On June 13th, 2025, I’ll do a special, one-night-only live show at the Tribeca Audio Festival in New York City, joined by two of the audiobook’s readers: Carrie Coon and Lili Taylor! www.thememorypalace.us/events.

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate. I have recently launched a newsletter. You can subscribe to it at thememorypalacepodcast.substack.com. 

Music

• Pale by Akira Koresuma
• The Things Left Unsaid by Caleb Burhans
• VIII. Juliet by Matthew Bourne
• Dream House III: After Dust from Mary Ellen Child’s beautiful album, Ethel.
• Here I Am, Two Warships, by Spirituals

Notes

• You can listen to the whole, original recording here, and an enhanced, speed corrected version, here. 
• One of the best places to learn about Herb’s life is this documentary. 

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A note on notes: We’d much rather you just went into each episode of The Memory Palace cold. And just let the story take you where it well. So, we don’t suggest looking into the show notes first.

Music

• Metaphysical Waltz by Shirley Meyer Blankenship
• …morphs into Jock O’Hazeldean by Cynthia Boener
• There’s Dominique Dumont’s La bataille de neige
• The Squimp from the Chico Hamilton Quintet
• Fruit of Dreams by Les Baxter
• Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett

Notes

• Best place to go if you want to learn a lot about Todd Storz is The Birth of Top 40 Radio: The Storz’ Stations Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s by Richard Fatherly and David MacFarland.
• For a loving history of the whole era, you’d probably enjoy Ben Fong Torres’ The Hits Just Keep on Coming: The History of Top 40 Radio

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• Sunrise Through the Dusty Nebula by Hannah Peel
• Keep by Nils Frahm
• Horizon Variations by Max Richter
• She cycles through: Where or When by Hal Kemp & His Orchestra, Smarty (You Know it All) by Fats Waller, Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me Love You by Judy Garland, Hellhounds on My Trail by Robert Johnson, and The Big Apple by Tommy Dorsey and his Clambake Seven.
• Future Waves by Uther Moads.
• And Vapour Trail by Ride, forever.

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* Up top, looped, is the first bit of the great, Foreign Fields, by Kacy Hill.
* Then we hear some of Sun Will Set, by Zoe Keating.
* The song on the radio is Sonny Thompson’s Long Gone, as heard on the Mellow Blues album.

Notes
* You can read all of the 1948 Green Book (and the rest of the Green Books) at the New York Public Library’s fantastic digital collection.

The post Open Road appeared first on the memory palace.

I love this story. I think my version’s pretty good, but the I love the story of John R. Brinkley. So much good stuff had to be left out to keep this podcast tight. There was a big biography that came out a few years ago called Charlatan that is very comprehensive. But I’d like to give a special shout out to a book called “Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves.” Hell, I’ll even give it an Amazon link. Because it is good (and tells all about Brinkley and the other people who followed his lead and broadcast from Mexico) and because one of its co-authors, a guy named Bill Crawford, gave me one of the best days I had in the last several years when he and a friend/colleague drove me down from Austin, past Brinkley’s Mansion in Del Rio, and down across the border to Acuna (where I interviewed the blind, current manager of a station that descended from Brinkley’s). Then back later that day through the high desert where we came up around this bend and I looked out and saw herds of animals grazing at sunset and learned that they were all Indian and African gazelles and Ibix and whatnot brought in to be hunted–turns out only native Texas animals are included in seasonal hunting laws. After which, I no longer mess with Texas.

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