Michael Fremer

At the end of Part 1, Mr. Porter had just left RCA Studios.

MF: Why did you leave?

BP: I left RCA because they tried to dictate to me and I wasn't gonna be dictated to.

MF: Dictate to you what?

BP: I had a small publishing company and they told me it was a conflict of interest. I said, 'How can that be, everybody else has got one. Chet has one.” “yes, but you work with a lot of different clients.” “Yes, but I'm not abusing the privilege.” So they said either the publishing company or you go. So I made my decision. The legal department said there was nothing wrong, but personnel did. Steve Sholes called and said “Now Bill, please don't leave.” “ I said story Steve.”

Porter, not really blindfolded, was kept in the dark about what he was listening to, then asked to comment before it was revealed. (The subsequent identifications have been edited out of the transcript).

1)Dionne Warwick: “People Got To Be Free” Soulful (Produced by Chips Moman and Dionne Warwick, no engineering credit) Scepter (German) SHA-S 401

BP: It's not bad. It's been electronically gimmicked slightly. You can hear it on the horns and voices. It sounds like, to me, a second-or third generation tape that's been equalized to compensate for whatever deficiencies they heard.

Brooklyn Dodger fans weren't the only ones heartbroken when their beloved bums moved to Los Angeles. An entire L.A. neighborhood, Chávez Ravine, had to be sacrificed to make way for the new Dodger stadium. Despite the album title, Ry Cooder's Cinemascopic new album is as much about a lost time-the 1950's-as it is about a lost Mexican-American neighborhood known as Chávez Ravine.

Death Cab For Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard probably reads “Romeo and Juliet” as light comedy. Calling him a “hopeless romantic” would be an understatement of Grand Canyon-like proportions. If Bryan Ferry wears his heart on his sleeve, Gibbard wears it on a Times Square billboard with a seriousness I can't recall hearing expressed outside of opera.