number one songs from from New Year's Day going back through music history. Gotta be an all access member to cop that though, go to disgraceandpod.com to sign up and unlock exclusive content like the content you're going to get later in the after party here, like our mini episodes. And you're also going to get ad free listening and access to our Disgraceland community chat on Patreon. Memberships start for as little as a dollar per month. That's all@gracelandpod.com to sign up. I'll be back right after this with your voicemails, texts, DMs and more.