[HTML1] In our first and second segments, Life, Love and Health: Special Edition Executive Producer Christopher Springmann visits something called Club 27. The membership is pretty exclusive, with some of the greatest artists and musicians you’ll never meet. Well, maybe someday in a distant land far away. And most members get into the 27 Club quite by accident. Our guests are here to discuss the life and times of one of the club’s most distinguished members, whose estate will earn $10 million dollars this year on the 40th anniversary of his death — at age 27. Join us on this trip through the ’60’s with Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, the authors of Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, The Untold Story of a Musical Genius. This book, the joint effort by a leading Hendrix historian and an accomplished media writer, reveals for the first time how the legendary guitarist was arrested in the civil rights movement, how he was psychologically shaped by utter poverty in Seattle and racism while touring the South, and how science fiction influenced him. Critical to Jimi Hendrix’s musical development were two women in New York City, one black, one white, who helped him while encouraging two different styles: rhythm and blues versus a new kind of rock.
In our third and fourth segments, Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer talks about the famous Hotel Maids Study and how perception and belief can reinforce or transform the world we think we inhabit. Here’s an example. As any casual observer of the hospitality industry knows, hotel maids spend the majority of their days lugging heavy equipment around endless hallways. Basically, almost every moment of their working lives is spent engaged in some kind of physical activity. “Given that they are exercising all day long,” Dr. Langer says, “that seemed to be bizarre.” What was even more bizarre, she says, was that, despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the U.S. surgeon general’s recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity. So Dr. Langer set about changing perceptions. She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general’s definition of an active lifestyle. The other group was given no information at all. One month later, Dr. Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.
Segment A (0:00 – 11:00)
Life Love & Health: Special Edition producer Christopher Springmann speaks with Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, authors of Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, The Untold Story of a Musical Genius
Segment B (11:01 – 22:00)
Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber on Jimi Hendrix and drugs, death and racism
Segment C (22:01 – 33:00)
Christopher Springmann speaks with about Dr. Ellen Langer about perception, reality and the Hotel Maids Study
Segment D (33:01 – 44:00)
Dr. Ellen Langer on mindful creativity and the power of uncertainty
More about Steven Roby
Steven Roby is a respected Jimi Hendrix historian/archivist and author of the bestseller Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix. The Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder selected Black Gold as the Best Rock Book for 2002. Steven was editor and publisher of Straight Ahead: The International Jimi Hendrix Fanzine (1989-1996), and editor of the Hendrix family’s authorized fanzine Experience Hendrix. He has written feature articles and reviews for Guitar World and Goldmine, and is a frequent contributor to the Italian Hendrix fanzine Univibes. His work has appeared online at billboard.com and forbes.com. Steven has been credited for his research in six Jimi Hendrix biographies and two Hendrix CD’s. He also worked for Experience Hendrix, LLC, a Hendrix family-owned company founded by James “Al” Hendrix. He helped organize numerous tribute concerts, including Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix Electric Guitar Festival (1995), and The Jimi Hendrix Guitar Competition (1997). In 2009, he assembled over 370 guitarists (including Jimi’s brother Leon) to play “Purple Haze” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, as part of the West Fest 40th Woodstock Anniversary. Steven has guest lectured on Hendrix at the University of Indianapolis, the University of Victoria, the University of California, the School of Rock, and Seattle’s Public Library Lecture Series. In 2007, he began teaching a popular college course called Jimi Hendrix: His Life and Music. In addition to writing and teaching, Steven worked in Bay Area radio for the past 30 years co-producing syndicated shows, as a music director, and a morning show host. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Francine.
More about Brad Schreiber
Brad Schreiber has worked as a writer in all media, as well as producer, executive, director and actor. He was Vice President of Storytech Literary Consulting for 11 years, founded by story structure expert Christopher Vogler. In television, he created the series North Mission Road, which ran for six seasons on Court TV, based on his nonfiction book Death in Paradise: An Illustrated History of the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner (Running Press/Perseus). He has worked as a writer, producer and development executive for L.A. PBS affiliate KCET-TV as well as director of development for TV/film director Jonathan Kaplan. Schreiber also wrote the six-hour live telecast, L.A. County Holiday Celebration which was aired nationally on PBS. His six books includes What Are You Laughing At?: How to Write Funny Screenplays, Stories and More and his compendium of live theatrical disasters, Stop the Show!, which was praised by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler. He is co-author of the biography Becoming Jimi Hendrix (Da Capo/Perseus). He is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and his national credits include Daily Variety, The Writer and Written By: The Journal of the Writers Guild of America. He was nominated for the Kingman Films KASA Award for his script The Couch and has won awards from the Edward Albee Foundation, the National Press Foundation, the National Audio Theatre Festivals and others. Schreiber has taught at the American Film Institute, the Directors Guild of America, the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York and writers conferences and universities in the US, Canada and Mexico.
More about Ellen Langer
Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. She has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books. Her work has led to numerous academic honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest of the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to Applied Psychology award from the American Association of Applied & Preventive Psychology, the Adult Development and Aging Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattel Award, and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize. The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, “…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making.” Dr. Langer is a Fellow of The Sloan Foundation; The American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science; Computers and Society; The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues; The Society of Experimental Social Psychologists. In addition to other honors, she has been a guest lecturer in Japan, Malaysia, Germany, and Argentina. Her books written for general and academic readers include Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, On Becoming An Artist, and Counterclockwise.
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