Cool Cat: How Cats Are the Soul of Rock 'n' Roll

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Okay, just just put your paw here. Yeah, very good. Okay, and now hold still, hold still. Okay, okay. Just strum.

(00:09):
That was a nice try. Let's try that one more time Snuggy. Okay, are you ready?
Holy...oh my god, Eddie!
Yeah!
You're never gonna believe what Snuggles just did!
One, two, one, two, one, two, three, four! Welcome back, cool cats and cat allies alike to

(00:32):
6 Degrees of Cats. The world's best and only cat themed culture, history and science
podcast.
The year is 1995.
The setting, a classroom, gray carpeting, flickering fluorescent lights, orange walls and a
motley crew of about 20-sullen, scowling, rumpled-looking youths of varying shapes, sizes and

(00:57):
admixtures of Irish or vaguely Slavic origin. And me! There I am!
Hidden under layers of fleece and flannel. Be speckled with braces and long,
straggly hair that got stuck in the bolts of those kidney-shaped desks we had to squeeze
into, sitting in the middle front left near the exit, just out of the sight lines of anyone

(01:23):
who was looking for an easy target.
At the top of the hour, our teacher, a cotton-headed 20-year teaching veteran who surely recognized
the features of former students in some of the faces of this scrappy parcel, plugged in
a dusty cassette player from the 80s and announced that we're gonna be trying out this new curriculum.

(01:44):
We were passed out these shiny-looking workbooks with pictures of top 20 artists from the past decade.
Open it to page 12, we were instructed.
On this page was a sepia-toned photo of a woman, a young black woman, wearing no jewelry
and just a simple black turtleneck. She had short braided hair and was photographed from the shoulders up.

(02:08):
The teacher pressed play on the deck, a simple acoustic loop faded in for a few bars.
My friend Hillary, whose brother was in prison, looked over at me. "I think my sister has this tape."
Soon a low-warm voice surfaced.
Bratty freckles from the back whose parent's small farm was just up the road from mine,

(02:30):
rasped, "Is that a dude?" A few others snickered and most of us just rolled our eyes.
As we listened, a simple scene was illustrated through the narrator's one-sided dialogue.
They seemed to be a young person speaking to their partner.
The song kind of told a story about someone, anyone anywhere really, with nothing to lose,

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but not a lot to begin with. Looking for a way out of the life they were currently living.
A way out of a home with an alcoholic father, bills piling up and the phone ringing off the
hook, having to leave school early, broken down cars and shelters, and eventually all the broken

(03:13):
promises that come with that kind of debt. As that song faded out, I noticed that the room was quiet.
Freckles and friends, usually the focus of most of the power, were sitting low in their seats,
and when the teacher asked what we thought of the song? For the first time in the history

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of class, Jimmy, whose sister had just had a baby, raised his hand.
This illustrates one of the reasons that I got into rock and roll music.
"What? Tracy Chapman? Well, actually, that's not rock and roll. That's soft. What even is that?"

(03:57):
Whatever, dude. First, rude. I think Tracy Chapman embodies the spirit of rock and roll so much
more than the vast majority of those topping the Billboard Rock charts right now.
That's actually what brings us here today. The spirit of rock and roll.
Cats and rock and roll have a long history together. In fact, I think the case can be made

(04:19):
that their likeness and general existence, their "cattitude," if you will, is the soul of rock and roll.
So in this episode of 6 Degrees of Cats, with the help of no less than three cat-loving rock and rollers,
four, if you count me. We're gonna dive into the history of rock and roll and the many cool cats who
have shaped its colorful history. Okay, fine, music patterns. Technically and probably by her own

(04:50):
management, Tracy Chapman's fast car, that song I was talking about earlier, is probably more
accurately described as a blues or folk song. Let's check it out. Billboard charts list her singles
on alternative, pop and rock charts. Let's see. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,

(05:15):
rock and roll is a type of popular dance music originating in the 1950s. Characterized by a heavy
beat and simple melodies. An amalgam of rhythm and blues and country music. Usually, based on a
12-bar structure and an instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums. (Are you Okay, Brian?) Cool, fast car.

(05:40):
There's definitely blues in that song and there's that upbeat tempo and the arrangement of the
instrument definitely rocks out. I rest in my case. Rock and roll, man. What it is, what it was,
and what it will be. Let's actually pick it up from that 12-bar blues structure and instrumentation,
specifically the guitar. Because for so many, that's actually where it all started.

(06:05):
I got interested in the guitar around the time that Tracy Chapman's song came on my radar. God bless
my parents. My ever-loving, patient and understanding parents. When they noticed my interest in picking
up the guitar, they agreed to let me quit piano and took me on my birthday to the local music store
where you popped a balloon for a store discount. We ended up with 25% off the new guitar and an intro

(06:30):
guitar lesson with Kevin, this nice metal dude, with whom I actually ended up taking a few months
more lessons. Thus sealed my fate and theirs. As in ribbons and tippins, my loving, faithful little
captive audience. What troopers? They were the ones who had to endure the busy rubber band snapping

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cacophony of my early days stumbling through whatever photocopy guitar tabs Kevin found in the back
of guitar world magazine. Yeah friends, that's when I found my real voice. And look at me now folks.
I write, and sing, and play guitar in my own band. That opening song for this podcast is actually one
of them. So thank you ribbons and tippins for being my first ever audience.

(07:18):
For an isolated, rural dwelling kid without artist parents, cable television,
a cool older sibling or a nearby college town, getting into music required serious recon.
It meant subscribing to every print magazine, listening to every cool radio station,

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and then later when the internet became faster, connecting with online communities to share
and exchange anything and everything about my favorite musicians with folks on the internet.
And to my great delight, guess who'd often enter the scene in some of those pictures after 20
hours of downloading, tying up the phone line? Sorry dad. Guess who'd sometimes show up in the song's

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lyrics, title, or even the band's minor notes? Yep, that's when I really knew I was in community.
Because as it turned out, my music people, well, many among them, also loved cats. Case in point.
The most theatrical musician, David Bowie, and he was also a huge cat guy.

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You know that voice. And if you don't, I'm excited to be the one to introduce you.
That was indeed one of my people or people, not only a major kitty guy, but also surprise,
a fellow rock and roller without further ado friends.
Hey, I'm Jackson Galaxy. Everybody. I am a cat behavior and wellness expert and sometimes relationship

(08:54):
coach. You can find me pretty much everywhere on social media. On Instagram, I'm the cat daddy
and you can also find me on my YouTube channel and look everywhere else.
For those just getting acquainted, Jackson is the star of the hit series My Cat from Hell,
in which Jackson would rock his stylish self up to a diversity of cat stores houses with a guitar case,

(09:19):
full of cat treats, cat toys, and excellent cat soothing energy. You may, however, be surprised to learn
that Jackson's first love was actually music. There wasn't a day in my life from the time I was 10
years old that I didn't express my life through my guitar until the day that my show got greenlit.

(09:43):
From the time I was really young, I knew that I was supposed to be a musician.
It's actually one of my earliest memories. My parents were huge, doo-wop people.
My mom being from New York and being steep to that culture and my dad being an immigrant,

(10:04):
that represented sort of like the American dream in a way.
There's a guitar that I think has made appearances in my videos. It was my first acoustic that my
dad bought for me. This owner, it was so funny because I had to read a new owner's for anything besides

(10:24):
harmonicas. And then Jackson went electric. I'm actually a Fender guy. I am also a Gretsch guy.
I was probably 13 and my dad gave me permission to go to 48th Street in New York. I think it was
Manny's and get an amp. I bought a Twin Reverb. That amp is still with me. A couple of years ago,

(10:49):
Billy Zoom from X, who's now one of the free, eminent amp hot rotters, mauded my amp for me.
Oh, rad! X, the LA punk band with a very specific brand of country and bluest influence
called Rockabilly or Psychobilly. I knew it. I mean, it's so funny because people will either
guess Rockabilly or Metal. And I am neither. Oh! I skewed towards theatrical music. Musicals?

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Not musical, fair. Songwriters like Freddie Mercury. There was this sense of just visual, Tom
Whites did it. Elvis Costell--Ah! All of those artists, in turns out, have publicly stated past or
present cat companionship. Elvis Costello plays a cartoon cat called Pete the Cat.
But all of these folks devotion to cats, pales in comparison to one Farrokh Bulsara. I mean, Freddie Mercury.

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As the lead singer of Queen, Freddie takes the crown as the king of rock and roll cat lovers.
Freddie had 10 pet kitties in his life and the seven kitties with him in his later years. Oscar,
Delilah, Goliath, Mikko, Romeo, Lily and Tiffany. Had their own rooms at the garden lodge, his apparently

(12:10):
palatial home, that's a lot of rooms. I really love his manager's recollection in one article that I
read of how Freddie would call over any street kitties he saw out and about. And while on tour,
he'd call home and ask whoever picked up to put his cats on the line.
Freddie was definitely one of us. When I think of cats and queen, of course, the first song that comes

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to mind is Cool Cat, which is now on its 150th loop in my head since writing this episode.
Cool Cat was released in 1982. It was originally meant to feature fellow cat fan David Bowie.
Despite how catchy that tune is, at the time it wasn't a commercial hit. It was on the B side of a
record that found queen exploring new funky territory, which you can kind of pick up on in the subtle

(12:59):
groove of the song that isn't typical to Queen's previous stuff. We will kind of touch on why the
fan base and critics at the time so fervently rejected this direction. But let me get back to Cool Cat here.
In Cool Cat, a presumably male character who may or may not be a kitty, a Tom, if you will,

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is strutting around, speeding too fast, controlling the room and stealing all the limelight.
Who are we kidding? That's a cat. Got to love Brian May, Roger Taylor, Mike Gross and John Deacon.
This was probably one instance where they gave in to Freddie's first draft of lyrics, which I'm sure
have a lot more cat stuff in them. Of course, cats are cool, but Cool Cat is not a phrase that Freddie made up.

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The name Cool Cat has a lot more behind it. It's not a coincidence that this song has a funk,
R&B kind of groove, and it actually serves as a great entry point for our deeper dive into Rock and
Roll history. To unspool the thread that ties cats to Rock and Roll, I'm so grateful to have

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consulted with one of the most respected Rock and Roll journalists out there.
I'm Holly George Warren. I'm a music journalist and author, and I also teach writing to students
at Clive Davis Institute Recorded Music, which is part of NYU. My most recent book is Behind the

(14:31):
Seams, My Life in Rhinestones, which I wrote with the great Dolly Parton. My previous book was a
biography of Janice Joplin who shares the same birthday of January 19th with Dolly Parton, believe it
or not. (Capricorn Cat Ladies!) So I mostly write biographies and music related books.

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I moved to New York from North Carolina, and one of the main reasons I wanted to live in New York was
to see as many punk rock bands as I possibly could because, believe me, it was very difficult to see
them in North Carolina. I totally lucked out when Holly received my outreach and agreed to share her

(15:17):
knowledge on the history of Rock and Roll and cats. I've always loved cats. Growing up in North Carolina,
we had cats. Then when I moved to college, once I moved out of the dorms into kind of a hippie house,
I had a cat there, then I moved to New York and I wasn't in New York very long before I got a cat.

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I called them my dog cats because they would just follow me around and be waiting for me inside the
door by part-man on St. Mark's place when I would come out from work. And remember what I said about
three Rock and Rollers on this podcast? Oh yeah, Holly is totally a rock and roller. She's OG, I mean,
come on. Living during the storied Ed Koch era of New York City in the East Village came with a

(16:06):
territory, I'd say. I started playing in my first all-woman band called Clambake around, I guess it was
around 82. And then finally my most famous band, and was in all-woman band called Das Fürlines,
that was a punk rock all-woman polka band that started the very talent of 86. And if you kind of tell

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by your name, that band was the most cat-loving band. Like I said, the perfect person to perceive cats in the
culture. So about cats and rock and roll, Holly agreed with me that cats have a history of hanging
around musicians, both literally and figuratively. I do like the songs that kind of harken back to the

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cool cats. So yes, you've got, The Coasters did that great song called Three Cool Cats,
which is an amazing song. This song is very fitting to illustrate our point with cats and rock and roll
because it turns out that the coasters were the very first group inducted into the rock and roll
hall of fame. Check the show notes for a link to the song. You might have to listen carefully to

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connect immediately to the modern clichés we now associate with rock and roll, you know, screaming
guitars, P and V sexual imagery, corn dogs, whatever. But what the coasters played was doo wop, kind of a
great uncle to rock and roll. Doo wop is a genre of rhythm and blues that kind of sounds like its name,

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and in addition to my all-time favorite busker on the four or five Friday mornings of the Bronx,
another place I hear Dew Wop a bit can be heard in one of the best jingles of all time,
the Chili's Babyback Ribs commercial, which believe it or not was originally part of a reality show
for a funeral, not even kidding, but I digress. To get to the bottom of all this cool cat talk,

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we got to get into the rhythm and blues. R&B, what is rhythm and blues? Let me defer to the professional here.
[Music]
Rhythm and blues came out of the blues, the Delta blues originally in which people who had been

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enslaved started using music as a tool to escape the kind of hard labor during reconstruction,
during the whole sharecropping era, working for a pittance on sharecropped land, really bad back-breaking
work, agricultural work. This music originated in the 1700s by said enslaved Africans

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brought to the American continent is the mitochondrial eve, if you will, for almost all strands of popular
music that's charting today. Country, rap, they're actually distant cousins. Holly name checked some
of my favorite blues guitarists whose quasi-liberation, we got to be real here, facilitated the spread of

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the blues among the diaspora of black folks in the south and those migrating north. A lot of musicians
who started writing songs of course, Robert Johnson comes to mind, were able to leave that lifestyle
and have more of a peripatetic life to leave the south. A lot of blues artists who were born

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and grew up in the south moved to Chicago, around World War II, money waters comes to mind and there
they were able to have a much better lifestyle. [Music]
Memphis Minnie, the great, great guitarist and songwriter and singer, lived in Memphis which was

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almost like an extension of Mississippi and it was a place where there was a thriving black music scene,
a thriving black community, the whole Beale Street area provided lots of venues where artists could
perform. So we got some great, great music out of Memphis, Memphis Minnie is just one of my favorite

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artists and has inspired so many to pick up the guitar. These enterprising artists, despite the
continued discrimination, segregation, violence and oppression, still managed to cultivate,
thriving careers that allowed them as much independence and freedom as possible, especially for the women.
Some incredible artists who came out of the south became the great, great leaders of jazz,

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the first ever jazz recording was made in 1920 by Mamie Smith.
That was a song called Crazy Blues. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith were these amazing artists who again
were following their own hearts, their own independent spirit by being artists. A lot of them started out

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traveling on what was then called the minstrel circuit and these traveling shows where there would be
all kinds of different types of acts, you know, music, dancing, comedians, stuff like that,
learning that lifestyle of living out of a suitcase, living on the road, that independence helped

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them break away from some of the horrific conditions that people were having to live in.
Segregation was horribly still the norm down south, but in New York and in Chicago,
Bessie Smith was able to get an even wider audience of black and white people, so she was able to

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sell a lot of records and live this great lifestyle. By the time the depression hit, she was I think
one of the highest paid artists in the country, what was then the biggest record label, Columbia Records,
Ma Rainey, who had been a mentor to her also was able to have a much better lifestyle than she would have

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had if she'd stayed in the South. So I think that was a huge help for these women to establish
themselves as artists. In the here and now, at least in the United States, it's more common for artists
to speak outright against the things that Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and their peers faced, but at the time,

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of course, that was so dangerous and many folks couldn't do that directly. Let's keep talking,
quite literally about talk, after the break.

(23:10):
Before the break, Holly told us about blues music, the progenitor of Rock and Roll and its cousins,
that paved the way for the birth of the cool. Cool cats.
We can't really trace the origin of cool cats without understanding a little bit about jazz.

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Wait, weren't we talking about the blues? Well, we were and still are. Kind of.
Basically, jazz is a descendant of the blues that continued the tradition of decentralizing
European and Eurocentric traditional structures of music by upending its rules on structure and style.
The earliest iteration of the jazz you're hearing now is probably close to what they'd call

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traditional or Dixieland jazz, which came out of New Orleans in around the late 19th century.
The jazz age. There are other types of jazz, but the important thing to remember is that overall,
jazz is an intrinsically black art form. And as jazz evolved, in the 1950s, a more laid-back
variation emerged. Cool jazz. A demarcation of that is Mr. Miles Davis's groundbreaking record,

(24:27):
The Birth of the Cool. And with cool jazz came, cool cats. Now, does that mean that there were cats
hanging out at the clubs, cats in the bands, or the cats in the audience just like ribbons and tibans?
Well, kind of. I mean, composer and multi-instrumentalist Charles Mingus was such a cat dude and

(24:49):
probably had a lot of cats around his studio that he literally wrote a book on how to train your cat to
use the toilet. Okay, okay. Cats were people. There are records of the word cat used in African-American
vernacular that goes as far back as 1886. But what kind of people? Were they the same as the three

(25:10):
cool cats in that coaster song? Holly elaborates. The lyrics were coded lyrics. Hepcat was first
used in the black community. I think around the time of jazz becoming popular in the 20s.
And in 1938, jazz band leader, Cab Calloway literally wrote the book on jive talk.

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The creative code for those in the know. His hepster's dictionary pamphlet defines cat as
musician in a swing band. Frisking the whiskers is what the cats do when they're warming up for a swing
session. And a hep cat is a guy who knows all the answers and knows about jive. Oh yeah, that jive is

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per Mr. Calloway. Harlamese speech. It's a fun read and let me just say you don't want to be a "Jeff".
(Sorry, Jeff). Check it out in marvel at how many words in our cultural lexicon today are actually
harlamese. It's interesting to see how jargon from the black community gets spread to white people. And

(26:25):
then of course globally now around the world. So yeah, I think it definitely came out of the jazz
and blues era when the music spread around outside its original regions where it was started.
Once people like Louis Armstrong left New Orleans, went to Chicago to get a wider audience. The
music and the ideas began to spread to a larger population. Then of course some of the language

(26:52):
used in the song lyrics, some of the things that people would say on stage or even in the studio
would get picked up by a different group of people. And so that's the way language makes this way
around. Hip hop is another huge example of that taken up by totally different people than
the people in the south Bronx and other parts of New York City who started doing hip hop first

(27:17):
years ago. Languages creative, but it wasn't just for shith and giggles as the kids say. This jive
talk was not only playful, it was a byproduct of a way that black musicians were navigating safely
through barriers such as racial discrimination, moral codes, and any hint of political dissidents.

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Here's where we jump off the jazz train and head on over to rock and roll.
One of the easy ways to think about it is the old expression, country and western and rhythm
and blues had a baby in its name was rock and roll. So both of those music's kind of evolved out of

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very ancient music with the lyrics being a way to spread information, sometimes coded information.
There's these great songs known as hocom songs, particularly among African American artists from
the 20s and 30s that use a lot of double entendres and those double entendres songs were also very

(28:33):
popular among country and western artists as well. And the strategy goes right back to the blues.
There were ideas that you were not allowed to express publicly in songs. Again, it gave them an
opportunity to express their feelings and their anger about the situation. So in reality,

(29:00):
you were talking about the overseer at the sharecropper form or the white people that
wouldn't allow you to go into their establishment and things like that. But you would couch it in terms
of like horrible lovers who have mistreated you or who have jilted you or two times you or things like that.

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You know, some of the women, especially the blues artists, were able to say stuff in their music
that they were not allowed to say conversationally or to a public that was still honing people to
certain very moralistic standards and things like that. Think about the 1950s when rock and roll was
coming along. Homosexuality was illegal up until I think 1972 in some states or something like that.

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A lot of women who were bisexual or lesbian again were able to sing a song about having it a fair
with someone and the language was expressed in such a way that they could easily have been
thinking about their female lover, but it wasn't so obvious.

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So truly, the spirit of all this blues-based music isn't the blues of romance.
It's the blues of oppression that fueled early rock and roll.
And cool cats. It turns out that the phrase "rock and roll" doesn't come from African-American
vernacular originally. Well, I mean, it could, but it seems like the phrase actually came from

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sea men describing a ship's rocking and rolling and then popped into the culture as a metaphor for
dancing. And by dancing, I mean, quote, "dancing."
Earlier on, I had shared the Oxford Dictionary Definition of Rock and Roll that did acknowledge

(30:58):
this genre's blues parentage, its facilitation of dancing (wink wink), and that it most commonly
featured a core instrumentation of guitar, bass, and drums. According to my research, the guitar's
roll and rock and roll was to replace the loud, showy brass section of "Big Band" of very dancey

(31:19):
kind of swing music. And of course, an electrifying vocal performance by a person or persons
who are working crowds with the power of blues, the magic of their message, and the passion of
gospel, another blues cousin. Of course, within the messages was the coded language we talked about in
"Jazz and Blues," which as Holly helped us understand allowed these folks to create with joy and style.

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The best among them?
There would be no rock and roll if not for the work of artists like
Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie and Willie Mae Thornton, etc.
And it all stemmed right back to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who is the inventor of Rock and Roll.

(32:08):
That was real life, rock and roll, lefty upside down shredder, and amazing cat mom, Malina Moye.
Malina Moye, and I am super excited to be here. You can always find me with really good places,

(32:28):
some new markets, or so I'm super excited about meeting new people and just continuing with people,
and um, yeah, until next year as well, so my name is Malina Moye. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok.
Malina is one heck of a guitarist who proudly carries on the legacy of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
This legend, an absolute shredder, you gotta check out the videos, y'all, was born into a musical

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family in Arkansas, and by age 23 had already established herself as a guitarist and singer,
despite the many, many barriers of that era and the fact that she was one of the only young, queer black
women on the circuit. Talk about rock and roll. This is a woman that literally took gospel.

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When you think about gospel and you start looking at the things that come from that, that is rock and roll,
where people get together, whether it's two people or 30,000, that is like a congregation. And when the
preacher is speaking, the congregation is clappy and coming along and it's the same thing is when a
person's up here performing and giving you their all, the audience is taking you, you're taking the

(33:36):
audience provide and you're both given energy. So how can we have Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis
Presley, Tina Turner, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Joplin...No Sister Rosetta?
The riffs that she was playing, how she played it, how she looked, it just got erased. It just got

(33:58):
erased. Blues and jazz crossed over from black communities into white dominant ones as we discussed.
And then these originators and all that subtext that we talked about in the language,
the queerness, the protest messages, well, they were pushed out of it in a lot of ways.

(34:19):
And what happened to that cat imagery? The terms, "Hapcat and Cool Cat" feel quaintly vintage or
can't be. Well, the Rolling Stones, Stray Cat Blues, check the lyrics. I don't think they could get
away with releasing that song today because the object of Mick Jagger as vocalist desire is a 15-year-old

(34:40):
girl who comes around. She's the Stray Cat. There's a lyric encouraging the 15-year-old girl to bring
another friend like that and bring her up there too, the two of us. And isn't there that other song
'Under My Thumb'? I have to say I do love that song but "Siamese cat of a girl"? Really? What is it with

(35:01):
cats Mick, Sheesh? The jive talk of yore specifically placing cats on the same pedestal of
cool as the players themselves seems to have ended when, well, the mic got passed away from the folks
like Sister Rosetta and their messages of resistance from poor treatment, be it from a lover,

(35:24):
enslaver, or The Man.
Blues is the root of everything. Rock 'n' roll is a part of something that as an African-American
culture, we've created. That's exactly where it comes from. The reason why I actually wrote the
song 'Enough' was because I saw the same people on the same covers. This one magazine ended up putting

(35:46):
one black woman up there and it was Sister Rosetta, but I remember going, wow, this is awesome,
but you're not looking at everybody who contributes it to this. You need to do representation.
I'm also advocating and asking people like the (NAACP) Image Awards, Soul Train to please put categories
in like rock as well as country because they only have that as a category. Early on, I could never

(36:09):
really submit my records because there's no lane to put that in.
She's doing that for all the cool cats out there. At the end of the day, Blues was protest music.
Rock and roll was born out of a desire for freedom, and I believe that desire is cat shaped.

(36:34):
Just realize that cats are rock and roll. There's something about the wild aspect of cats, the
un-tameable, the un-ownable, freedom and creativity, which rock and roll should be, right?
When I think about people like Freddie Mercury or I think about Prince, when I think about

(36:56):
Jimmy Hendrix, what I feel is freedom. Because when you see people in their element,
when you see your cat literally living their best life, we're free, right?
The Egyptians knew it, the Vikings knew it. Cats are little gods.

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Rock gods. And why not? After all, we know rock and roll was all about mythology.
Thanks, Holly.
Well, cool cats, it's been quite a trip. Every other minute could have been a whole episode,
and this one was definitely extra. We're not even done talking about music, but next time we'll be

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leaving the new world behind to head back to the old world, then over to West Africa and up to Asia.
So get ready. I want to thank my wonderful experts. Jackson Galaxy, Holly George Warren,
and Malina Moye. While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
If you'd like to learn more about them, check out our show notes, which includes all the stuff I

(38:05):
named in the episode, that fun playlist, and the references and research that went into this episode.
If you loved it, definitely please do sing our praises by sharing with your musical friends.
So they too truly appreciate this history of rock and roll, and can be part of the exclusive
cool cat club comprised of 6 Degrees of Cats listeners - you beautiful people.

(38:28):
I appreciate you. Thanks y'all. Keep on rockin' in the free world and remember. Everything is connected.
Six degrees of cats is produced, written, edited, and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty,
aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by going to linktr.ee/6degreesofcats,

(38:55):
or look us up on all those social media platforms. You'll be first in line for the extra audio
and more treats that you connect with us there. All episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood,
the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird, and of course all the cats we've loved and lost.
We ends up getting a rescue cat, and her name is Cocobama

(39:24):
Obama after President Obama. And she's black and white, like, you know, the Chanel shoes.
When it comes to just music and writing, Cocobama is the first to listen to all my songs.
I literally would say, "Coco, what do you think about this record?" I'm looking at her right now.
Are you talking about me? Yes, I am.

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